Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles)
440 BC · British Museum, London
The goddesses of the east pediment wear drapery so wet it clings. Elgin took the marbles to London in 1801 and Greece wants them back.
★ 9.4
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.
The Fighting Temeraire
1839 · National Gallery, London
A steam tug hauls a Trafalgar warship off to be broken up. Turner refused to sell the picture and left it to the nation.
★ 9.1
Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife
1434 · National Gallery, London
A couple joins hands in a Bruges bedroom, and the mirror behind them catches two visitors at the door. Van Eyck signed the wall above it.
★ 9.1
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 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
Bacchus and Ariadne
1523 · National Gallery, London
Bacchus leaps from his chariot toward Ariadne while Theseus's ship slips off the horizon, painted for a duke's private chamber in Ferrara.
★ 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
The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal
Artist unknown
645 BC · British Museum, London
The king kills lions released into an arena to prove he can protect his people, and the dying animals are carved with startling tenderness.
★ 8.7
The Ambassadors
1533 · National Gallery, London
Two men pose with globes, sundials and a lute with a broken string, and a smear on the floor turns into a skull from the side.
★ 8.5
The Ardabil Carpet
1540 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Over ten meters long and tied from perhaps twenty-six million knots, woven for a shrine and inscribed with a longing line of Hafiz.
★ 8.2
Sunflowers
1887 · National Gallery, London
Some blooms burst with petals and others have gone to seed, all yellow on yellow, painted to decorate the house where Gauguin was to come.
★ 8.2
Marilyn Diptych
1962 · Tate Modern, London
Warhol silkscreened a publicity photo fifty times just after Monroe died, bright on one half and smudging away to nothing on the other.
★ 8.0
Supper at Emmaus
1601 · National Gallery, London
One disciple grips his chair to stand and the other throws his arms wide, while a fruit basket teeters off the edge toward us.
★ 8.0
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
1944 · Tate Modern, London
Three flayed creatures crane and scream on orange grounds. Shown as the war ended in 1945, they made Bacon's reputation overnight.
★ 8.0
Queen Mother Pendant Mask (Iyoba)
Artist unknown
1520 · British Museum, London
The oba wore it at his hip, its crown made of tiny Portuguese heads. A British expedition looted it from Benin in 1897.
★ 7.9
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
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1665)
1665 · Kenwood House, London
The old painter holds his brushes and palette, and behind him two large arcs are drawn on the wall that nobody has explained.
★ 7.7
Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time
1545 · National Gallery, London
A girl with a reptile's body offers a honeycomb and Time pulls back a curtain. The cold puzzle was probably a gift for the French king.
★ 7.6
Portrait of a Man in a Red Turban (Self portrait?)
1433 · National Gallery, London
The wary, straight-on gaze is what a painter sees in a mirror, which is why this is probably van Eyck looking at himself.
★ 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
The Weeping Woman
1937 · Tate Modern, London
Picasso pulled her out of the screaming mother in Guernica and gave her the face of Dora Maar, his lover and a photographer.
★ 7.5
Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
1942 · Tate Modern, London
Black lines, white ground, three primary colors and nothing else. Mondrian spent decades taking painting down to this and called it Neo-Plasticism.
★ 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
Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan
1504 · National Gallery, London
Bellini painted the brocade thread by thread and turned the official portrait from a profile on a coin into a man met face to face.
★ 7.4
Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam
1523 · National Gallery, London
Erasmus rests his hands on a book whose edge is inscribed The Labors of Hercules, his own joke about how much scholarship costs.
★ 7.4
Laughing Cavalier
1624 · Wallace Collection, London
He is neither laughing nor a cavalier. The lace and gold thread on that sleeve were flicked on in a few confident strokes.
★ 7.4
Madonna of the Rocks 2
1505 · National Gallery, London
The second version, painted to settle a long quarrel with the confraternity. Everyone now has a halo and the angel has stopped pointing.
★ 7.4
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
The Elephant Celebes
1921 · Tate Modern, London
Part boiler, part elephant, with a tusked hose coming out of its head. Ernst took the shape from a photograph of an African grain bin.
★ 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
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
Venus and Mars
1483 · National Gallery, London
Mars sleeps the sleep of the spent lover while satyrs make off with his lance, one blowing a conch in his ear without waking him.
★ 7.2
The Ancient of Days
1794 · Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England
Blake's Urizen leans out of the sun with a golden compass to measure the void, and Blake was not sure whether to admire him.
★ 7.2
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
Saint George and the Dragon
1470 · National Gallery, London
The princess has the dragon on a leash made from her own belt, and a spiral storm cloud winds up behind the saint.
★ 6.9
The Raising of Lazarus
1519 · National Gallery, London
Lazarus heaves upright still wrapped in his shroud while the crowd recoils from the smell. Michelangelo supplied drawings to help beat Raphael.
★ 6.9
Nude, Green Leaves and Bust
1932 · Tate Modern, London
Marie-Thérèse asleep beside a sculpture of her own head and a philodendron, from the year Picasso could seemingly do nothing wrong.
★ 6.9
Agony in the Garden (Mantegna)
1460 · National Gallery, London
Mantegna carved the rock like an engraver while Judas already leads the soldiers down the road. His brother-in-law Bellini painted the same scene, softer.
★ 6.8
Portrait of a Man
1476 · National Gallery, London
A red cap, a parapet, and a gaze that meets yours. Antonello brought the Netherlandish portrait into Italy and killed off the profile.
★ 6.8