Five ordinary addresses you could stand on today — a harbour skyline, a gaslit café square, a storm over a walled city, a farmhouse gable and a hillside of dry grass — each one the view behind a canvas millions have seen.
Vermeer's 'View of Delft' (c. 1660–61) hangs in the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world and had his novelist Bergotte drop dead in front of it, transfixed by a little patch of yellow wall.
Van Gogh painted 'Café Terrace at Night' on the Place du Forum in September 1888 and told his sister it was 'a painting of night without black' — nothing but blue, violet and green. It hangs in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Netherlands.
El Greco's 'View of Toledo' (c. 1596–1600) is one of only two surviving landscapes he ever painted — and it cheats, shuffling the city's great buildings out of their real positions to suit the composition. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The house is the Dibble House, built in 1881–82; the painting is Grant Wood's 'American Gothic', which took the bronze medal and a $300 cash prize at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 — a patron then talked the museum into buying it, and it belongs to Chicago still. The models were his sister Nan and the family dentist, Dr Byron McKeeby.
The Museum of Modern Art bought Andrew Wyeth's 'Christina's World' in 1948 for $1,800. Christina Olson was 55 at the time, but the young body in the picture is Wyeth's wife Betsy. The Olson House still stands and is open to visitors.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.