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
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.
Bouquet
1603 · Alte Pinakothek, Munich
None of these flowers bloom in the same season. Bruegel assembled the bouquet from studies made across the whole year, and let petals droop.
★ 6.1
Flowers (Warhol)
1964 · Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh
Four flat hibiscus blossoms on green, silkscreened from an ordinary photograph and reproduced in any color, over and over, on demand.
★ 6.1
Bullfinch on Weeping Cherry
1834 · Location unknown
One plump bullfinch on a cherry sprig, a poem written beside it. The other Hokusai, quiet and exact, nothing like the wave.
★ 6.5
Nude with Calla Lilies
1944 · Location unknown
An armful of calla lilies is nearly bigger than the woman kneeling behind it. Rivera came back to the flower and its sellers constantly.
★ 6.6
The Flower Carrier
1935 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
An enormous basket of flowers forces the man down onto his hands and knees, and a woman steadies the load from behind.
★ 6.9
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
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
Sunflowers
1887 · National Gallery, London
Some blooms burst with petals and others have gone to seed, all yellow on yellow, painted to decorate the house where Gauguin was to come.
★ 8.2
The Ardabil Carpet
1540 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Over ten meters long and tied from perhaps twenty-six million knots, woven for a shrine and inscribed with a longing line of Hafiz.
★ 8.2
Bodhisattva Padmapani
Artist unknown
478 · Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra
The bodhisattva lowers his eyes with a blue lotus in his hand, painted into living rock at Ajanta and lost to the jungle for centuries.
★ 8.4
Red and White Plum Blossoms
1715 · MOA Museum of Art, Atami
A stylized river runs down the gold between two plum trees, one young and white, the other old and red, leaning toward each other.
★ 8.8
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5