Artists beginning with L

Georges de la Tour - The Magdalene (1640-1645)

The play of dark and light assumes an almost metaphysical resonance here. An apparently pregnant woman gazes intently at a sputtering candle while, with moving delicacy, touching the ground zero of a human skull. Yet the theme of meditation on mortality is embodied more fully and with greater impact in De La Tour's masterful command of chiaroscuro: that candle-light redeeming the beautifully bared shoulder from the shadow's grasp. (RC)

Fernand LÈger - Three Women (1921)

LÈger's women, who all have the same tumbling waterfall of black hair, are modernist descendants of Ingres's nudes. In a sense this is the culmination of French painting, a monument to its ideals of beauty and reshufflings of the classical, modern and erotic, held here in delicate, beautiful balance. (JJ)

Hubert le Sueur - Equestrian statue of Charles I (1633)

The setting was recently re-landscaped, but in the roaring traffic and urban clamour many still miss one of the finest and earliest London statues, by the French artist le Sueur, who spent most of his career at the court of Charles I. Completed just in time for the civil war, it was ordered to be destroyed but instead buried to save it, and eventually re-erected by Charles II; the badly eroded base is said to be by Grinling Gibbons. (MK)

Roy Lichtenstein - Whaam! (1963)

Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted America as a boy's fantasy, filling it with bottle blondes, chiselled hunks and comic-book explosions. Whaam! is based on an image from All American Men of War, which celebrated the superpower's global supremacy in comic book imagery. (JL)

Limbourg Brothers and others - Les Très Riche Heures (c1412-1416)

The wealthy Duc de Berry commissioned the greatest miniaturists of the age to illustrate a prayer book featuring the activities of his many vine-yards and chateaux. The result is the apex of International Gothic style and possibly the most valuable property survey in the world. (AH)

Maya Lin - Vietnam Veterans' Memorial (1982)

Maya Lin's black wall bearing the names of Americans who died in Vietnam is overwhelming in its calm eloquence. It is rare to walk down the gently sloping path into the cut in the ground in which it is set without seeing someone in tears beside one of the names. (JJ)

Fra Filippo Lippi - Madonna and Child with Birth of the Virgin (c1452-1460s)

The beautiful sad-eyed Virgin who looks out from this circular painting is modelled on Lucrezia Buti, a young nun with whom Lippi - a friar - had a child. His paintings are among the tenderest Renaissance works, especially when she's in them. (JJ)

El Lissitzky - Victory over the Sun (1923)

The New Man strides on robot limbs, his heart a red square, in El Lissitzky's suite of prints illustrating a science fiction opera first staged in St Petersburg four years before the October Revolution. (JJ)

Ambrogio Lorenzetti - Good Government in the City and the Country (1338-1340)

The people of Siena dance in their streets, so happy are they with the way the city is governed behind its pink walls, and peace and prosperity reign over the green hills of Tuscany in this lovable painting that makes you wish you too lived on the eve of the Black Death. (JJ)

Lorenzo Lotto - Portrait of Andrea Odoni (1527)

The great lateral sweep of this picture with its broad-chested man sweeping out his arms as he shows his collection of antiquities, whose ruinous stone faces haunt his green life, enfolds you and makes you feel he's opening his heart. (JJ)

LS Lowry - The Sea (1963)

Forget matchstick men and mill chimneys. Lowry was the greatest seascape painter of the 20th century. A greyish vacuity of sky and a greyish striation of sea, and there you have it - melancholic depths comparable to a late Rothko abstraction. (RC)

Sarah Lucas - Two Fried Eggs and Kebab (1992)

Sarah Lucas employs visual puns and bawdy humour to create provocative works about gender stereotypes and macho behaviour. Her classic work Two Fried Eggs and Kebab is a reclining naked female figure constructed from a table, two eggs and a kebab to represent genitalia. (JL)