The Old Plantation
1795 · Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, Williamsburg
Enslaved people dancing and making music beside their cabins, with African instruments and dress. Attributed to a South Carolina slaveholder.
★ 4.3
The Art canon
Sourced and hung.
Every work chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
Browse all 704 works or filter by movement, subject, place, and artist.
The Card Players (van Leyden)
1517 · Wilton House, Wiltshire, England
Coins and cards on the table and a great deal of sidelong glancing. Somebody is being cheated, and the intrigue may not be financial.
★ 4.8
The Bullfight
1864 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Manet cut up the original canvas because he was unhappy with it, and this is one of the surviving pieces.
★ 4.8
Bathers (Summer Scene)
1869 · Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Young men lounging on a riverbank in dappled light, the oldest subject in painting given ordinary modern bodies and modern poses.
★ 4.8
Sunday
1890 · Private collection
He stares out the window, she pokes the fire, and the dots are used here for boredom rather than sunlight.
★ 4.8
Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand
1508 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Thousands are clubbed and thrown off cliffs, and Dürer paints himself walking calmly through the middle of it holding a banner with his name.
★ 5.2
The Milkmaid (van Leyden)
1510 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A milkmaid, a herdsman and two cows, and almost nothing happening. One of the first prints to take peasants as a subject worth the burin.
★ 5.2
Woman Before a Mirror
1876 · Guggenheim, New York City
A woman in a white corset seen from behind, painted so loosely the picture seems to stop just before the image settles.
★ 5.2
Breakfast
1887 · Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
A family at breakfast, posed so stiffly in the glare that the comfortable room turns faintly airless. Every surface is built from dots.
★ 5.2
In the Vanilla Grove, Man and Horse
1891 · Guggenheim, New York City
A man and a white horse in a Tahitian grove, painted on Gauguin's first stay, flat and warm and looking for a paradise.
★ 5.2
Women at the Well
1891 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Provençal women at a hilltop well above a blue bay, the dots loosening into curves and the science giving way to pleasure.
★ 5.2
Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook
1895 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman sits on the bank and puts her bare feet in the water, the whole stream broken into flickering touches of color.
★ 5.2
Child with a Dove
1901 · Private collection
A child holding a white dove with a colored ball at its feet, painted just as Picasso's palette was cooling toward blue.
★ 5.2
Reading the Letter
1921 · Musee Picasso, Paris
Two heavy young men press close together over a letter, and the intimacy is usually read as a memorial to Apollinaire.
★ 5.2
Maya with Doll
1938 · Private collection
His daughter Maya holding her doll, her face split front and profile at once, the Cubist trick turned warm for once.
★ 5.2
Figure in a Landscape
1945 · Tate Modern, London
Bacon started from a snapshot of a friend dozing in a park and then removed the head, the identity and the ease.
★ 5.2
Reading (La Lecture)
1932 · Private collection
Marie-Thérèse has fallen asleep over her book with her head on her arms, from the year Picasso painted her over and over.
★ 5.4
Raftsmen Playing Cards
1847 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), St. Louis
Rivermen break off work for a card game on a flatboat, arranged with a stillness that lifts the scene toward history painting.
★ 5.4
Jealousy
1907 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
A sallow green face fills the front of the picture while behind him a woman in red picks fruit beside another man. He is imagining it.
★ 5.4
The Last of the Buffalo
1888 · Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Bierstadt painted this vast hunt as the herds were nearing extinction, with skulls and bones already lying across the foreground.
★ 5.4
Prisoners from the Front
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Union officer faces three captured Confederates and the two halves of the country study each other. Homer had covered the war as an illustrator.
★ 5.6
Mother and Child
1902 · Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
A mother holding her child, in the blue Picasso used for everything during the years he was poor in Paris and Barcelona.
★ 5.6
Cutting the Stone
1494 · El Prado, Madrid
A quack in a funnel hat cuts the stone of madness out of a man's head, and what comes out is a flower.
★ 5.7
Night Scene in the Yoshiwara
1850 · Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
Oi was Hokusai's daughter and studio collaborator, and her handling of lantern light against darkness beats anything else in the ukiyo-e of her time.
★ 5.7
The Football Players
1908 · Guggenheim, New York City
Moustached men in striped jerseys leap for a ball among autumn trees, playing the new game of rugby as though it were slow ritual.
★ 5.7
The Forge
1820 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Three smiths at a forge, one hammer at the top of its swing. Goya gave laboring men the scale usually kept for gods and kings.
★ 5.7
Races at Longchamp
1867 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The horses come straight at you instead of across the frame, which nobody painting racehorses had bothered to try.
★ 5.7
Melancholy
1892 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A man broods on the shore while a couple boards a boat far off, and the curving coastline carries the whole mood by itself.
★ 5.7
Artillerymen (Kirchner)
1915 · Guggenheim, New York City
Naked conscripts showering in a barracks under a mounted officer, painted after the army service that broke Kirchner down.
★ 5.7
The Shipwreck
1772 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Masts splintering, survivors in the surf, and the whole thing arranged for people who wanted to feel terror from a safe distance.
★ 5.7
The Moon Through a Crumbling Window
1886 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bodhidharma meditates before a broken lattice with the moon behind it. Yoshitoshi is reckoned the last great master of the woodblock print.
★ 5.9
The Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in his Picture Gallery in Brussels
1647 · El Prado, Madrid
Teniers was the archduke's curator, and he painted the walls tiled with identifiable Titians and Giorgiones as a kind of catalogue.
★ 5.9
A Girl with a Watering Can
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
She stands in a garden in a blue dress holding a watering can, and Renoir spends the rest of the canvas on light.
★ 6.1
La Promenade
1876 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Two girls walking under trees, the elder leading the younger, everything blurred into one shimmer of dappled light and pale dress.
★ 6.1
Woman with Yellow Hair
1931 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marie-Thérèse asleep with her head on her arms, the angular violence of Cubism gone soft and curved for a few years.
★ 6.1
The Meeting
1772 · The Frick Collection, New York City
He is coming over the garden wall and she has just seen him, with a statue of Venus watching from above. Painted for Madame du Barry.
★ 6.1
The County Election
1851 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), St. Louis
Voting on the courthouse steps with electioneering, arguing and one man too drunk to stand. Bingham had run for office himself.
★ 6.1
The Fortune Teller (Caravaggio)
1595 · Louvre, Paris
She reads his palm and takes the ring off his finger while she does it, and he is too busy looking at her to notice.
★ 6.1
The Rehearsal
1879 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Dancers stretch while a spiral staircase cuts the corner and the frame slices figures off. Degas cared about the practice, not the performance.
★ 6.1
Anxiety
1894 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
The same bridge and the same burning sky as the Scream, but with a whole crowd coming toward you instead of one figure.
★ 6.1