Great Fish Market
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Hundreds of minutely painted fish, baskets and hagglers. They called him Velvet Bruegel for exactly this kind of finish.
★ 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.
The Sinking of the Titanic
1913 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), Saint Louis
Beckmann painted the disaster a year after it happened, borrowing Géricault's raft, and it now reads as a rehearsal for the war.
★ 4.8
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
Raftsmen Playing Cards
1847 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), St. Louis
Rivermen break off work for a card game on a flatboat, arranged with a stillness that lifts the scene toward history painting.
★ 5.4
A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon
1902 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Notre-Dame across the Seine in a few dark summary strokes, painted before Matisse's color went off and Fauvism happened.
★ 5.7
The Shipwreck
1772 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Masts splintering, survivors in the surf, and the whole thing arranged for people who wanted to feel terror from a safe distance.
★ 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
Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening
1826 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A packet boat comes in at evening and Turner dissolves the city, the passengers and the river into a single sheet of gold.
★ 6.3
Boating
1874 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Manet painted this beside Monet at Argenteuil and let the blue water climb all the way to the top edge of the canvas.
★ 6.3
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
Rooms by the Sea
1951 · Private collection
A door opens straight onto the water with no shore in between, and the only other thing in the picture is sunlight on a wall.
★ 6.6
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 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
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
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
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A man and three boys heel a catboat over into open water, painted in the centennial year and read ever since as the country's optimism.
★ 7.2
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
Starry Night Over the Rhone
1888 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Gaslights along the Arles quay drop long quivering reflections into the water, the Great Bear overhead, a couple walking arm in arm below.
★ 7.2
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
1633 · Stolen
Rembrandt's only seascape, and one disciple is being sick over the side. Stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990 and never recovered.
★ 7.2
Watson and the Shark
1778 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
Brook Watson really did lose a leg to a shark in Havana harbor, and Copley put a Black sailor at the top of the rescue.
★ 7.2