View of Delft
1660 · Mauritshuis, The Hague
Vermeer painted his own city from across the harbor, almost his only townscape. Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world.
★ 9.3
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.
Nighthawks
1942 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Four people sit under fluorescent light behind a curved sheet of glass, and Hopper gave the diner no door in or out.
★ 8.9
View of Toledo
1610 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
El Greco moved the cathedral tower off its real site for the sake of the composition and lit the whole city with a green storm.
★ 8.4
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
1914 · Private collection
A girl rolls a hoop down an arcaded street toward a shadow coming around the corner, in light that belongs to no hour.
★ 8.3
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
Cafe Terrace at Night
1888 · Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo
Van Gogh set up outside and painted the terrace on the spot after dark, pleased that he had used no black at all.
★ 7.5
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
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
1648 · National Gallery, London
The sun sits low over a glassy harbor and floods everything. Turner admired it so much he insisted his own work hang beside it.
★ 7.3
I and the Village
1911 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A green-faced peasant and a cow look at each other, and the houses behind them are upside down. Chagall grew up in Vitebsk.
★ 7.2
Golconde
1953 · The Menil Collection, Houston
Men in bowler hats hang in the sky over the rooftops at even intervals, neither falling nor floating, which is somehow the unsettling part.
★ 7.2
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 Boulevard Montmartre at Night
1897 · National Gallery, London
Pissarro painted these boulevards from a hotel window over and over, but only once after dark, the gaslight smeared across wet pavement.
★ 6.9
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
San Giorgio Maggiore at Dusk
1912 · National Museum Cardiff, Cardiff
Monet went to Venice late and found a city already doing what he had spent fifty years trying to paint.
★ 6.3
New York Street with Moon
1925 · Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Her male colleagues doubted a woman could paint the city, so O'Keeffe painted the city, with a moon caught between two dark buildings.
★ 6.3
Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino
1839 · Getty Museum, Los Angeles
The Roman Forum was a cattle pasture when Turner painted it, and he let the columns of empire evaporate into gold air.
★ 6.3
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
Paris Through the Window
1913 · Guggenheim, New York City
A train crosses the sky upside down, a man drifts past on a parachute, and the cat on the sill has a human face.
★ 6.1
A Glimpse of Notre Dame in the Late Afternoon
1902 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Notre-Dame across the Seine in a few dark summary strokes, painted before Matisse's color went off and Fauvism happened.
★ 5.7
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