Sand artist Sudarshan Pattnaik wished megastar Amitabh Bachchan for good health in his unique style. He made a four feet high and ten feet long sand sculpture of Big B at the Puri beach in Odisha with the message 'Get well Soon'.

"Puri is famous for Lord Jagannath. I have created the sculpture and prayed to god for the speedy recovery of the Big B," he said.

He also revealed that he used 10 tonnes of sand for this sculpture and took six hours to complete it. His students from his sand art institute helped him in creating an image of the megastar.

Amitabh, who underwent two abdominal surgeries, is still in Seven Hills Hospital of Mumbai but the doctors are satisfied with his progress in health and he might get discharged very soon.

 An oil painting recently authenticated as the work of Leonardo da Vinci will be on display at the National Gallery in the fall as part of a larger exhibition on the Renaissance artist, the London museum said Monday.

‘Salvator Mundi,’ which dates to around 1500, depicts a half-length figure of Christ with one hand raised in blessing and the other holding an orb.

The National Gallery said in a statement Monday that the work was shown to its director, curator and other art scholars after undergoing conservation that was completed in 2010.

"We felt that it would be of great interest to include it in the exhibition as a new discovery," the museum said, adding that its curator Luke Syson "is cataloging the picture as by Leonardo da Vinci and this is how the picture will be presented in the exhibition."

The painting will be included in an exhibition titled: "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter of the Court of Milan," from Nov. 9 to Feb. 5, 2012. "This will obviously be the moment to test this important new attribution by direct comparison with works universally accepted as Leonardo`s," the museum said.

"Once you walked into the room it had that uncanny presence that Leonardo`s have," said Martin Kemp, professor emeritus of art history at Oxford. A researcher of paintings, he was among the experts consulted on the painting.

Detailed examination of the work as well as scientific testing convinced him that he was looking at the real thing. For example, some of the brushwork in the best preserved sections made it clear that the master had been holding the brush.

"None of the students painted like that, none of the followers," Kemp said.

Kemp said he was glad the painting was going on display at the National Gallery. "It`s a new Leonardo painting, it`s sensational," he said. "I`m glad London is seeing it publicly first."

The work is currently owned by R.W. Chandler, a consortium represented by Robert Simon, an art historian and private art dealer in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., according to Sara Latham, a spokeswoman for Simon.

"Salvator Mundi," which means Savior of the World, was believed to have been lost. It was first recorded in the art collection of King Charles I of England in 1649. In 1763, it was auctioned by the son of the Duke of Buckingham. It next appeared in 1900, damaged from excessive paint overlay and its authorship unclear, when it was purchased by a British collector, Sir Frederick Cook, according to a released from Simon. Cook`s descendants sold it at auction in 1958 for 45 pounds. In 2005, it was acquired by an American estate.

Simon said that among the factors that convinced art experts that the painting was by the great master were its execution and style, which were consistent with da Vinci`s other known works, and its superiority to more than 20 painted known copies by his students and followers. He said examination of the pigments and technique also were consistent with those used by da Vinci.

About the Cafe Terrace at Night Painting
Vincent van Gogh painted several night scenes and became fascinated with depicting the stars (most famously with his Starry Night paintings) and the light effects of the night. Van Gogh has achieved an effect of luminosity with the use of contrasting colors and tones. The darks compliment the lights, the blues intensify the oranges, and the purples bring out the yellows.

Van Gogh wrote about the Cafe Terrace at Night painting in a letter to his sister, saying "Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. But I like to paint the thing immediately.
It is true that in the darkness I can take a blue for a green, a blue lilac for a pink lilac, since it is hard to distinguish the quality of the tone. But it is the only way to get away from our conventional night with poor pale whitish light, while even a simple candle already provides us with the richest of yellows and oranges."

The cafe still exists today and is a popular destination for those following the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh.

Highly recognizable, often spoofed, The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí is a painting that tends to be a universal symbol of Surrealist or Modern Art. In the work, clocks appear to melt over branches and rigid surfaces, and ants devour a pocket watch while a vague face hovers in the background. The background itself shows the rocky landscape of Port Lligat in Dalí’s native Catalonia, Spain. The painting is like a well-crafted hallucination, with the fascinating yet confusing details of a dream.

Since The Persistence of Memory was finished in 1931, many interpretations of its symbolism and components have been made. The face beyond is said to be Dalí himself, the ants may represent destruction or decay, the rocks can be viewed as eternity or reality, and the melting clocks perhaps show that regimented time is an artificial concept that cannot withstand the true power of the universe beyond. The actual painting is only about 10 x 13 inches, intensely colored, one of Dalí’s self-described “hand-painted dream photographs.”

Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881, French: Le déjeuner des canotiers) is a painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is currently housed in The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.
The painting depicts a group of Renoir's friends relaxing on a balcony at the Maison Fournaise along the Seine river in Chatou, France. The painter and art patron, Gustave Caillebotte, is seated in the lower right. Renoir's future wife, Aline Charigot, is in the foreground playing with a small dog.
The diagonal of the railing serves to demarcate the two halves of the composition, one densely packed with figures, the other all but empty, save for the two figures of the proprietor's daughter Louise-Alphonsine Fournaise and her brother, Alphonse Fournaise, Jr, which are made prominent by this contrast. In this painting Renoir has captured a great deal of light. As you can see the main focus of light is coming from the large opening in the balcony, beside the large singleted man in the hat. The singlets of both men in the foreground and the table-cloth all work together to reflect this light and send it through the whole composition.
The painting was purchased from the artist by the dealer-patron Paul Durand-Ruel; it was bought from his son by Duncan Phillips.^[1] It was featured prominently in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain released in English as Amélie (2001). The most prominent reference is a comparison between the film's protagonist, Amélie, and the woman in the centre sipping a glass (Actress Ellen Andrée), seemingly gazing out of the canvas, uninterested, while everyone else is enjoying the day together.
A homage to this painting appears in the final panel of On the False Earths, the seventh volume of Jean-Claude Mézières and Pierre Christin's long-running comic book series Valérian and Laureline. [1]
Actor Edward G. Robinson is quoted as saying: “For over thirty years I made periodic visits to Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party in a Washington museum, and stood before that magnificent masterpiece hour after hour, day after day, plotting ways to steal it."^[2]