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Thread of childhood artworks by famous artists 🧵 1. Edward Hopper, 9 years old
2. Pablo Picasso began drawing and painting at three. When he was eight years old, inspired by a bullfight he attended with his father, he created a small oil painting of a Picador. "At eight, I was Raphael", he used to say. "It took me a whole lifetime to paint like a child."
3. Though it may seem hard to believe, this is believed to be the Michelangelo's first known painting—completed when he was just twelve or thirteen years old. Michelangelo's version of The Torment of Saint Anthony (1487) was based on a 15th-century engraving by Martin
4. This is the earliest known sculpture by Michelangelo, sculpted around 1490. He was only fifteen or sixteen years old. The "Madonna of the Stairs", according to Vasari, is an obvious homage to the stiacciato low reliefs of Donatello.
5. "Self-Portrait at the age of 13" is a drawing by Albrecht Dürer, when the artist was either twelve or thirteen years old. It was later signed with the words "This I drew myself from a mirror in the year 1484, when I was still a child. Albrecht Dürer".
6. Artemisia Gentileschi was only seventeen years old when she painted this masterpiece. "Susanna and the Elders", an astonishing 1610 painting by the renowned Italian Baroque artist, is notably her earliest signed and dated piece.
7. On her first day at the Sacred Heart Academy, a teacher criticized Georgia O’Keeffe's drawing, nearly bringing her to tears. Determined to improve, the fourteen-year-old worked hard over the following months. Her teacher later displayed her improved drawings on the classroom
8. This is Salvador Dalí's first oil painting. He was six years old. The legendary surrealist painter knew from an early age that he wanted to do great things: "I wanted to be a cook at the age of six. I wanted to be Napoleon when I was seven," he wrote in his autobiography.
9. Paul Klee drew this elegant lady with a parasol when he was just four to six years old. Years later, in a letter to his fiancée, Klee described the drawings he completed between the ages of three and 10 as "the most significant [I have made] until now".
10. Salvador Dalí painted "Fiesta in Figueres" on the back of a blank postcard between the ages of six and ten.
11. Edvard Munch was twelve-year-old when he drew his little brother Andreas in the living room of their flat at no 48 Thorvald Meyers gate.
12. Claude Monet's caricature of his teacher Jacques-François Ochard. He was fifteen years old.
13. A year later, Monet created this graphite drawing on blue paper, probably in the quaint French village of Gainneville, just outside Le Havre in Normandy. He was just 16 and already a masterful artist.
14. This is Monet's "View from Rouelles," the earliest known painting by the artist, which was completed in 1858 when he was about 17 years old.
15. Angelica Kauffman, "Self portrait aged thirteen", 1753
16. Gustav Klimt was only seventeen years old when he drew this portrait of a girl.
17. Pablo Picasso painted his first self-portrait in 1896, when he was 15 years old.
18. One of Rembrandt's earliest works, "The Spectacles-pedlar," was painted around 1624–25 when the artist was just 18.
19. Diego Velázquez was around the same age when he painted "Three Musicians."
20. Frida Kahlo was only fifteen years old when she painted one of her earliest self-portraits. "I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone," Kahlo once explained, "because I am the person I know best."
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One more: Bernini was just eleven years old when he started sculpting "The Goat Amalthea with the Infant Jupiter and a Faun." According to F. Baldinucci, when Gian Lorenzo was eight years old he created a "small marble head of a child that was the marvel of everyone".
