Landscape painting began to develop during the Italian Renaissance, when artists began depicting religious and historic events in a landscape setting. Idealized landscapes originated in the Netherlands, as Protestants in the area demanded a more secular option to religious works.

In "The Harvesters," 1565, Peter Breugel the Elder created perhaps the first modern landscape, with a full foreground, middle ground, and background. Artists in the Dutch Golden Age – the 1600s – painted landscapes with vast, moody skies on small canvases for display in wealthy homes.

Landscape became important in the 19th century. In France, the Barbizon School and then the Impressionists carried tubes of paint into the countryside, creating landscapes from life. The Impressionist works were dazzling ethereal studies of light, and they are extremely rare on the market.

German artists imbued their landscape scenes with Romantic storm and drama. In the United States, paintings of the American West rhymed with the ideas of transcendentalism and manifest destiny.

In the 20th century, artists reduced landscape to pure abstraction. By the end of the century, the actual, physical landscape itself could be a work of art, as art leapt from the canvas and into the world.

• Dutch artist Aelbert Cuyp was considered one of the most poetic landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age. His paintings were known to be charming and visionary, accented with golden light

In the early 15th century, Jan van Eyck and his Flemish peers popularized the use of linseed oil to carry pigments. By the 16th century, oil painting had replaced tempera almost completely and artists were using it to create life-like renderings of their world. Oil has kept its place as the medium of choice in painting through contemporary times.

Oil paint has a jewel-like translucence in comparison to the flat, bright colors and velvety opacity of the egg tempera that it replaced. Artists can apply oil paint in thin, glowing layers to achieve an extremely life-like sense of depth. They can also build it into heavy, textured impasto that projects out from the surface. Oil dries slowly, so the artist can manipulate it after the paint is applied.

• Beginning in the mid-20th century, oil painter artists began using household gloss paint instead of linseed oil paint
• Damien Hirst’s workshop uses gloss paint for his dot paintings. These paints dry fast, but their colors are less stable over time and are a worry for conservators
• Leonardo used his fingers to blend oil paint he had applied. Visitors can see the Renaissance master’s fingerprints in "Ginevra di’ Benci," c. 1474/78, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Portraiture has been around since the dawn of the Renaissance. As a symbol of wealth, it became more prevalent as capitalism took its grip in Europe. Early portraits showed wealthy arts patrons beholding major religious events.

By the 1600s, portrait artists were in high demand. Anthony Van Dyck of Flanders served as court painter to Charles I, and his style influenced oil portrait painters across Europe. In the Netherlands, Frans Hals painted the noble and other conservative patrons who wanted a portrait without ostentatious display.

Naturalistic portraits emerged during the Rococo period. Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits convey the naturalism popular in France with a gentle storm-and-drama edge. Later, more conservative neoclassical portraiture style celebrated scientific understanding of depth and lighting. Portraiture became more and more abstract in the 20th century, such as the work of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

• By the 19th century, portraiture was so popular that art critics complained about seeing it too much in the Paris salons
• In 2006, Ronald Lauder paid $135 million for Gustav Klimt’s "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer," 1907, and placed it on permanent public display at the Neue Galerie in New York
• Artist Chuck Close has re-invigorated contemporary portrait painting images with arrays of colored geometric forms, like a cross between the Pointillist dot and Lichtenstein’s circles

Acrylic is new in comparison to oil or tempera paint. With acrylic, the pigment is suspended in a natural or synthetic polymer – basically, plastic – instead of in linseed oil or egg yolk.

Acrylic paint dries fast and works well for achieving crisp, sharp edges and a finish that has an industrial look. Once the acrylic is dry, it is waterproof and cannot be re-worked. Acrylic paint can be diluted in water before it is applied so it is semi-transparent like watercolor, or can be left thick and heavy.

David Hockney, the Californian painter, used acrylics in the 1960s in his works, such as "A Bigger Splash," 1960. Acrylic is suited to Hockney’s sun-drenched California pool scenes. Andy Warhol also worked with acrylic, including in his "Oxidation Painting (in 12 parts)," 1978. In these, Warhol primed canvases with an acrylic containing a copper pigment, and a studio assistant, Ronnie Cutrone, urinated on them. A chemical reaction took place, leaving a dark center with copper-color around it.

• Andy Warhol’s "Big Electric Chair," 1967-68 is an acrylic work that sold for $20.4 million at Sotheby’s in May 2014
• Damien Hirst uses acrylics, as in "Daptomycin," 2010. In Hirst’s “dot paintings,” acrylic gives a minimalist finish absent of a sign of the artist’s hand
• Chris Ofili’s "The Holy Virgin Mary," 1996, criticized as “sick” by Rudolph Giuliani, includes acrylic in its materials list and sold for £2.9 million at Christie’s London in June 2015

Watercolor is made from a combination of pigment and transparent gum, such as gum arabic, diluted in water. Depending upon the amount of dilution, the white of the support shows through the watercolor and becomes part of the picture. Albrecht Dürer was one master of watercolor, using different levels of dilution to paint lighter and darker areas giving depth to his landscapes.

Watercolor is associated with precision, and is often utilized in detailed wildlife or botanical images. Artists are aware of the potential connotations when they choose to paint in watercolor. For a time, watercolor was seen as a medium strictly for women, but Paul Cézanne, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and Eugène Delacroix renewed its masculinity.

The range of artistic expression available in watercolor is staggering. From humorous animal-like pictures by George Condo, to a hat by Jim Dine, to watercolor images of stylish French aristocrats in bound books, the watercolor medium has an extraordinary variety of offerings. Artists often use watercolor in combination with other media, such as oil, crayon, pencil, or gouache.

• Sotheby’s New York sold Eva Hesse’s "Untitled," 1963, a collage on paper with watercolor, gouache, ink, and crayon, for $162,500 on March 5, 2015
• The same company sold "Still Life and Young Girl (A Double-sided Work)," 1975, in watercolor on paper by Fernand Botero, for $56,250 on June 25, 2014
• Christie’s New York sold Andy Warhol’s "One Dollar," 1961, in watercolor and graphite on paper, for $5.2 million on November 12, 2013

Seascape is highly expressive and comes in a variety of forms, from prismatic Impressionist scenes to dark, storm-and-thunder Romantic fare.

The German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich painted at the height of moody Romantic expression, which might involve lone figures at the center of the picture with explosions of sea foam, dramatic lighting effects, and swirling clouds in the background.

Joseph Mallord William Turner was another master of the seascape. In paintings such as "Sunrise with Sea Monsters" (c. 1845), Turner reduces the complex lighting effects of a clouded golden sunset sky into simple painterly gestures.

The French Impressionists brought their ocular experiment to the seascape; the play of light in the sky and water was perfect for them. Paul Signac and Claude Monet were exemplars of the Impressionist seascape. Signac, in particular, broke the light into large, at times rectangular brushstrokes that formed solid colors when viewed from a distance.

• Monet’s famous seascape painting, "Impression Sunrise," 1872, provided the name for the entire artistic movement
• Seascape goes Pop: On July 1, 2015, Christie’s London sold Roy Lichtenstein, "Seascape," 1965, for £104,500
• American painter Winslow Homer was a master of the seascape. Homer’s dramatic seaside pictures have are inspired by, if not always faithful to, the scenery there