The Last Supper (Bouveret)
1896 · Private collection
The light in the darkened room seems to be coming off Christ himself, painted when religious art had largely gone out of fashion.
★ 4.0
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.
Portrait of Dante
1495 · Private collection
Dante had been dead nearly two centuries, so this is not a likeness but a verdict, struck in profile like a coin.
★ 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
The Elephants
1948 · Private collection
Two elephants carrying obelisks on legs far too spindly to hold them, which is the entire effect and it works.
★ 4.8
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
Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto
1903 · Private collection
They shared a Barcelona studio, and Soto was known as a hard drinker, but Picasso painted him sober and sad in blue.
★ 5.2
The Foxes
1913 · Private collection
Foxes curled together and assembled out of shards of grey, blue and rust. Marc was killed at Verdun three years after painting it.
★ 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
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
Portrait of Jean Cocteau
1917 · Private collection
Cocteau sits stiffly upright with his neck drawn long, one of the sharpest personalities in Paris turned into an elegant mask.
★ 5.4
Woman with Folded Arms (Femme aux Bras Croises)
1902 · Private collection
Her crossed arms are a wall against the world, and the blue does the rest. Picasso was painting the outcast and the destitute.
★ 5.6
The Boxer
1982 · Private collection
Arms up in victory, built from slashing black and a blaze of color. Basquiat kept returning to Black athletes as heroes and as targets.
★ 5.7
Pyramid of Skulls
1901 · Private collection
Four skulls stacked on a tabletop and lit straight on. Cézanne kept coming back to the skull in his last years, never this frontally.
★ 5.9
Swans Reflecting Elephants
1937 · Private collection
Three swans on a lake, and in the reflection the necks have become trunks and the trees have become legs.
★ 6.1
La Mariee (The Bride)
1950 · Private collection
A bride in red floats through the blue night with a goat playing a cello beside her. Many people know it from a film.
★ 6.1
Irony of the Negro Policeman
1981 · Private collection
Basquiat was twenty-one and two years out of graffiti. His figure in a policeman's cap is penned in by a grid and scrawled words.
★ 6.1
Castle and Sun
1928 · Private collection
Small colored blocks stack up into a town like stained glass, with a red sun above. Klee taught at the Bauhaus and kept the whimsy.
★ 6.3
Danae
1907 · Private collection
Zeus arrives as a stream of gold coins and ornament between her thighs, and Klimt makes no attempt to be subtle about it.
★ 6.3
Self-Portrait (Poussin)
1650 · Private collection
Poussin stands in front of his own blank stretched canvases with a portfolio under his arm, presenting himself as a thinker rather than a craftsman.
★ 6.5
The Desperate Man (Self-portrait)
1845 · Private collection
Courbet at twenty-six, lunging at the viewer with both hands in his hair and his eyes wide. Half self-portrait, half performance.
★ 6.5
Rooms by the Sea
1951 · Private collection
A door opens straight onto the water with no shore in between, and the only other thing in the picture is sunlight on a wall.
★ 6.6
The Dream (La Reve)
1932 · Private collection
Marie-Thérèse asleep in a red armchair, her face split into curves. Picasso is said to have done it in a single afternoon.
★ 6.7
Red Nude
1917 · Private collection
The police shut down Modigliani's only solo show for indecency, and this was among the nudes that did it.
★ 6.8
Boy with a Pipe
1905 · Private collection
A boy from the street in a crown of roses, painted the year Picasso's blue gloom warmed into rose.
★ 6.9
Suprematist Composition
1916 · Private collection
Colored bars drift at diagonals across a white void with no ground under them, which Malevich meant as pure feeling and nothing else.
★ 7.1
The Problem We All Live With
1964 · Private collection
The girl is Ruby Bridges, walking into a New Orleans school in 1960 between four marshals whose faces Rockwell cut off at the shoulders.
★ 7.2
Three Studies of Lucian Freud
1969 · Private collection
Freud sits on a wooden chair in three panels, wrenched out of shape and still unmistakably himself. Bacon painted his friend and rival.
★ 7.2
Portrait of Dr. Gachet
1890 · Private collection
The doctor who was caring for him leans his head on one hand, a sprig of foxglove on the table, the background rippling blue.
★ 7.5
The Son of Man
1964 · Private collection
Magritte called the floating apple a kind of self-portrait, about how much we want to see the thing that is being hidden.
★ 7.5
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
1914 · Private collection
A girl rolls a hoop down an arcaded street toward a shadow coming around the corner, in light that belongs to no hour.
★ 8.3
The Sleeping Gypsy
1897 · Private collection
A lion sniffs at a sleeper in the desert without waking her. Rousseau was a customs officer who never took a lesson.
★ 8.5