Monday marked the conclusion of a thrilling edition of the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, with the victory of Oakland’s Amy Schneider, who prevailed over competitors Andrew He and Sam Buttrey. And the clue that put her on the path to victory was a Daily Double from a category dedicated to painting.
Schneider and He came into the game, the fifth in a best-of-seven affair, tied at two wins a piece, with Buttrey yet to have notched a victory. Schneider had taken games two and four, with He reigning supreme in the first and third contests, largely on the strength of aggressive wagering.
Schneider and He were both poised to take the championship with a third and decisive victory on Friday, and it seemed within He’s grasp when he hit two consecutive Daily Doubles. At $5,000, He doubled his score to $10,000 by identifying Toni Morrison’s debut novel, The Bluest Eye.
The next clue was the second and final Daily Double of the round, and He once again went all in—a strategy that had proved instrumental to his tournament run up to that point.
But He finally hit on a clue he didn’t know in the category “Paint Samples,” dropping his score from a potential $20,000 to zero, and making way for Schneider to lock up the title with a third victory in game six on Monday, cementing her place among the Tournament of Champions pantheon of winners.
The clue that stumped He was: “Don’t try to pet this cat in a tricky canvas by Louis-Leopold Boilly, who invented this French term.” Think you know the answer? Test your knowledge below, along with a slew over other art clues that appeared throughout the tournament.
Highlight the text in black to read the answers and see how you would have stacked up to the competition. (On an iPhone, highlight and select “look up.”)
The 2022 Jeopardy Tournament of Champions contestants and host Ken Jennings. Photo ©2022 Sony Pictures Television.
Tournament of Champions
November 21, Category: Welcome to the New Millennium
$400 clue: “In 2004 armed robbers stole two of this artist’s best-known paintings from his museum in Oslo”
Edvard Munch
November 21, Category: “P.J.”s
$1,600 clue: “In 1979 this architect famous for his ‘Glass House’ in Connecticut was the first recipient of the Pritzker Prize”
Philip Johnson
November 18, Category: Paint Samples
$400 clue: “It’s a three-part painting, like Francis Bacon’s “3 Studies of Lucian Freud”
a triptych
$800 clue: “Benjamin West nailed history painting depicting this man’s Treaty with the Indians on the Delaware River”
William Penn
$1,200 clue: “Don’t try to pet this cat in a tricky canvas by Louis-Leopold Boilly, who invented this French term”
trompe-l’œil
$1,600 clue: “Vermeer went outside for his cityscape ‘View of’ this 5-letter city”
Delft
$2,000 clue: “In 2010 you could get a Rothko for 44 cents: Orange and Yellow, in a stamp series honoring this two-word movement in American painting”
Abstract Expressionism
November 14, Category: From “D” to “O” (Each response begins with “D” and end with “O”)
$400 clue: “In the mid-1400s he sculpted the biblical David a bit over five feet high in bronze”
Donatello
November 11, Category: The Arts
$600 clue: “A depiction of Nike discovered on a Greek island in 1863, this statue is thought to commemorate a sea battle”
Winged Victory
November 11, Category: Senior Moments
$1,000 clue: “Well into his 80s, Claude Monet painted his garden in this village 40 miles from Paris”
Giverny
November 11, Category: Mandy Patinkin (clues read by the actor)
$1,000 clue “I was a big fan of the late Stephen Sondheim and I am honored to have originated the role of the artist Seurat in this Jame Lapine-Sondheim musical that was inspired by a painting”
Sunday in the Park With George
November 1, Category: Art and Artists
$400 clue: “Vasari stated that this famous portrait was commissioned by the subject’s husband, silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo”
Mona Lisa
Dance in the Country (1883). Collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
$800 clue: “A man and a woman hold each other close in Dance in the Country by this French painter”
Pierre Auguste Renoir
$1,200 clue: “This artist donated the proceeds from her portrait of Breonna Taylor to fund college scholarships”
Amy Sherald
Self Portrait (1980). Photo courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, ©the Estate of Robert Mapplethorpe.
