Along the River During the Qingming Festival
1120 · Palace Museum, Beijing
More than eight hundred figures crowd five meters of scroll, and Chinese painters have been copying and forging it for nine hundred years.
★ 9.2
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.
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
The City
1919 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Billboards, scaffolding and stairways in flat primary color, with people reduced to bright interchangeable parts. Léger loved machines and made no secret of it.
★ 7.1
The Houses of Parliament, Sunset
1903 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Monet painted Westminster across the river again and again because what he actually wanted was the fog, not the building.
★ 6.6
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
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
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