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
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.
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
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
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
Portrait of Thomas Cromwell
1533 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Cold competence and nothing else. Holbein painted him as a near-pendant to Thomas More, whom Cromwell helped send to the scaffold.
★ 6.5
Cologne, the Arrival of a Packet Boat, Evening
1826 · The Frick Collection, New York City
A packet boat comes in at evening and Turner dissolves the city, the passengers and the river into a single sheet of gold.
★ 6.3
The Rehearsal
1879 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Dancers stretch while a spiral staircase cuts the corner and the frame slices figures off. Degas cared about the practice, not the performance.
★ 6.1
The Meeting
1772 · The Frick Collection, New York City
He is coming over the garden wall and she has just seen him, with a statue of Venus watching from above. Painted for Madame du Barry.
★ 6.1
La Promenade
1876 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Two girls walking under trees, the elder leading the younger, everything blurred into one shimmer of dappled light and pale dress.
★ 6.1
Portrait of a Man (Memling)
1470 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Memling put his sitters in front of open countryside instead of a dark ground, an idea that traveled to Italy and came back changed.
★ 5.9
The Choice Between Virtue and Vice
1565 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Hercules bolts from Vice toward Virtue and gashes his leg on the thorns of the harder road as he goes.
★ 5.9
Wisdom and Strength
1565 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Divine Wisdom looks up and Hercules looks down at a scatter of crowns and jewels, which is the entire argument of the picture.
★ 5.9
Purification of the Temple
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
El Greco split the canvas down the middle: the traders tumbling out on the left, the disciples watching calmly on the right.
★ 5.7
The Forge
1820 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Three smiths at a forge, one hammer at the top of its swing. Goya gave laboring men the scale usually kept for gods and kings.
★ 5.7
The Temptation of Christ (Duccio)
1311 · The Frick Collection, New York City
The Devil offers all the kingdoms of the world, rendered as tiny gold-edged walled towns scattered down the slopes, and is refused.
★ 5.4
St. Jerome
1600 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Not the desert hermit but the Doctor of the Church, in cardinal's red with one long hand resting on his own translation of the Bible.
★ 5.4
The Sermon on the Mount (Lorrain)
1656 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Christ preaches from a hilltop and is almost too small to find. Claude was really painting the hills, the water and the distance.
★ 5.2
The Bullfight
1864 · The Frick Collection, New York City
Manet cut up the original canvas because he was unhappy with it, and this is one of the surviving pieces.
★ 4.8
St. John the Evangelist
1469 · The Frick Collection, New York City
John stands lost in his book, wrapped in red cloth massed like masonry. One wing of an altarpiece now scattered across five cities.
★ 4.4