Night View of a Ginza Store
1884 · Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
Gaslight in the windows of a new brick storefront on an empty Tokyo street. Yasuji died at twenty-five and got there before Hopper.
★ 4.7
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.
Night Scene in the Yoshiwara
1850 · Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
Oi was Hokusai's daughter and studio collaborator, and her handling of lantern light against darkness beats anything else in the ukiyo-e of her time.
★ 5.7
The Moon Through a Crumbling Window
1886 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bodhidharma meditates before a broken lattice with the moon behind it. Yoshitoshi is reckoned the last great master of the woodblock print.
★ 5.9
Takiyasha the Witch and the Skeleton Spectre
1844 · British Museum, London
One vast skeleton pushes through a torn bamboo blind, where the convention had always been crowds of small phantoms. Three sheets wide.
★ 6.5
Three Beauties of the Present Day
1793 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Three famous women of 1790s Edo on mica ground, their faces nearly identical, so you have to read them from the tilt of an eye.
★ 7.8
Otani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei
1794 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Sharaku made about 140 actor prints in ten months and then vanished so completely that people still argue about who he was.
★ 7.9
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ohashi Bridge and Atake
1857 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
Rain falls as fine diagonal scratches over the bridge, a trick Van Gogh admired enough to copy the whole print in oil.
★ 8.2