The Card Players (van Leyden)
1517 · Wilton House, Wiltshire, England
Coins and cards on the table and a great deal of sidelong glancing. Somebody is being cheated, and the intrigue may not be financial.
★ 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.
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
Figure in a Landscape
1945 · Tate Modern, London
Bacon started from a snapshot of a friend dozing in a park and then removed the head, the identity and the ease.
★ 5.2
Christ Taking Leave of His Mother
1520 · National Gallery, London
The episode appears in no Gospel at all, and Altdorfer nearly buries the figures under a forest of enormous trees and luminous sky.
★ 5.2
Neptune and Triton
1623 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Neptune drives his trident down to still the waters. It was made for a fountain, so real water once finished the sculpture.
★ 5.4
The Entombment (Michelangelo)
1500 · National Gallery, London
Bare priming still shows where the Virgin was meant to sit. Michelangelo probably set it aside to go back to Florence and carve the David.
★ 5.6
Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Sylvia
1682 · Ashmolean, Oxford, England
Ascanius draws his bow on a tame stag, the shot that starts a war in the Aeneid, and Claude paints it as a calm golden evening.
★ 5.7
Chichester Canal
1828 · Tate Modern, London
Masts stand black against a sky going from gold to soft blue, and almost nothing else in the picture is solid.
★ 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
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
The Adoration of the Kings
1564 · National Gallery, London
Bruegel gives the holy figures plain faces and surrounds them with gawkers and whisperers, which makes reverence hard to come by.
★ 6.3
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 Ugly Duchess
1513 · National Gallery, London
Satire on old age aping youth, in a headdress two generations out of date. Tenniel used her for the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.
★ 6.5
We are Making a New World
1918 · Imperial War Museum, London
Splintered stumps and shell craters under a cold sun, and Nash gave it that title on purpose, as an official British war artist.
★ 6.5
A Satyr Mourning over a Nymph
1495 · National Gallery, London
A satyr kneels and touches the dead woman with extraordinary gentleness while her dog keeps watch and wading birds stand along the shore.
★ 6.7
Metamorphosis of Narcissus
1937 · Tate Modern, London
The kneeling figure on the left is the same shape as the stone hand on the right, holding an egg with a flower coming out.
★ 6.7
Agony in the Garden (Mantegna)
1460 · National Gallery, London
Mantegna carved the rock like an engraver while Judas already leads the soldiers down the road. His brother-in-law Bellini painted the same scene, softer.
★ 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
Saint George and the Dragon
1470 · National Gallery, London
The princess has the dragon on a leash made from her own belt, and a spiral storm cloud winds up behind the saint.
★ 6.9
The Raising of Lazarus
1519 · National Gallery, London
Lazarus heaves upright still wrapped in his shroud while the crowd recoils from the smell. Michelangelo supplied drawings to help beat Raphael.
★ 6.9
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
1932 · Tate Modern, London
Marie-Thérèse asleep beside a sculpture of her own head and a philodendron, from the year Picasso could seemingly do nothing wrong.
★ 6.9
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
The Ancient of Days
1794 · Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Blake's Urizen leans out of the sun with a golden compass to measure the void, and Blake was not sure whether to admire him.
★ 7.2
Venus and Mars
1483 · National Gallery, London
Mars sleeps the sleep of the spent lover while satyrs make off with his lance, one blowing a conch in his ear without waking him.
★ 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 Three Dancers
1925 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso's classical calm breaks here into something jagged and violent, the limbs flung out almost crucified, set off by the death of an old friend.
★ 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
Seaport with the Embarkation of St. Ursula
1641 · National Gallery, London
Saint Ursula is on the quay somewhere, but the real subject is the light coming up the water between the palaces at dawn.
★ 7.3
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
1648 · National Gallery, London
The sun sits low over a glassy harbor and floods everything. Turner admired it so much he insisted his own work hang beside it.
★ 7.3
Madonna of the Rocks 2
1505 · National Gallery, London
The second version, painted to settle a long quarrel with the confraternity. Everyone now has a halo and the angel has stopped pointing.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
1504 · National Gallery, London
Bellini painted the brocade thread by thread and turned the official portrait from a profile on a coin into a man met face to face.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam
1523 · National Gallery, London
Erasmus rests his hands on a book whose edge is inscribed The Labors of Hercules, his own joke about how much scholarship costs.
★ 7.4
Laughing Cavalier
1624 · Wallace Collection, London
He is neither laughing nor a cavalier. The lace and gold thread on that sleeve were flicked on in a few confident strokes.
★ 7.4
Whaam!
1963 · Tate Modern, London
Lichtenstein blew a single war-comic panel up to mural scale across two canvases, Ben-Day dots, caption box and all.
★ 7.5
The Weeping Woman
1937 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso pulled her out of the screaming mother in Guernica and gave her the face of Dora Maar, his lover and a photographer.
★ 7.5
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 7.5
The Swing
1767 · Wallace Collection, London
An old man works the ropes without knowing the young man in the bushes is looking straight up her skirts. A slipper flies off.
★ 7.6
Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Self portrait?)
1433 · National Gallery, London
The wary, straight-on gaze is what a painter sees in a mirror, which is why this is probably van Eyck looking at himself.
★ 7.6
Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
1545 · National Gallery, London
A girl with a reptile's body offers a honeycomb and Time pulls back a curtain. The cold puzzle was probably a gift for the French king.
★ 7.6
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1665)
1665 · Kenwood House, London
The old painter holds his brushes and palette, and behind him two large arcs are drawn on the wall that nobody has explained.
★ 7.7
Bathers at Asnieres
1884 · National Gallery, London
Working men bathe on the bank while factory chimneys smoke across the river, the figures given the weight of a classical frieze.
★ 7.8
Queen Mother Pendant Mask (Iyoba)
Artist unknown
1520 · British Museum, London
The oba wore it at his hip, its crown made of tiny Portuguese heads. A British expedition looted it from Benin in 1897.
★ 7.9
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944 · Tate Modern, London
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
★ 8.0
Supper at Emmaus
1601 · National Gallery, London
One disciple grips his chair to stand and the other throws his arms wide, while a fruit basket teeters off the edge toward us.
★ 8.0
Marilyn Diptych
1962 · Tate Modern, London
Warhol silkscreened a publicity photo fifty times just after Monroe died, bright on one half and smudging away to nothing on the other.
★ 8.0
Sunflowers
1887 · National Gallery, London
Some blooms burst with petals and others have gone to seed, all yellow on yellow, painted to decorate the house where Gauguin was to come.
★ 8.2
The Ardabil Carpet
1540 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Over ten meters long and tied from perhaps twenty-six million knots, woven for a shrine and inscribed with a longing line of Hafiz.
★ 8.2
The Ambassadors
1533 · National Gallery, London
Two men pose with globes, sundials and a lute with a broken string, and a smear on the floor turns into a skull from the side.
★ 8.5
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
Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies
500 · British Museum, London
A court lady steps between a lunging bear and the emperor. What survives is a later copy, crowded with the seals of everyone who owned it.
★ 8.9
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 Hay Wain
1821 · National Gallery, London
England ignored it, but the Paris Salon awarded it a gold medal in 1824 and sent Delacroix back to rework his own canvases.
★ 8.9
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
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1
The Fighting Temeraire
1839 · National Gallery, London
A steam tug hauls a Trafalgar warship off to be broken up. Turner refused to sell the picture and left it to the nation.
★ 9.1
Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles)
440 BC · British Museum, London
The goddesses of the east pediment wear drapery so wet it clings. Elgin took the marbles to London in 1801 and Greece wants them back.
★ 9.4