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It’s easy to mix up Impressionists Édouard Manet and Claude Monet; though the French artists have similar last names, their work is visually distinct. The two were also friends. In his 1874 The Barge (Claude Monet with his wife in his floating studio), above, Manet captured Monet painting in his boat in France. If you look closely, you can see that Monet is painting a landscape, the genre for which he is best known.

Post-Impressionist painters Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh had a much rockier friendship. In 1888, the French Gauguin and Dutch Van Gogh spent a few months living together in the French town of Arles. During that time, Gauguin painted his pal in Vincent van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, above. Like Manet, Gauguin depicts Van Gogh painting one of his favorite subjects. However, their stay in Arles ended dramatically, with Van Gogh famously cutting off part of his own ear. The two artists never saw each other again.

Photographer Ansel Adams and painter Georgia O’Keeffe became friends in 1929. The friendship between the 20th-century American artists developed from their shared love of nature. They often explored the outdoors together. Adams’s 1937 photograph Georgia O’Keeffe Holding Bones, above, shows O’Keeffe standing in the desert landscape that she so often painted, and she holds animal bones, a subject she also included in her own work.