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
Melancholy
1874 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
A woman slumped back on a sofa, and Degas reads the whole state of mind off the slope of her shoulders.
★ 4.2
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
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 Rebuke of Adam and Eve
1626 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Adam points at Eve, Eve points at the serpent, and the first sin turns into an ordinary comedy of passing the blame.
★ 4.4
The Parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins
1825 · Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
Five have kept their lamps lit and five have not, and the ones who have not are pleading. An avenging angel waits above.
★ 4.4
Madonna and Child (Perugino)
1500 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
The oval face, the lowered eyes, the Umbrian distance melting into air. Raphael took all of it and then went past it.
★ 4.8
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
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
Leda and the Swan
1882 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
The swan nips her hand and Leda barely reacts. Cézanne cared about the planes of the body, not the story.
★ 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
Grand Canal Venice
1905 · Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Gondolas on water that has shattered into pink, blue and gold. Signac took the divisionist dot to the most painted view in Europe.
★ 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
The Sinking of the Titanic
1913 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), Saint Louis
Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.
★ 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 Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew
1311 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The brothers pause with the net still trailing fish through green water, caught between the work and the man on the shore.
★ 4.9
Allegory of Gluttony and Lust
1500 · Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
A man rides a wine barrel while swimmers chase a floating pie. It was sawn off the bottom of the Ship of Fools.
★ 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
The Parable of the Sower
1557 · Timken Museum of Art, San Diego
You take in the whole river valley before you notice the sower at the bottom corner, or Christ preaching from a boat behind him.
★ 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
George Washington at Princeton
1779 · Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
Washington leans on a cannon with captured flags at his feet. Peale knew him and served in the war, so this is the man.
★ 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
Tahitian Mountains
1893 · Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis
Green and rose slopes flattened into bold shapes, with rather less interest in what the island actually looked like than in the color.
★ 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
Little Harbor in Normandy
1909 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Boats and masts broken into tilting green and brown planes, painted while Braque and Picasso were building Cubism out of Cézanne.
★ 5.2
Deer in the Forest I
1913 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
The deer have almost dissolved into the crystalline planes of the wood, which is exactly what Marc was after.
★ 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
Red Hills with Flowers
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Red New Mexico hills roll across the canvas with a few flowers brought right up close, the vast and the fragile in one frame.
★ 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 Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory
1954 · Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Florida
Dalí went back to his own melting watches and broke the ground beneath them into floating bricks, for the atomic age.
★ 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
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (Cole)
1828 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Eden on one side of the rock arch, blasted wilderness on the other, and Cole lets the landscape carry the entire moral argument.
★ 5.4
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
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
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