Paintings Facts

A Virginia woman bought a napkin-sized landscape at a West Virginia flea market in 2009 for $7. She wanted the plastic cow and the doll in the same box. Two years later she learned the little painting was a genuine Renoir worth $100,000. Then the FBI showed up. The museum had reported it missing in 1951.

Bob Ross painted roughly 30,000 works in his lifetime - nearly triple Picasso's output. For each of his 381 TV episodes, he painted three versions of the same scene: one before the camera, one on air, and one for his books. Today, 1,165 of those originals sit in cardboard boxes in a Virginia warehouse owned by Bob Ross Inc., which has never sold a single one. The Smithsonian holds four.

Washington Crossing the Delaware is the 1851 painting almost every American studied in school. It shows Washington's gamble on Christmas night, 1776, crossing an icy river to attack Trenton. Every Christmas Day, hundreds of costumed reenactors gather at Washington Crossing Historic Park in Pennsylvania. They row replica Durham boats across the river, if conditions are safe. This December is the 74th crossing.