The Guitarist
1755 · Musee d'Arts Nantes, Nantes
A young man glances up from his guitar mid-song. Greuze usually painted tearful moral lessons, and here he simply does not.
★ 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.
St. John the Evangelist
1469 · The Frick Collection, New York City
John stands lost in his book, wrapped in red cloth massed like masonry. One wing of an altarpiece now scattered across five cities.
★ 4.4
Portrait of Dante
1495 · Private collection
Dante had been dead nearly two centuries, so this is not a likeness but a verdict, struck in profile like a coin.
★ 4.8
Portrait of a Man, Aged 93
1521 · Albertina, Vienna
An inscription gives his age as ninety-three. Dürer drew him in Antwerp and used the head soon after for a Saint Jerome.
★ 4.8
Christ Blessing (The Savior of the World)
1600 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Two fingers raised in a gesture reaching back to Byzantium, one hand on a crystal orb, the face long and sorrowful and unmistakably his.
★ 5.2
George Washington at Princeton
1779 · Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton
Washington leans on a cannon with captured flags at his feet. Peale knew him and served in the war, so this is the man.
★ 5.2
Portrait of Angel Fernandez de Soto
1903 · Private collection
They shared a Barcelona studio, and Soto was known as a hard drinker, but Picasso painted him sober and sad in blue.
★ 5.2
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
Clown with Lute
1623 · Louvre, Paris
Caught mid-strum with his cap askew and his mouth open, painted so fast the brushstrokes still seem to be moving.
★ 5.4
Portrait of Jean Cocteau
1917 · Private collection
Cocteau sits stiffly upright with his neck drawn long, one of the sharpest personalities in Paris turned into an elegant mask.
★ 5.4
Portrait of a Man (Memling)
1470 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Memling put his sitters in front of open countryside instead of a dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and came back changed.
★ 5.9
Mummy Portrait of a Boy (Eutyches)
Artist unknown
130 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Painted in hot colored beeswax and bound over the face of a mummy. The strokes are still visible and the eyes startlingly present.
★ 6.1
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1629)
1629 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt was barely in his twenties and using his own face as a laboratory for light. Dozens more would follow over forty years.
★ 6.1
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
Portrait of a Young Man
1517 · National Gallery, London
He swivels over his shoulder to look at you, holding a block that nobody can identify, and his name has been lost entirely.
★ 6.1
Triple Portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu
1642 · National Gallery, London
Richelieu appears three times on one canvas so that a sculptor in Rome could carve a bust without ever meeting him.
★ 6.3
The Beaneater
1580 · Galleria Colonna, Rome
A peasant looks up from his beans as though caught, spoon halfway to his mouth. Painted decades before Caravaggio's followers made a career of this.
★ 6.3
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell
1533 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Cold competence and nothing else. Holbein painted him as a near-pendant to Thomas More, whom Cromwell helped send to the scaffold.
★ 6.5
Boy with a Basket of Fruit
1593 · Galleria Borghese, Rome
Fruit already spotting toward rot, painted with the same attention as the boy holding it. An early statement of what Caravaggio intended.
★ 6.6
Portrait of Agnolo Doni
1506 · Palazzo Pitti, Florence
Raphael had just arrived in Florence and studied the Mona Lisa hard, then did the same pose in clear light instead of smoke.
★ 6.7