$1,600 clue: “Here’s a portrait of this provocative photographer who was also a great art subject”
Robert Mapplethorpe
$2,000 clue: “This contemporary Chinese artist and activist made the film Human Flow, about displaced people and refugees”
Ai Weiwei
October 31, Category: Hobby Supplies
$800 clue: “Not just for donuts, this pottery finisher made from a powder can give your final creation a lovely sheen”
glaze
November 2, Category: Baroque
$600 clue: This 17th century Italian painter and sculptor also wrote comedies and oh yeah, did some Vatican City architecture
Gian Lorenzo Bernini
$800 clue: Like Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi painted this biblical woman “Beheading Holofernes”
Judith
November 4, Category: South America
$1,000 clue: Thousands of years old, large geoglyphs representing plants and animals can be seen 15 miles northwest of this Peruvian city
Nazca
Second Chance
October 28, Category: African American Firsts
$2,000 clue: “A Florida educator and college founder, she is the first African American to represent a state in Statuary Hall”
McLeod Bethune
October 28, Category: Artists
Final Jeopardy: “Sabena Airlines commissioned a painting by this artist, L’Oiseau de Ciel, a bird whose body is filled with clouds in a blue sky”
René Magritte
October 26, Category: Charity
Final Jeopardy: “A Catholic charity called Caritas Rome is the beneficiary of money collected from here, over the years averaging about $3,500 daily”
The Trevi Fountain
October 26, Category: Sculpture
$400 clue: “Not far from the New York Stock Exchange is Arturo di Modica’s over-three-and-a-half-ton sculpture of a charging this”
bull
$800 clue: “Louise Bourgeois famously created giant sculptures of these creatures partly as an ode to her mother, who was a weaver”
spiders
$1,200 clue: “The little boy fountain sculpture Manneken Pis is a symbol of this Belgian city’s spirit and sense of humor
Brussels
By Alexandros of Antioch, marble sculpture found in Milos, Greece. Greek civilization, 2nd century BC. Detail. Paris, Musée Du Louvre. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images.
$1,600 clue: “After its discovery and purchase by a French ambassador, it was presented to Louis XVIII who donated it to the Louvre”
Venus de Milo
$2,000 clue: “Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of this city was commissioned to commemorate an event during the Hundred Years’ War”
Calais
October 24, Category: Destination Europe
$800 clue: “Park Güell, with unique architectural features by Antoni Gaudí, is a must see in this Spanish city”
Barcelona
October 20, Category: Medical Drama
$2,000 clue: “There’s a statue in Central Park of this heroic sled dog for helping run a diphtheria antitoxin to remote Alaskans in 1925”
Balto
October 18, Category: National Geographic Treasures of Egypt
Bracelets of Queen Hetepheres I, Old Kingdom, 4th Dynasty (ca. 2575-2550 B.C.E). From the Tomb of Hetepheres I, Egypt.
$400 clue: “Bracelets featuring butterflies inlaid with gems, circa 2,500 B.C.E., are made from this metal, at that time, more precious than gold”
silver
Gold sarcophagus at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Photo credit should read Cris Bouroncle/AFP via Getty Images.
$800 clue: “This young pharaoh’s mummified remains were interred in a solid-gold coffin weighing almost 250 pounds”
King Tut
The seated scribe (ca. 2400 B.C.E.) From Saqqara Necropolis. Old Kingdom, 4th-5th Dynasty. Collection of Louvre, Paris.
$1,200 clue: “Looking ready to begin, a statue of a scribe from about 2400 B.C.E. holds a representation of a scroll of this material in his lap”
papyrus
A pendant from the tomb of Princess Mereret. Middle Kingdom, 12th Dynasty (ca. 1991–1786 B.C.E.) From the Funerary Complex of Senusret III, Tomb of Mereret, Dahshur. Collection of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo.
$1,600 clue: “A pendant from the tomb of Princess Mereret from around 1800 B.C. features two of these, a fierce hybrid of a raptor and lion”
a griffin
Collection of the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, Egypt. Photo GNU Free Documentation License, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
$2,000 clue: “He was laid to rest in the grandest of the pyramids, but a tiny ivory figurine is the only complete sculpture known of this pharaoh”
Khufu (or Cheops)
October 18, Category: Americana
$600 clue: “Nan, sister of this painter, is next to a pitchfork-wielding gent in American Gothic“
Grant Wood
October 17, Category: Trying to Get Some Works Done
$800 clue: “The Calf Bearer from the 500s B.C. discovered on this Athens elevation in 1864—sad that parts are missing, but now we can show it”
the Acropolis
$1,200 clue: “From Rubens and his workshop, The Lion Hunt, The Tiger Hunt, and this Roman goddess ‘and her Nymphs on the Hunt’
Diana
$2,000 clue: “Child with Toy Hand Grenade from 1962, a famous image by this woman who often photographed social outcasts”
Diane Arbus
October 17, Category: An Impressive Vocabulary
$1,000 clue: “Adventurous artists are described by this hyphenated French word, which used to refer to the leading body of an army”
avant-garde
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