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 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.
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
Violin and Candlestick
1910 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
Brown and grey planes rebuild a violin into a lattice, painted while Braque and Picasso were working almost as one person.
★ 6.1
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
The Cotton Pickers
1876 · LACMA, Los Angeles
Two young Black women in a cotton field a decade after emancipation, given a gravity American painting had not extended to field labor.
★ 6.5
The Flower Carrier
1935 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
An enormous basket of flowers forces the man down onto his hands and knees, and a woman steadies the load from behind.
★ 6.9
Irises
1889 · Getty Museum, Los Angeles
One white iris stands alone among a whole bed of blue-violet ones, the blades twisting and crowding right up to the edge of the canvas.
★ 7.4
Woman with a Hat
1905 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
A critic looked at this and called Matisse and his friends fauves, wild beasts, which is how the movement got its name.
★ 7.8
The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
1929 · LACMA, Los Angeles
The words under the pipe are correct, since a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, which is the whole and entire joke.
★ 7.9