Starry Night
1889 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Van Gogh painted the churning sky and its eleven stars from a window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, partly from memory.
★ 9.6
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.
Water Lilies (Nympheas Cycle)
1926 · Musee de l'Orangerie, Paris
Monet painted these eight murals of his pond for two oval rooms in Paris while his eyesight failed. They opened months after he died.
★ 9.5
Hunters in the Snow
1565 · Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Three hunters come home over the hill with one thin catch while villagers skate below. Bruegel painted it for a series on the months.
★ 9.4
A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains
1113 · Palace Museum, Beijing
Twelve meters of blue and green mountains, ground from azurite and malachite by a court prodigy said to have died before he was twenty.
★ 9.3
Pine Trees (Shorin-zu byobu)
1595 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
A few pines loom and dissolve on two screens where the bare paper does the work of mist. Japan's finest ink painting, by most accounts.
★ 9.1
The Hay Wain
1821 · National Gallery, London
England ignored it, but the Paris Salon awarded it a gold medal in 1824 and sent Delacroix back to rework his own canvases.
★ 8.9
Travelers Among Mountains and Streams
1000 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
A wall of rock fills two-thirds of the picture and shrinks the mule train below to nothing. Fan Kuan hid his signature in the leaves.
★ 8.7
The Persistence of Memory
1931 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Dalí said the soft watches came to him from a camembert melting in the sun, and he painted them with hallucinatory precision.
★ 8.7
The Tempest
1508 · Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice
A soldier, a nursing woman, and lightning over the town beyond. Nobody has explained what connects them, and Giorgione died young leaving few certain works.
★ 8.6
Early Spring
1072 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
Guo Xi was court painter to the Song emperor and worked from a theory of three distances, shifting the eye between peak, valley and horizon.
★ 8.3
The Embarkation for Cythera
1717 · Louvre, Paris
Couples linger on the shore of Venus's island at dusk, unwilling to board. Watteau gave it to the Academy, which invented a genre to fit it.
★ 8.3
Haboku (Splashed-Ink) Landscape
1495 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
A mountain, a wineshop flag and a boatman conjured from a few wet blots. Sesshu made it as a parting gift for a departing pupil.
★ 8.2
Mont Sainte-Victoire
1895 · The Barnes Foundation (Philadelphia), Philadelphia
Cézanne painted his local mountain over and over, less to record it than to rebuild it out of flat patches of green, ochre and blue.
★ 8.2
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains
1350 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
A collector loved the scroll so much he tried to have it burned with him at death. It was pulled from the fire in two pieces.
★ 8.0
Wheatfield with Crows
1890 · Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Three paths run into the wheat and none of them go anywhere. Painted at Auvers in his last weeks, and read too neatly ever since.
★ 7.7
On a Mountain Path in Spring
1200 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
They called him One-Corner Ma. A scholar and a willow occupy one corner and the rest of the silk is left as air.
★ 7.6
The Rongxi Studio
1372 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
An empty pavilion, a few dry trees, no people at all. Ni Zan gave away his estate and spent his last years on a houseboat.
★ 7.5
Wheat Field with Cypresses
1889 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Van Gogh loved the cypress and compared it to an Egyptian obelisk, then set one flaming up the right side of a Provençal field.
★ 7.5
Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies
1899 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Monet dug the pond himself at Giverny, built the Japanese bridge over it, and then painted the place for the rest of his life.
★ 7.4
Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang (Inwangjesaekdo)
1751 · National Museum of Korea, Seoul
Instead of copying idealized Chinese scenery, Jeong Seon walked out and painted a real hill above Seoul with the rain just lifting off it.
★ 7.3
The Magpie
1869 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
A single magpie on a gate in deep snow, the shadows tinged blue and violet rather than grey. The Salon turned it down.
★ 7.3
Wheatstacks (End of Summer)
1891 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Monet painted the same stacks near his house at every hour and season, so that what changes from canvas to canvas is only the light.
★ 7.3
Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills
1935 · Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn), Brooklyn
O'Keeffe collected sun-bleached bones off the desert and hung this one in the sky over the hills, with a single white hollyhock beside it.
★ 7.2
The Oxbow
1836 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Wilderness under storm on the left, farmland in sunshine on the right, and Cole himself down in the middle, tiny, looking up from his easel.
★ 7.2
Starry Night Over the Rhone
1888 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Gaslights along the Arles quay drop long quivering reflections into the water, the Great Bear overhead, a couple walking arm in arm below.
★ 7.2
Luxe, Calme et Volupte
1904 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
The title comes from Baudelaire and the technique from Seurat, but the color is already heading somewhere neither of them went.
★ 7.1
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
1555 · Musees Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels
Two pale legs disappear into the sea in the corner while the ploughman keeps ploughing. Auden wrote a poem about exactly that indifference.
★ 7.1
The Human Condition
1933 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A canvas on an easel shows exactly the landscape it is standing in front of, and therefore hides it completely.
★ 6.9
Kindred Spirits
1838 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Thomas Cole and the poet Bryant stand on a ledge in the Catskills. Durand painted it as a memorial after Cole died young.
★ 6.8
The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
1863 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Bierstadt went west with a survey expedition and came home with peaks lit like an opera set, which is what the country wanted.
★ 6.8
Twilight in the Wildnerness
1860 · Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
Not a single figure anywhere in it. Church painted this burning sky in 1860, and people have read the Civil War into it since.
★ 6.8
The Tilled Field
1924 · Guggenheim, New York City
An eye and an ear sprout from a tree and a lizard wears a cap. Miró's Catalan farm has come apart into Surrealism.
★ 6.8
Haymaking
1566 · Prague Castle, Prague
June or July from the same series of months, with rakes over shoulders and a girl carrying baskets of cherries toward us.
★ 6.7
White Frost
1873 · Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Critics at the first Impressionist show in 1874 said it looked like palette scrapings. The furrows are streaked with blue, violet and gold.
★ 6.6
Yellow Cow
1911 · Guggenheim, New York City
Marc used yellow for whatever was gentle and joyful, and this cow is kicking its legs out across the hills for the pleasure of it.
★ 6.5
View of Mount Fuji from Satta Point
1859 · Location unknown
The eye sweeps from pines on the cliff across Suruga Bay to Fuji, a whole vista folded into a few flat planes of color.
★ 6.5
Europe After the Rain II
1942 · Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
Ernst made the eaten-away textures by pressing and lifting paint, working on it while fleeing occupied Europe for America.
★ 6.5
We are Making a New World
1918 · Imperial War Museum, London
Splintered stumps and shell craters under a cold sun, and Nash gave it that title on purpose, as an official British war artist.
★ 6.5
Mountains at Saint-Remy
1889 · Guggenheim, New York City
The hills buckle and heave in the same thick strokes he gave his skies, so that the rock ends up moving too.
★ 6.3