The Bullfight
1864 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Manet cut up the original canvas because he was unhappy with it, and this is one of the surviving pieces.
★ 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.
Artillerymen (Rousseau)
1893 · Guggenheim, New York City
A regiment posed around its cannon like a group photograph that has gone charmingly rigid. Rousseau was a customs officer painting in his spare time.
★ 4.8
Portraits at the Stock Exchange
1879 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Degas turned from dancers to financiers, catching heads bent close over documents in the crush of the Paris exchange.
★ 5.2
Prisoners from the Front
1866 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A Union officer faces three captured Confederates and the two halves of the country study each other. Homer had covered the war as an illustrator.
★ 5.6
The Football Players
1908 · Guggenheim, New York City
Moustached men in striped jerseys leap for a ball among autumn trees, playing the new game of rugby as though it were slow ritual.
★ 5.7
Artillerymen (Kirchner)
1915 · Guggenheim, New York City
Naked conscripts showering in a barracks under a mounted officer, painted after the army service that broke Kirchner down.
★ 5.7
Meagre Company
1637 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Hals left this militia portrait unfinished and another painter finished the right-hand figures, a join you can still see if you look.
★ 6.3
Eclipse of the Sun
1926 · Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington NY
A headless official takes advice from an industrialist, a blinkered donkey listens above, and a dollar sign has blotted out the sun.
★ 6.3
Where Do We Come From What Are We Where Are We Going
1898 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Gauguin thought he was dying and meant this to be his last work, reading right to left from a sleeping infant to an old woman.
★ 8.5