Las Meninas
1656 · El Prado, Madrid
The Infanta and her maids fill the room, but Velázquez has put himself at his easel and the king and queen in a mirror behind.
★ 9.8
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.
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 Scream
1893 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
Munch said an infinite scream was passing through nature, and put two figures on the bridge behind who walk on without noticing.
★ 9.2
The Night Watch
1642 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A militia company surges out of the shadow with a dog barking and a girl glowing among the men. Varnish, not night, made it dark.
★ 9.2
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
1886 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Seurat spent two years building this riverbank out of tiny dots of unmixed color, applying optical theory to a crowd standing oddly still.
★ 9.2
A Bar at the Folies-Bergere
1882 · Courtauld Gallery, London
Manet worked from a real barmaid named Suzon and put her reflection in the wrong place, which people have been arguing about ever since.
★ 9.1
The Kiss (Klimt)
1908 · Galerie Belvedere, Vienna
Two lovers kneel wrapped in a single gold robe, rectangles patterning his side of it and circles hers, on a meadow of flowers.
★ 8.9
Luncheon on the Grass
1863 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A naked woman picnics with two clothed men and looks calmly out at us. The Salon refused it, so it hung with the rejects.
★ 8.9
Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies
500 · British Museum, London
A court lady steps between a lunging bear and the emperor. What survives is a later copy, crowded with the seals of everyone who owned it.
★ 8.9
Luncheon of the Boating Party
1881 · Phillips Collection, Washington, District of Columbia
Fourteen of Renoir's friends linger over the wreckage of lunch above the Seine, his future wife among them, cooing at a dog on the table.
★ 8.8
Campbell's Soup Cans
1962 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Thirty-two canvases, one for every variety Campbell's then sold, hung in a row like stock on a supermarket shelf.
★ 8.8
The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
1586 · Church of Santo Tome, Toledo, Ohio
Two saints lower a nobleman into his grave while his soul slips through a tear in the sky. The mourners are El Greco's own neighbors.
★ 8.7
The Card Players
1895 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Cézanne used local farmhands as models and painted several versions, stripping the old tavern subject down until only two men and a bottle remain.
★ 8.7
The Dance (Matisse)
1909 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five figures wheel in a ring against blue and green, reduced to three colors and the strain of holding hands at speed.
★ 8.5
The Sleeping Gypsy
1897 · Private collection
A lion sniffs at a sleeper in the desert without waking her. Rousseau was a customs officer who never took a lesson.
★ 8.5
The Milkmaid (Vermeer)
1660 · Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
A kitchen maid pours a thin stream of milk in ordinary daylight, given the weight and stillness usually reserved for saints.
★ 8.5
Bal du Moulin de la Galette
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Sunlight comes through the trees in patches over a Montmartre dance floor, a big ambitious canvas given over entirely to a Sunday afternoon.
★ 8.5
A Burial at Ornans
1850 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Courbet gave an ordinary village funeral the scale reserved for kings and saints, and the critics were furious about it.
★ 8.3
The Joy of Life
1906 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Nudes lounge and pipe and dance in a ring in a glade of colors nothing in nature has, a Fauve idyll from 1906.
★ 8.3
The Art of Painting (The Artist's Studio)
1668 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Vermeer never sold this one. The model poses as Clio, muse of history, with a great map of the Netherlands filling the wall behind.
★ 8.3