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 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.
Self-Portrait (Caillebotte)
1892 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
One of the Impressionist canvases he owned hangs on the wall behind him. Caillebotte's money and his bequest kept the movement alive.
★ 4.4
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
Portraits at the Stock Exchange
1879 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Degas turned from dancers to financiers, catching heads bent close over documents in the crush of the Paris exchange.
★ 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
Family Reunion
1867 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Eleven of the painter's family on a shaded terrace near Montpellier. Bazille was killed in the Franco-Prussian War at twenty-eight.
★ 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
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
Young Spartans Exercising
1860 · National Gallery, London
Spartan girls taunt the boys into wrestling, and Degas made the bodies awkward rather than ideal, which is not how history painting was done.
★ 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
San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk
1912 · National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff
Monet went to Venice late and found a city already doing what he had spent fifty years trying to paint.
★ 6.3
Garden at Sainte-Adresse
1867 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet's own father sits among the gladioli on a terrace, and the young painter tips the space up in flat bands like a Japanese print.
★ 6.6
The Cliff Walk at Pourville
1882 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Two women with parasols on a clifftop in Normandy, the grass and their dresses going the same direction as the wind.
★ 6.6
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset
1903 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Monet painted Westminster across the river again and again because what he actually wanted was the fog, not the building.
★ 6.6
White Frost
1873 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Critics at the first Impressionist show in 1874 said it looked like palette scrapings. The furrows are streaked with blue, violet and gold.
★ 6.6
The Boating Party
1894 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A dark-suited oarsman fills the foreground with his back while the water rises behind with no horizon, a design taken from Japanese prints.
★ 6.7
The Boulevard Montmartre at Night
1897 · National Gallery, London
Pissarro painted these boulevards from a hotel window over and over, but only once after dark, the gaslight smeared across wet pavement.
★ 6.9
Gare Saint Lazare
1877 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Monet set his easel up inside the station and painted the steam until the roof and the city beyond it had dissolved into it.
★ 7.1
Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
1881 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A basket of colored wool sits in the front, the Seine glitters behind, and the whole thing is about how good an afternoon can be.
★ 7.2
The Child's Bath
1893 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman washes a child's feet in a basin, seen from above, the wallpaper and rug pushing everything flat as a Japanese print.
★ 7.2
L'Absinthe
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Two people sit shoulder to shoulder at a cafe table staring at nothing, pushed off to one side behind a run of empty tables.
★ 7.3
Bain a la Grenouillere
1869 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet and Renoir set up side by side at this riverside resort and worked out the quick broken stroke that became Impressionism.
★ 7.3
The Magpie
1869 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A single magpie on a gate in deep snow, the shadows tinged blue and violet rather than grey. The Salon turned it down.
★ 7.3
Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1891 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Monet painted the same stacks near his house at every hour and season, so that what changes from canvas to canvas is only the light.
★ 7.3
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
1899 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Monet dug the pond himself at Giverny, built the Japanese bridge over it, and then painted the place for the rest of his life.
★ 7.4
Paris Street; Rainy Day
1877 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Umbrellas cross the wet cobbles of Haussmann's new boulevards, composed with a photographic exactness his Impressionist friends had no use for.
★ 7.6
Bal du Moulin de la Galette
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Sunlight comes through the trees in patches over a Montmartre dance floor, a big ambitious canvas given over entirely to a Sunday afternoon.
★ 8.5
Impression, Sunrise
1872 · Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris
A critic seized on the word in the title to mock the whole group, and the insult ended up naming the movement.
★ 8.6
Luncheon of the Boating Party
1881 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
Fourteen of Renoir's friends linger over the wreckage of lunch above the Seine, his future wife among them, cooing at a dog on the table.
★ 8.8
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
1882 · Courtauld Gallery, London
Manet worked from a real barmaid named Suzon and put her reflection in the wrong place, which people have been arguing about ever since.
★ 9.1
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5