The Adoration of the Magi
1813 · Kunsthalle, Hamburg
Overbeck and the Nazarenes lived almost as monks in Rome and painted deliberately like the Italians before Raphael. This is the program.
★ 4.2
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.
I Am Still Learning
1828 · El Prado, Madrid
An old man on two sticks, with Aun aprendo written underneath. Goya drew it in exile and failing health, near the end.
★ 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 Forge
1820 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Three smiths at a forge, one hammer at the top of its swing. Goya gave laboring men the scale usually kept for gods and kings.
★ 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
The Artist Moved to Despair at the Grandeur of Antique Fragments
1779 · Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich
An artist weeps beside a colossal marble foot and a pointing hand, defeated by the size of what antiquity had already managed.
★ 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
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 Madwoman
1823 · Musee des Beaux Arts Lyon, Lyon
One of a series Géricault painted of asylum patients for a doctor studying obsession, and he gave her the seriousness of a commissioned portrait.
★ 6.5
The Desperate Man (Self-portrait)
1845 · Private collection
Courbet at twenty-six, lunging at the viewer with both hands in his hair and his eyes wide. Half self-portrait, half performance.
★ 6.5
Majas on a Balcony
1810 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Two women in white smile out from the railing while two men in dark cloaks stand behind them in the shadow, watching.
★ 6.5
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
Dante and Virgil (The Barque of Dante)
1822 · Louvre, Paris
Delacroix's debut, and the damned are biting the hull. Romanticism announced itself with churning water and bodies learned from Rubens.
★ 6.8
Frederic Chopin
1838 · Louvre, Paris
It was half of a double portrait with George Sand listening at the piano, until somebody cut the canvas in two.
★ 6.8
The Clothed Maja
1800 · El Prado, Madrid
The same woman, same cushions, same pose, now dressed. It is thought to have hung in front of the nude and slid aside.
★ 6.9
Chalk Cliffs on Rugen
1818 · Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur
Three figures at the lip of a white chalk drop, painted around the time of his marriage, the eye pulled out to sea and straight down.
★ 7.1
The Ancient of Days
1794 · Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Blake's Urizen leans out of the sun with a golden compass to measure the void, and Blake was not sure whether to admire him.
★ 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
Charles IV of Spain and His Family
1800 · El Prado, Madrid
Goya put himself at an easel in the shadows, as Velázquez had, and painted the royal family looking vacant, pompous or merely plain.
★ 7.2