Terracotta Army
Artist unknown
210 BC · Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, Xi'an
Thousands of life-size clay soldiers in battle formation, no two faces alike, guarding an emperor's tomb since 210 BC.
★ 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.
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
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
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
Red and White Plum Blossoms
1715 · MOA Museum of Art, Atami
A stylized river runs down the gold between two plum trees, one young and white, the other old and red, leaning toward each other.
★ 8.8
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
Bodhisattva Padmapani
Artist unknown
478 · Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra
The bodhisattva lowers his eyes with a blue lotus in his hand, painted into living rock at Ajanta and lost to the jungle for centuries.
★ 8.4
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
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
Wind God and Thunder God (Fujin Raijin-zu)
1630 · Kyoto National Museum, Kyoto
The two gods hurtle in from opposite edges and Sotatsu leaves the whole middle empty, so the bare gold reads as sky.
★ 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
Cypress Trees
1590 · Tokyo National Museum, Tokyo
One ancient cypress sprawls across the screen against solid gold, painted by the man who decorated the castles of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi.
★ 8.0
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
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
Night Scene in the Yoshiwara
1850 · Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
Oi was Hokusai's daughter and studio collaborator, and her handling of lantern light against darkness beats anything else in the ukiyo-e of her time.
★ 5.7
The Port of Saint-Tropez
1902 · National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Signac moved to Saint-Tropez and pulled the rest of the Neo-Impressionists south. Seurat's tight dots have loosened into bigger, brighter tiles.
★ 5.6
Night View of a Ginza Store
1884 · Ota Memorial Museum of Art, Tokyo
Gaslight in the windows of a new brick storefront on an empty Tokyo street. Yasuji died at twenty-five and got there before Hopper.
★ 4.7