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.
The Girls of Avignon
1907 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Five nude women stare out with their faces turned into masks, and Picasso kept the canvas rolled up in his studio for years.
★ 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
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
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
Sistine Madonna
1512 · Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Two bored cherubs lean on the frame at the bottom, and they floated free of the altarpiece long ago onto everything else.
★ 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
Melencolia I
1514 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A winged figure sits with her compass idle among abandoned tools, and no print in history has drawn more scholarly argument.
★ 8.6
Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)
1950 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Pollock worked on the floor and moved around the canvas instead of standing at an easel, laying black enamel across raw cotton in 1950.
★ 8.6
Bird in Space
1928 · Museum of Modern Art, New York
American customs taxed it as industrial metal until Brancusi v. United States in 1928 forced the law to recognize abstract sculpture as art.
★ 8.6
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
Where Do We Come From What Are We Where Are We Going
1898 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Gauguin thought he was dying and meant this to be his last work, reading right to left from a sleeping infant to an old woman.
★ 8.5
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
American Gothic
1930 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Wood posed his sister and his dentist in front of a farmhouse window, and people have argued ever since whether he meant tribute or mockery.
★ 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 Dream
1910 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Rousseau painted this in the last year of his life and explained that the woman on the sofa is dreaming herself into the jungle.
★ 8.3
The Slave Ship
1840 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Turner took the Zong case, where a slaver threw its human cargo overboard for the insurance money, and set it under his most beautiful sunset.
★ 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
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
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
Saint Francis in Ecstasy
1480 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Francis steps barefoot from his hermitage into a light coming from the left, and Bellini gives him no seraph and barely any wounds.
★ 8.0
Portrait of Adele Block Bauer
1907 · Neue Galerie, New York City
Only the face and hands are painted naturally and the rest is gold. The Nazis seized it, and a long restitution case eventually got it back.
★ 8.0
Madame X
1884 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
The strap fell off her shoulder in the 1884 version, Paris was scandalized, her family demanded it come down, and Sargent repainted the strap.
★ 8.0
Nude Descending a Staircase
1912 · Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
A critic at the 1913 Armory Show called it an explosion in a shingle factory, and the insult followed the painting around America.
★ 8.0
The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)
1929 · LACMA, Los Angeles
The words under the pipe are correct, since a painting of a pipe is not a pipe, which is the whole and entire joke.
★ 7.9
Otani Oniji III as Yakko Edobei
1794 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Sharaku made about 140 actor prints in ten months and then vanished so completely that people still argue about who he was.
★ 7.9
Rothko Chapel murals
1967 · Rothko Chapel, Houston
Fourteen near-black panels in an octagonal room, where your eyes adjusting to the dark is the point. Rothko died before it opened.
★ 7.9
Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings
1617 · Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
The emperor hands a book to a Sufi and ignores the kings waiting below, one of them James I, copied from an English portrait.
★ 7.9
Portrait of Juan de Pareja
1650 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Pareja was Velázquez's enslaved assistant, freed soon after this was painted in Rome as a warm-up before the pope sat for him.
★ 7.8
Study After Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X
1953 · Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines
Bacon took Velázquez's composed pope and set him screaming behind a curtain of falling paint. He never saw the original in person.
★ 7.8
The Nightmare
1781 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
An incubus squats on a sleeping woman's chest while a wild-eyed horse pushes through the curtains. It made Fuseli famous immediately.
★ 7.8
Three Beauties of the Present Day
1793 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Three famous women of 1790s Edo on mica ground, their faces nearly identical, so you have to read them from the tilt of an eye.
★ 7.8
Woman with a Hat
1905 · San Francisco MOMA, San Francisco
A critic looked at this and called Matisse and his friends fauves, wild beasts, which is how the movement got its name.
★ 7.8
The Song of Love
1914 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
A marble head, a red rubber glove and a green ball hang together on a wall, and a train goes by in the distance.
★ 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
Broadway Boogie Woogie
1943 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
Mondrian broke his own grid into blinking squares after moving to New York, where he loved the traffic and the jazz.
★ 7.7
Woman I
1950 · Museum of Modern Art, New York City
De Kooning dragged the figure back into abstract painting at the moment that was least acceptable, and worked this canvas over for two years.
★ 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
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
Self-Portrait (Rembrandt, 1658)
1658 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Rembrandt painted himself enthroned like a monarch, staff across his lap, in the same year bankruptcy took his house and everything in it.
★ 7.5
The Polish Rider
1655 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A young horseman rides into the dusk armed and alert, and nobody has ever agreed who he is or where he is going.
★ 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
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
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
The Death of Socrates
1787 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Socrates reaches for the hemlock without looking at it, still arguing with his other hand while his students fall apart around him.
★ 7.4
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
Three Flags
1954 · Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City
Johns chose things the mind already knows, so that nobody would look past the wax surface. Three flags stacked, each smaller than the last.
★ 7.4
Irises
1889 · Getty Museum, Los Angeles
One white iris stands alone among a whole bed of blue-violet ones, the blades twisting and crowding right up to the edge of the canvas.
★ 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
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
Washington Crossing the Delaware
1851 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Almost every detail is wrong, including the flag and the boat, and Leutze painted it in Germany seventy-five years after the fact.
★ 7.2
Ginevra de Benci
1478 · National Gallery of Art, Washington, District of Columbia
A juniper bush stands behind her as a pun on her name. The panel was later cut down at the bottom, taking her hands with it.
★ 7.2
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
Watson and the Shark
1778 · Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
Brook Watson really did lose a leg to a shark in Havana harbor, and Copley put a Black sailor at the top of the rescue.
★ 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
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
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
White Crucifixion
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Christ wears a Jewish prayer shawl while a synagogue burns and refugees flee by boat. Chagall painted it in 1938, watching what was coming.
★ 7.2
Self-portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
1940 · Harry Ransom Center, Austin
A thorn necklace draws blood at her throat, a dead hummingbird hangs from it, and a monkey and a black cat watch from behind.
★ 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
Yellow Christ
1889 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Three Breton women in white caps kneel at a wooden cross in an autumn field, everything flattened into blocks of color like stained glass.
★ 7.2
Time Transfixed
1938 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
A small steam locomotive comes out of a fireplace under the mantel clock, and the room around it is otherwise entirely ordinary.
★ 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
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
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
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
Composition VIII
1923 · Guggenheim, New York City
Circles, triangles and floating lines arranged with the precision of a score. Kandinsky painted it while teaching at the Bauhaus, his storms over.
★ 7.2
Excavation
1950 · Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago
Hooks and curves fill the canvas edge to edge with no center to rest on, and teeth and jaws keep surfacing out of the mass.
★ 7.2
Portrait of Sir Thomas More
1527 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Holbein arrived in England on a letter from Erasmus and painted More at the height of his power. Within a few years More was executed.
★ 7.1
Nativity
1530 · Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
All the light in the picture comes off the newborn child, and one shepherd throws up a hand against the glare.
★ 7.1
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
Paul Revere
1768 · Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Boston
Copley painted the silversmith in his shirtsleeves at the bench with a teapot in his hand, which was not how gentlemen were usually shown.
★ 7.1
Spirit of the Dead Watching
1892 · Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
A girl lies face down and frightened while a hooded figure sits behind her. Gauguin said his Tahitian companion was afraid of the dark.
★ 7.1