Leda and the Swan
1882 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
The swan nips her hand and Leda barely reacts. Cézanne cared about the planes of the body, not the story.
★ 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.
Sunday
1890 · Private collection
He stares out the window, she pokes the fire, and the dots are used here for boredom rather than sunlight.
★ 4.8
Grand Canal Venice
1905 · Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Gondolas on water that has shattered into pink, blue and gold. Signac took the divisionist dot to the most painted view in Europe.
★ 4.8
Breakfast
1887 · Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
A family at breakfast, posed so stiffly in the glare that the comfortable room turns faintly airless. Every surface is built from dots.
★ 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
Women at the Well
1891 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Provençal women at a hilltop well above a blue bay, the dots loosening into curves and the science giving way to pleasure.
★ 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
The Port of Saint-Tropez
1902 · National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Signac moved to Saint-Tropez and pulled the rest of the Neo-Impressionists south. Seurat's tight dots have loosened into bigger, brighter tiles.
★ 5.6
Pyramid of Skulls
1901 · Private collection
Four skulls stacked on a tabletop and lit straight on. Cézanne kept coming back to the skull in his last years, never this frontally.
★ 5.9
Man with Crossed Arms
1900 · Guggenheim, New York City
Cézanne cared less who the man was than whether the head would hold together as structure, and the slight asymmetries keep it alive.
★ 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
The Bather
1885 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
He stands in bathing trunks with his hands on his hips, built out of planes and given the same weight as a mountain.
★ 6.3
The Models
1888 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Seurat painted this to prove the dots could handle a nude, and hung his own Grande Jatte on the studio wall behind them.
★ 6.8
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A girl lies face down and frightened while a hooded figure sits behind her. Gauguin said his Tahitian companion was afraid of the dark.
★ 7.1
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
The Potato Eaters
1885 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh made the faces deliberately coarse and the browns deliberately muddy, wanting it clear that these people had dug the meal themselves.
★ 7.2
Almond Blossoms
1890 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
He painted it for his brother's newborn son, named Vincent after him, and cropped the boughs against the sky like a Japanese print.
★ 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
Yellow Christ
1889 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Three Breton women in white caps kneel at a wooden cross in an autumn field, everything flattened into blocks of color like stained glass.
★ 7.2
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