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
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
Raftsmen Playing Cards
1847 · Saint Louis Art Museum (Saint Louis), St. Louis
Rivermen break off work for a card game on a flatboat, arranged with a stillness that lifts the scene toward history painting.
★ 5.4
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
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
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
Ship of Fools
1500 · Louvre, Paris
A monk and a nun bawl a song over a lute while somebody vomits over the side. The boat has no rudder, which is the point.
★ 6.3
Boating
1874 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Manet painted this beside Monet at Argenteuil and let the blue water climb all the way to the top edge of the canvas.
★ 6.3
The Boating Party
1894 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A dark-suited oarsman fills the foreground with his back while the water rises behind with no horizon, a design taken from Japanese prints.
★ 6.7
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
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
1555 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Two pale legs disappear into the sea in the corner while the ploughman keeps ploughing. Auden wrote a poem about exactly that indifference.
★ 7.1
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A man and three boys heel a catboat over into open water, painted in the centennial year and read ever since as the country's optimism.
★ 7.2
The Storm on the Sea of Galilee
1633 · Stolen
Rembrandt's only seascape, and one disciple is being sick over the side. Stolen from the Gardner Museum in 1990 and never recovered.
★ 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
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
1845 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A trapper and his son drift downriver at first light with a chained animal at the prow, the water so still it doubles them.
★ 7.2
Washington Crossing the Delaware
1851 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Almost every detail is wrong, including the flag and the boat, and Leutze painted it in Germany seventy-five years after the fact.
★ 7.2
Seaport with the Embarkation of St. Ursula
1641 · National Gallery, London
Saint Ursula is on the quay somewhere, but the real subject is the light coming up the water between the palaces at dawn.
★ 7.3
Bain a la Grenouillere
1869 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet and Renoir set up side by side at this riverside resort and worked out the quick broken stroke that became Impressionism.
★ 7.3
The Slave Ship
1840 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Turner took the Zong case, where a slaver threw its human cargo overboard for the insurance money, and set it under his most beautiful sunset.
★ 8.2
Impression, Sunrise
1872 · Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris
A critic seized on the word in the title to mock the whole group, and the insult ended up naming the movement.
★ 8.6