The Guitarist
1755 · Musee d'Arts Nantes, Nantes
A young man glances up from his guitar mid-song. Greuze usually painted tearful moral lessons, and here he simply does not.
★ 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.
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
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
Mona Lisa (Botero)
1978 · Location unknown
Botero inflated the most famous face in the world until the little mouth vanished into acres of cheek. Affectionate rather than cruel.
★ 4.4
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
Portrait of a Man, Aged 93
1521 · Albertina, Vienna
An inscription gives his age as ninety-three. Dürer drew him in Antwerp and used the head soon after for a Saint Jerome.
★ 4.8
Christ Blessing (The Savior of the World)
1600 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Two fingers raised in a gesture reaching back to Byzantium, one hand on a crystal orb, the face long and sorrowful and unmistakably his.
★ 5.2
Young Woman Sleeping
1654 · British Museum, London
A few sweeps of brush and brown ink, most of the paper left bare, and the whole weight of a sleeping head is there.
★ 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
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 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
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
Clown with Lute
1623 · Louvre, Paris
Caught mid-strum with his cap askew and his mouth open, painted so fast the brushstrokes still seem to be moving.
★ 5.4
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1629)
1629 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt was barely in his twenties and using his own face as a laboratory for light. Dozens more would follow over forty years.
★ 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
Portrait of a Young Man
1517 · National Gallery, London
He swivels over his shoulder to look at you, holding a block that nobody can identify, and his name has been lost entirely.
★ 6.1
Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu
1642 · National Gallery, London
Richelieu appears three times on one canvas so that a sculptor in Rome could carve a bust without ever meeting him.
★ 6.3
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
Portrait of a Young Princess
1435 · Louvre, Paris
She sits in profile against a hedge of carnations with butterflies going past, a sprig of juniper on her sleeve punning on her name.
★ 6.5
The Madwoman
1823 · Musee des Beaux Arts Lyon, Lyon
One of a series Géricault painted of asylum patients for a doctor studying obsession, and he gave her the seriousness of a commissioned portrait.
★ 6.5
Head of a Woman (La Scapigliata)
1508 · Galleria Nazionale di Parma, Parma
Her face is finished and breathing while the hair around it stays loose scribble, and nobody knows whether Leonardo considered it done.
★ 6.5
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
LHOOQ
1919 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Duchamp bought a postcard of the Mona Lisa, drew a moustache on it, and added five letters that make a crude joke in French.
★ 6.5
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
1593 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Fruit already spotting toward rot, painted with the same attention as the boy holding it. An early statement of what Caravaggio intended.
★ 6.6
Self-Portrait in the Green Bugatti
1925 · Location unknown
She painted herself at the wheel in leather helmet and gloves for a German fashion magazine, and invented the look of the Jazz Age.
★ 6.7
Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
1490 · Musee Conde, Chantilly
She had been dead for years when this was painted, and the asp at her throat turns her into Cleopatra.
★ 6.7
Portrait of Agnolo Doni
1506 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Raphael had just arrived in Florence and studied the Mona Lisa hard, then did the same pose in clear light instead of smoke.
★ 6.7
Martin Luther
1532 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Cranach was Luther's friend and godfather to his children, and his workshop turned out this face by the score for Protestant Germany.
★ 6.7
Wedding Portrait of Isaac Massa and Beatrix van der Laen
1622 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A married couple sitting on the grass, leaning into each other and visibly amused, which is not how marriage portraits were done.
★ 6.8
Gypsy Girl
1626 · Louvre, Paris
Not a commission but a tronie, a character study made to show off. Hals catches her half-laugh before it has finished.
★ 6.8
Frederic Chopin
1838 · Louvre, Paris
It was half of a double portrait with George Sand listening at the piano, until somebody cut the canvas in two.
★ 6.8
The Balcony
1868 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three people at a green railing all looking different ways and none at each other. Berthe Morisot is the one seated and dreaming.
★ 6.8
Portrait of a Man
1476 · National Gallery, London
A red cap, a parapet, and a gaze that meets yours. Antonello brought the Netherlandish portrait into Italy and killed off the profile.
★ 6.8