Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook
1895 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman sits on the bank and puts her bare feet in the water, the whole stream broken into flickering touches of color.
★ 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.
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
Races at Longchamp
1867 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The horses come straight at you instead of across the frame, which nobody painting racehorses had bothered to try.
★ 5.7
On the Threshold of Liberty
1937 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A cannon points across a room whose walls are panelled with samples of the world: sky, wood grain, fire, bells, a woman's torso.
★ 5.9
Woman Combing Her Hair
1920 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Goyo oversaw every stage of his prints himself and finished only a handful before dying young. This is the one everyone knows.
★ 6.5
The Cliff Walk at Pourville
1882 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Two women with parasols on a clifftop in Normandy, the grass and their dresses going the same direction as the wind.
★ 6.6
Excavation
1950 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Hooks and curves fill the canvas edge to edge with no center to rest on, and teeth and jaws keep surfacing out of the mass.
★ 7.2
Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
1881 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A basket of colored wool sits in the front, the Seine glitters behind, and the whole thing is about how good an afternoon can be.
★ 7.2
Time Transfixed
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A small steam locomotive comes out of a fireplace under the mantel clock, and the room around it is otherwise entirely ordinary.
★ 7.2
The Child's Bath
1893 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman washes a child's feet in a basin, seen from above, the wallpaper and rug pushing everything flat as a Japanese print.
★ 7.2
White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
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
Paris Street; Rainy Day
1877 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Umbrellas cross the wet cobbles of Haussmann's new boulevards, composed with a photographic exactness his Impressionist friends had no use for.
★ 7.6
The Old Guitarist
1904 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The guitar is the only warm note in the picture. Picasso painted it in his Blue Period, poor himself and living on very little.
★ 7.8
American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 8.3
Nighthawks
1942 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Four people sit under fluorescent light behind a curved sheet of glass, and Hopper gave the diner no door in or out.
★ 8.9
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
1886 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Seurat spent two years building this riverbank out of tiny dots of unmixed color, applying optical theory to a crowd standing oddly still.
★ 9.2