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
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.
Fragment of a Crucifixion
1950 · Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Bacon used the shape of the cross as an armature for meat rather than religion, with a snarling animal fixed on top.
★ 4.8
The Little Owl
1506 · Albertina, Vienna
Owls carried centuries of symbolism in the north, but Dürer's is mostly just an owl, looking back at you with its talons over a ledge.
★ 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
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
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
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
Conversion on the Way to Damascus
1601 · Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome
The horse and the groom take up most of the canvas and neither notices anything. The miracle happens entirely inside the man on the ground.
★ 5.4
Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (Louvre)
1300 · Louvre, Paris
The same story at miniature scale, squeezed into a predella panel, and Giotto loses none of the plainness that made it convincing.
★ 5.7
Circe and Her Lovers in a Landscape
1525 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
An enchantress sits in a wood ringed by deer, dogs, owls and a stork, which may be men she has transformed. Dossi leaves it unresolved.
★ 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
Leda and the Swan (Correggio)
1532 · Gemaldegalerie, Berlin
The story runs across the canvas in stages, arrival to departure. A later owner cut Leda's head out in disgust and it was repainted.
★ 5.7
The Conversion of St. Paul
1530 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Saul sprawls on the ground with his arm up while the white horse rears above him with something close to ballet in it.
★ 5.9
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
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
Exotic Landscape
1910 · Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena
Monkeys look out from between giant leaves in a jungle Rousseau assembled from the Paris botanical gardens, the zoo, and illustrated books.
★ 6.1
Eclipse of the Sun
1926 · Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY
A headless official takes advice from an industrialist, a blinkered donkey listens above, and a dollar sign has blotted out the sun.
★ 6.3
The Peaceable Kingdom
1833 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Hicks was a Quaker preacher and sign-painter who returned to Isaiah's prophecy about sixty times. Penn signs his treaty in the background.
★ 6.3
Bullfinch on Weeping Cherry
1834 · Location unknown
One plump bullfinch on a cherry sprig, a poem written beside it. The other Hokusai, quiet and exact, nothing like the wave.
★ 6.5
Yellow Cow
1911 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marc used yellow for whatever was gentle and joyful, and this cow is kicking its legs out across the hills for the pleasure of it.
★ 6.5
Lion Hunt
1621 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Horses, lions, spears and men knotted into one turning mass, with a rider already thrown and about to be mauled.
★ 6.7
Boy Leading a Horse
1906 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
The Rose Period cooling off into something graver and more archaic, the boy and horse built like figures off a Greek relief.
★ 6.7
Bull's Head
1942 · Musee Picasso, Paris
A bicycle saddle and a set of handlebars, joined. Picasso joked that someone might one day turn it back into a bicycle.
★ 6.7
Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening
1944 · Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
A bee circles a pomegranate, and in the second before waking it has become two tigers and a bayonet coming at Gala's arm.
★ 6.7
The Tilled Field
1924 · Guggenheim, New York City
An eye and an ear sprout from a tree and a lizard wears a cap. Miró's Catalan farm has come apart into Surrealism.
★ 6.8
The Hungry Lion Throws Itself on the Antelope
1905 · Fondation Beyeler, Riehen
Rousseau never left France and built his jungles from botanical gardens and prints. This one hung in the room that named the Fauves.
★ 6.9
Blue Horse I
1911 · Stadtische Galerie, Munich
Marc gave his animals symbolic colors, blue for the spiritual, and looked to them for an innocence he thought people had lost.
★ 7.1
The Battle of San Romano (Louvre)
1435 · Louvre, Paris
Broken lances lie along the receding lines of a perspective grid. Vasari said Uccello sat up all night muttering about how sweet it was.
★ 7.2
The Hunt in the Forest
1470 · Ashmolean, Oxford, England
Red-clad hunters and dogs funnel into a black wood toward a single vanishing point. One of the earliest night scenes on an Italian panel.
★ 7.2
The Elephant Celebes
1921 · Tate Modern, London
Part boiler, part elephant, with a tusked hose coming out of its head. Ernst took the shape from a photograph of an African grain bin.
★ 7.2
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
1845 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A trapper and his son drift downriver at first light with a chained animal at the prow, the water so still it doubles them.
★ 7.2
I and the Village
1911 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A green-faced peasant and a cow look at each other, and the houses behind them are upside down. Chagall grew up in Vitebsk.
★ 7.2
Young Hare
1502 · Albertina, Vienna
Every whisker set down separately, and in the dark eye a studio window is reflected. Dürer signed an animal study as a finished work.
★ 7.3
The Snake Charmer
1907 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.
★ 7.6
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
Great Hall of the Bulls
Artist unknown
17000 BC · Lascaux, France
Painters worked here by lamplight seventeen thousand years ago. Four boys found the cave in 1940, and it was sealed again in 1963.
★ 8.6
The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal
Artist unknown
645 BC · British Museum, London
The king kills lions released into an arena to prove he can protect his people, and the dying animals are carved with startling tenderness.
★ 8.7
Bacchus and Ariadne
1523 · National Gallery, London
Bacchus leaps from his chariot toward Ariadne while Theseus's ship slips off the horizon, painted for a duke's private chamber in Ferrara.
★ 8.9
The Court of Gayumars
1525 · Aga Khan Museum, Toronto
Hundreds of tiny faces hide in the swirling rocks around Persia's first king, painted for a royal copy of the Shahnama made for Shah Tahmasp.
★ 9.0
Ishtar Gate
Artist unknown
575 BC · Pergamon Museum, Berlin
Bulls and dragons stride across glazed brick in deep blue, raised for Nebuchadnezzar around 575 BC and rebuilt from the original bricks in Berlin.
★ 9.0