Mediterranean Landscape
1952 · Albertina, Vienna
The whole coast reduced to a few flat zones of color and some quick line. Picasso old, settled in the south, and enjoying himself.
★ 4.4
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.
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 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 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
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
Train Smoke
1900 · The Munch Museum, Oslo
One puff of steam drifts across a curving shoreline, the modern world putting a small mark on a landscape that had none.
★ 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
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
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
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
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 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
The Last of the Buffalo
1888 · Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Bierstadt painted this vast hunt as the herds were nearing extinction, with skulls and bones already lying across the foreground.
★ 5.4
Prisoners from the Front
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Union officer faces three captured Confederates and the two halves of the country study each other. Homer had covered the war as an illustrator.
★ 5.6
Cutting the Stone
1494 · El Prado, Madrid
A quack in a funnel hat cuts the stone of madness out of a man's head, and what comes out is a flower.
★ 5.7
The Judgment of Paris
1527 · Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
Paris turns up as a German knight in plate armor and the three goddesses wear nothing but jewels and improbable hats.
★ 5.7
Rest during the Flight into Egypt
1423 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
A gilded low sun hangs over the road and the orange trees are heavy with fruit, an early attempt at real morning light across a landscape.
★ 5.7
Annunciation to the Shepherds
1338 · Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence
A shepherd twists onto his back and throws up a hand against the glare. One of the first real night scenes in Western art.
★ 6.1
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda
1513 · Uffizi Gallery, Florence
The sea-monster is part fish and part beast and thoroughly invented, and some of the onlookers on the shore have started playing music.
★ 6.1
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
Morning in the Village After Snowstorm
1912 · Guggenheim, New York City
Peasants and houses rendered as polished metal cylinders. Malevich was three years away from painting a black square and stopping.
★ 6.1
Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters
1608 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Hundreds of tiny figures skating, sledging and falling over on one frozen river. Avercamp was deaf and mute and known as the mute of Kampen.
★ 6.1
Mountains at Saint-Remy
1889 · Guggenheim, New York City
The hills buckle and heave in the same thick strokes he gave his skies, so that the rock ends up moving too.
★ 6.3
Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino
1839 · Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Roman Forum was a cattle pasture when Turner painted it, and he let the columns of empire evaporate into gold air.
★ 6.3
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
Europe After the Rain II
1942 · Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
Ernst made the eaten-away textures by pressing and lifting paint, working on it while fleeing occupied Europe for America.
★ 6.5
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
Haymaking
1566 · Prague Castle, Prague
June or July from the same series of months, with rakes over shoulders and a girl carrying baskets of cherries toward us.
★ 6.7
The Israelites Gathering Manna
1639 · Louvre, Paris
Poussin laid the crowd out like a relief so each gesture reads separately, one woman so hungry she nurses her own mother.
★ 6.7
Twilight in the Wildnerness
1860 · Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
Not a single figure anywhere in it. Church painted this burning sky in 1860, and people have read the Civil War into it since.
★ 6.8
The Colossus
1812 · El Prado, Madrid
A giant stands with his head in the clouds while everything below scatters. Whether Goya actually painted it is now disputed.
★ 6.8
Kindred Spirits
1838 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Thomas Cole and the poet Bryant stand on a ledge in the Catskills. Durand painted it as a memorial after Cole died young.
★ 6.8
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
1863 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bierstadt went west with a survey expedition and came home with peaks lit like an opera set, which is what the country wanted.
★ 6.8
The Human Condition
1933 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A canvas on an easel shows exactly the landscape it is standing in front of, and therefore hides it completely.
★ 6.9
The Blind Leading the Blind
1568 · Museo di Capodimonte, Naples
Six blind men go down one after another, and Bruegel painted their clouded eyes accurately enough for doctors to diagnose the conditions.
★ 7.0
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
1555 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Two pale legs disappear into the sea in the corner while the ploughman keeps ploughing. Auden wrote a poem about exactly that indifference.
★ 7.1
Flight into Egypt (A. Carracci)
1604 · Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome
The holy family is tiny and the landscape does everything, which is the arrangement Poussin and Claude would build whole careers on.
★ 7.1
The Oxbow
1836 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Wilderness under storm on the left, farmland in sunshine on the right, and Cole himself down in the middle, tiny, looking up from his easel.
★ 7.2
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (Bosch)
1505 · Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon
Flying fish, reading toads and a burning village, and in the middle of it Anthony kneels and blesses a small Christ, entirely undistracted.
★ 7.2
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills
1935 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.
★ 7.2
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
Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (Inwangjesaekdo)
1751 · National Museum of Korea, Seoul
Instead of copying idealized Chinese scenery, Jeong Seon walked out and painted a real hill above Seoul with the rain just lifting off it.
★ 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
Wheat Field with Cypresses
1889 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Van Gogh loved the cypress and compared it to an Egyptian obelisk, then set one flaming up the right side of a Provençal field.
★ 7.5
The Tower of Babel
1563 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
The tower is already leaning as it goes up, and Bruegel drew the cranes and ramps in enough detail that you could nearly build it.
★ 7.5
The Rongxi Studio
1372 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
An empty pavilion, a few dry trees, no people at all. Ni Zan gave away his estate and spent his last years on a houseboat.
★ 7.5
On a Mountain Path in Spring
1200 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
They called him One-Corner Ma. A scholar and a willow occupy one corner and the rest of the silk is left as air.
★ 7.6
Cypress Trees
1590 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
One ancient cypress sprawls across the screen against solid gold, painted by the man who decorated the castles of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi.
★ 8.0
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
1350 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
A collector loved the scroll so much he tried to have it burned with him at death. It was pulled from the fire in two pieces.
★ 8.0
The Battle of Alexander at Issus
1529 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Tens of thousands of tiny soldiers fight under a sky that curves like the whole earth. Painted while the Ottomans were pressing on Vienna.
★ 8.1
Haboku (Splashed-Ink) Landscape
1495 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
A mountain, a wineshop flag and a boatman conjured from a few wet blots. Sesshu made it as a parting gift for a departing pupil.
★ 8.2
Mont Sainte-Victoire
1895 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Cézanne painted his local mountain over and over, less to record it than to rebuild it out of flat patches of green, ochre and blue.
★ 8.2
The Gleaners
1857 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three women bend for the stalks left after harvest while a full farm sits small in the distance, which unsettled the people buying paintings.
★ 8.2
The Embarkation for Cythera
1717 · Louvre, Paris
Couples linger on the shore of Venus's island at dusk, unwilling to board. Watteau gave it to the Academy, which invented a genre to fit it.
★ 8.3
The Joy of Life
1906 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Nudes lounge and pipe and dance in a ring in a glade of colors nothing in nature has, a Fauve idyll from 1906.
★ 8.3
A Burial at Ornans
1850 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Courbet gave an ordinary village funeral the scale reserved for kings and saints, and the critics were furious about it.
★ 8.3