Christ Bearing the Cross, with a Dominican Friar
1360 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Christ looks back over the cross at a tiny Dominican friar kneeling in the corner, the patron drawn into the road to Calvary.
★ 3.2
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 Flagellation of Christ (Cimabue)
1280 · The Frick Collection, New York City
No bigger than a page, and one of very few works securely given to Cimabue, whom Dante named the best painter of his day.
★ 4.0
St. John the Evangelist
1469 · The Frick Collection, New York City
John stands lost in his book, wrapped in red cloth massed like masonry. One wing of an altarpiece now scattered across five cities.
★ 4.4
The Lamentation
1582 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The body pushed close to the viewer and lit in sharp pools. The Carracci taught a generation to weld grandeur to direct feeling.
★ 4.4
The Annunciation (David)
1506 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
This is only the angel. Mary received the message on a companion panel, and the two now hang together as a pair.
★ 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
Artillerymen (Rousseau)
1893 · Guggenheim, New York City
A regiment posed around its cannon like a group photograph that has gone charmingly rigid. Rousseau was a customs officer painting in his spare time.
★ 4.8
Landscape at La Ciotat
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Hot pinks and oranges laid on freely, a year before Cézanne and Picasso's Demoiselles sent Braque off toward Cubism instead.
★ 4.8
Capricious Forms
1937 · Guggenheim, New York City
The Bauhaus grids and circles have given way to floating amoebas. Kandinsky in Paris at the end, inventing a biology instead.
★ 4.8
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
The Sermon on the Mount (Lorrain)
1656 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Christ preaches from a hilltop and is almost too small to find. Claude was really painting the hills, the water and the distance.
★ 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
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
Descent from the Cross (Beckmann)
1917 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Beckmann came out of the war traumatized and painted a Christ so emaciated and angular that no consolation survives the picture.
★ 5.2
Painting Number 2
1954 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Black bars crossing a white ground, enlarged from small ink sketches so the speed and weight of the arm survive the scaling up.
★ 5.2
The Presidential Family
1967 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
President, wife, child, bishop and general, all inflated into balloons and posed with great solemnity in front of a volcano.
★ 5.2
The Temptation of Christ (Duccio)
1311 · The Frick Collection, New York City
The Devil offers all the kingdoms of the world, rendered as tiny gold-edged walled towns scattered down the slopes, and is refused.
★ 5.4
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
The Hermitage at Pontoise
1867 · Guggenheim, New York City
Plain village houses on a hillside, built in solid earthy blocks. Pissarro refused to prettify the countryside and gave it structural weight instead.
★ 5.4
Fragment of a Queen's Face
Artist unknown
1340 BC · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Only the mouth and chin survive, in honey-yellow jasper, and the break seems to concentrate the thing rather than diminish it.
★ 5.6
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
Self-Portrait with a Cigarette
1923 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Beckmann had spent the war as a medical orderly, and he looks out of the shadows here like a man finished being surprised.
★ 5.6
Woman with a Parrot
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Courbet took the nude to the Salon with her hair loose, her body relaxed, and a parrot on her hand instead of a myth.
★ 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
Purification of the Temple
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
El Greco split the canvas down the middle: the traders tumbling out on the left, the disciples watching calmly on the right.
★ 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 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
Portrait of a Man (Memling)
1470 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Memling put his sitters in front of open countryside instead of a dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and came back changed.
★ 5.9
The Choice Between Virtue and Vice
1565 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Hercules bolts from Vice toward Virtue and gashes his leg on the thorns of the harder road as he goes.
★ 5.9
Wisdom and Strength
1565 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Divine Wisdom looks up and Hercules looks down at a scatter of crowns and jewels, which is the entire argument of the picture.
★ 5.9
Perseus with the Head of Medusa
1806 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
When Napoleon carried off the Apollo Belvedere, the Vatican put this on the empty pedestal, a modern work judged fit for the company.
★ 5.9
Mummy Portrait of a Boy (Eutyches)
Artist unknown
130 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Painted in hot colored beeswax and bound over the face of a mummy. The strokes are still visible and the eyes startlingly present.
★ 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
Man with Crossed Arms
1900 · Guggenheim, New York City
Cézanne cared less who the man was than whether the head would hold together as structure, and the slight asymmetries keep it alive.
★ 6.1
Morning in the Village After Snowstorm
1912 · Guggenheim, New York City
Peasants and houses rendered as polished metal cylinders. Malevich was three years away from painting a black square and stopping.
★ 6.1
Paris Through the Window
1913 · Guggenheim, New York City
A train crosses the sky upside down, a man drifts past on a parachute, and the cat on the sill has a human face.
★ 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
Dempsey and Firpo
1924 · Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Firpo has just punched Dempsey clean out of the ring and into the laps of the reporters. Bellows painted the exact instant.
★ 6.1