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