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
The Gleaners
1857 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three women bend for the stalks left after harvest while a full farm sits small in the distance, which unsettled the people buying paintings.
★ 8.2
The Bathers
1906 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Cézanne worked on it for years and died before he finished, bending the trees inward so they rhyme with the bodies underneath.
★ 8.2
Bathers at Asnieres
1884 · National Gallery, London
Working men bathe on the bank while factory chimneys smoke across the river, the figures given the weight of a classical frieze.
★ 7.8
The Old Guitarist
1904 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
The guitar is the only warm note in the picture. Picasso painted it in his Blue Period, poor himself and living on very little.
★ 7.8
Three Musicians
1921 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A harlequin, a Pierrot and a monk in flat interlocking shapes that look cut from paper. Synthetic Cubism at its grandest and most deadpan.
★ 7.8
The Harvesters
1565 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
One man lies flat on his back with his mouth open while the others cut wheat. Late summer, from the same series of months.
★ 7.7
Paris Street; Rainy Day
1877 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Umbrellas cross the wet cobbles of Haussmann's new boulevards, composed with a photographic exactness his Impressionist friends had no use for.
★ 7.6
The Snake Charmer
1907 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A black silhouette plays a flute and the snakes come out of the leaves toward the music, in moonlight Rousseau invented entirely.
★ 7.6
The Swing
1767 · Wallace Collection, London
An old man works the ropes without knowing the young man in the bushes is looking straight up her skirts. A slipper flies off.
★ 7.6
Et in Arcadia Ego (Poussin)
1638 · Louvre, Paris
Shepherds trace the carved words on a tomb, Even in Arcadia I am here, and Poussin lets death speak without raising its voice.
★ 7.5
Family of Saltimbanques
1905 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
Circus people stand together in an empty landscape without looking at each other. The Rose Period at its largest and most wistful.
★ 7.5
The Peasant Wedding
1568 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Two men carry the porridge in on an unhinged door, the bagpiper eyes it hungrily, and the bride sits idle under her paper crown.
★ 7.5
Whaam!
1963 · Tate Modern, London
Lichtenstein blew a single war-comic panel up to mural scale across two canvases, Ben-Day dots, caption box and all.
★ 7.5
The Gross Clinic
1875 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
The surgeon turns from the open incision to lecture, scalpel still bloody, while a woman at the side covers her eyes. Philadelphia was appalled.
★ 7.5
The Night Cafe
1888 · Yale Art Gallery, New Haven
Van Gogh wanted a room where a man could ruin himself or go mad, and got it with red walls and a green ceiling.
★ 7.5
Woman Holding a Balance
1665 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The scales in her hand are empty and perfectly level, and the painting on the wall behind her is a Last Judgment.
★ 7.4
Bain a la Grenouillere
1869 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Monet and Renoir set up side by side at this riverside resort and worked out the quick broken stroke that became Impressionism.
★ 7.3
L'Absinthe
1876 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Two people sit shoulder to shoulder at a cafe table staring at nothing, pushed off to one side behind a run of empty tables.
★ 7.3
Young Woman with a Water Jug
1662 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
One hand on the pitcher, one on the window latch, and morning light coming through onto a white cap. Nothing happens, perfectly.
★ 7.2
Fur Traders Descending the Missouri
1845 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
A trapper and his son drift downriver at first light with a chained animal at the prow, the water so still it doubles them.
★ 7.2
The Child's Bath
1893 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A woman washes a child's feet in a basin, seen from above, the wallpaper and rug pushing everything flat as a Japanese print.
★ 7.2
The Night
1919 · Kunstsammlung, Dusseldorf
A family is tortured in a room too small for it, painted in Germany in 1919 with the war and the revolution just finished.
★ 7.2
The Problem We All Live With
1964 · Private collection
The girl is Ruby Bridges, walking into a New Orleans school in 1960 between four marshals whose faces Rockwell cut off at the shoulders.
★ 7.2
The Hunt in the Forest
1470 · Ashmolean, Oxford, England
Red-clad hunters and dogs funnel into a black wood toward a single vanishing point. One of the earliest night scenes on an Italian panel.
★ 7.2
Two Sisters (On the Terrace)
1881 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A basket of colored wool sits in the front, the Seine glitters behind, and the whole thing is about how good an afternoon can be.
★ 7.2
The Three Dancers
1925 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso's classical calm breaks here into something jagged and violent, the limbs flung out almost crucified, set off by the death of an old friend.
★ 7.2
Drowning Girl
1963 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
She would rather sink than call Brad. Lichtenstein took one panel of a romance comic and blew it up to the size of a serious painting.
★ 7.2
Breezing Up (A Fair Wind)
1876 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A man and three boys heel a catboat over into open water, painted in the centennial year and read ever since as the country's optimism.
★ 7.2
The Potato Eaters
1885 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Van Gogh made the faces deliberately coarse and the browns deliberately muddy, wanting it clear that these people had dug the meal themselves.
★ 7.2
Officer and a Laughing Girl
1660 · The Frick Collection, New York City
The officer's hat and back loom enormous in the foreground while the girl sits small and bright beyond, which is exactly how the eye works.
★ 7.1
Gare Saint Lazare
1877 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Monet set his easel up inside the station and painted the steam until the roof and the city beyond it had dissolved into it.
★ 7.1
The Dance of Life
1900 · National Gallery (Oslo), Oslo
A woman in white waits, a woman in red dances, a woman in black stands apart. Three ages of love on a midsummer shore.
★ 7.1
Old Woman Frying Eggs
1618 · National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh
Eggs are visibly cooking in the pan as you watch. Velázquez painted this in Seville when he was barely nineteen years old.
★ 6.9
The Flower Carrier
1935 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
An enormous basket of flowers forces the man down onto his hands and knees, and a woman steadies the load from behind.
★ 6.9
Philosopher in Meditation
1632 · Louvre, Paris
Daylight from a window, firelight from a hearth, and a great spiral staircase winding up into the dark between them.
★ 6.9
Snap the Whip
1872 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Barefoot boys crack the whip outside a red schoolhouse and the last one is already stumbling. Painted just after the Civil War.
★ 6.9
The Cardsharps
1594 · Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth
One boy has a card hidden behind his back and his older partner signals the count on his fingers. It got Caravaggio his first patron.
★ 6.8
The Balcony
1868 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Three people at a green railing all looking different ways and none at each other. Berthe Morisot is the one seated and dreaming.
★ 6.8
Automat
1927 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
One cup of coffee, one glove still on, and a window behind her that reflects nothing but two rows of ceiling lights.
★ 6.8
Room in New York
1932 · Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln
He reads the paper, she touches one key of the piano, and we are watching from the street through their window.
★ 6.8