Art & Travel

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird

Frida Kahlo

Harry Ransom Center

its compressed symbolism made it one of Kahlo’s signature self-images

Nighthawks

Edward Hopper

Art Institute of Chicago

its lonely diner became an icon of modern urban isolation

American Gothic

Grant Wood

Art Institute of Chicago

it became one of the most parodied and recognizable American images

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

Georges Seurat

Art Institute of Chicago

its pointillist technique made it the great manifesto of Neo-Impressionism

Paris Street; Rainy Day

Gustave Caillebotte

Art Institute of Chicago

its cropped boulevard view made modern Paris feel cinematic

The Nightmare

Henry Fuseli

Detroit Institute of Arts Museum

its incubus and horse made it the prototype of Gothic dream imagery

No. 61 (Rust and Blue)

Mark Rothko

The Museum of Contemporary Art – Moca

The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

its swirling night sky became the universal image of emotional landscape painting

The Persistence of Memory

Salvador Dali

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

its melting clocks became the shorthand image of surreal time

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

Pablo Picasso

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it shattered pictorial conventions and opened the road to Cubism

The Great Wave off Kanagawa

Katsushika Hokusai

The Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art

its bold wave became the most famous Japanese print in the world

One: Number 31, 1950

Jackson Pollock

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it became the canonical image of all-over drip painting

Christina’s World

Andrew Wyeth

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

its emotional distance and open field made it an American classic

The Lovers

René Magritte

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

Campbell’s Soup Cans

Andy Warhol

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it turned supermarket repetition into a defining Pop Art statement

Death of Socrates

Jacques-Louis David

The Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Composition VIII

Wassily Kandinsky

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

it crystallized Kandinsky’s musical approach to abstraction

Broadway Boogie Woogie

Piet Mondrian

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it translated New York’s grid and jazz pulse into pure abstraction

The Sleeping Gypsy

Henri Rousseau

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

its dreamlike stillness fascinated modern and surrealist artists

Untitled - Selections from Truisms...

Jenny Holzer

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

Portrait of Madame X

John Singer Sargent

The Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art

Mérode Altarpiece

Robert Campin

The Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art

its domestic Annunciation transformed sacred narrative into intimate realism

The Harvesters

Pieter Bruegel the Elder

The Met - Metropolitan Museum of Art

it elevated seasonal rural labor into a grand panoramic subject

Woman I

Willem de Kooning

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it fused abstraction and the female figure into one ferocious image

Vir Heroicus Sublimis

Barnett Newman

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

its huge red field made scale itself part of the experience

The Red Studio

Henri Matisse

MoMA The Museum of Modern Art

it turned studio space into a near-abstract field of color

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Edgar Degas

National Gallery of Art Washington

its realism, costume and adolescent subject shocked nineteenth-century viewers

Comedian

Maurizio Cattelan

Centre Pompidou-Metz

A fresh banana duct-taped to a white wall — Maurizio Cattelan's audacious conceptual gesture that sold for millions and redefined the boundaries of contemporary art.

La Gioconda - The Mona Lisa

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Louvre Museum

Liberty Leading the People

Eugène Delacroix

Louvre Museum

it fused revolution and allegory into one of France’s defining images

Impression, Sunrise

Claude Monet

Musée Marmottan Monet

it gave Impressionism its name

Water Lilies

Claude Monet

Musée de l’Orangerie

its immersive oval rooms anticipate modern installation and abstraction

Bal du moulin de la Galette

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Musée d’Orsay

its flickering light and urban leisure define Impressionism for many visitors

Olympia

Édouard Manet

Musée d’Orsay

its confrontational modern nude scandalized Paris

The Luncheon on the Grass

Édouard Manet

Musée d’Orsay

its picnic scene with a nude woman challenged academic convention

Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, Whistler's Mother

James Abbott McNeill Whistler

Musée d’Orsay

The Origin of the World

Gustave Courbet

Musée d’Orsay

The Raft of the Medusa

Théodore Géricault

Louvre Museum

its modern tragedy reshaped what history painting could do

The Card Players

Paul Cezanne

Musée d’Orsay

its quiet structural gravity shaped modern painting

The Wedding at Cana

Paolo Veronese

Louvre Museum

its vast theatrical banquet is one of the largest and most dazzling canvases in the Louvre

The Lacemaker

Johannes Vermeer

Louvre Museum

its tiny scale and concentration make it one of Vermeer’s most intimate works

A Burial at Ornans

Gustave Courbet

Musée d’Orsay

it gave monumental scale to ordinary provincial life

Grande Odalisque

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

Louvre Museum

its elegant distortions made academic painting unexpectedly strange

The Bedroom

Vincent van Gogh

Musée d’Orsay

its tilted room turned an interior into a psychological space

The Gleaners

Jean-François Millet

Musée d’Orsay

it gave dignity and monumentality to poor rural labor

L'Absinthe

Edgar Degas

Musée d’Orsay

its alienated café mood captured modern urban melancholy

The Ballet Class

Edgar Degas

Musée d’Orsay

its off-center composition made rehearsal more compelling than performance

The Oath of the Horatii

Jacques-Louis David

Louvre Museum

it defined Neoclassicism with moral clarity and severe geometry

The Birth of Venus

Sandro Botticelli

Uffizi Gallery

its idealized beauty became the emblem of mythological Renaissance painting

David

Michelangelo

Galleria dell’Accademia

it is the defining Renaissance heroic nude and a civic icon of Florence

Judith Slaying Holofernes

Artemisia Gentileschi

Uffizi Gallery

its visceral force made it a Baroque and feminist landmark

Primavera

Sandro Botticelli

Uffizi Gallery

its poetic allegory became one of the key images of Florentine culture

Venus of Urbino

Titian

Uffizi Gallery

its direct gaze transformed the Renaissance reclining nude

The Last Supper

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano

its psychological staging of the betrayal scene changed Western religious painting

The Calling of Saint Matthew

Caravaggio

San Luigi dei Francesi

its dramatic light and everyday realism transformed sacred painting

The Creation of Adam

Michelangelo

Sistine Chapel

the near-touching hands became one of the most recognizable images in art

The School of Athens

Raphael

Pinacoteca Vaticana

it turned classical philosophy into the perfect Renaissance image of harmony

Sistine Chapel Ceiling

Michelangelo

Sistine Chapel

its scale, anatomy and narrative ambition redefined monumental painting

The Last Judgment

Michelangelo

Sistine Chapel

its muscular apocalypse redefined monumental sacred art

Vitruvian Man

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia

it became the universal image of Renaissance proportion and humanism

The Tempest

Giorgione

Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia

its mystery and atmosphere made it one of the most debated Renaissance pictures

Sunflowers

Vincent van Gogh

The National Gallery London

its blazing yellow palette made it one of Van Gogh’s signature images

The Arnolfini Portrait

Jan van Eyck

The National Gallery London

its mirror symbolism and minute oil-paint detail changed portraiture

The Hay Wain

John Constable

The National Gallery London

it became England’s iconic rural landscape painting

The Fighting Temeraire

J. M. W. Turner

The National Gallery London

its sunset farewell to a warship became a national image of loss

Whaam!

Roy Lichtenstein

Tate Modern London

Ophelia

John Everett Millais

Tate Britain

its jewel-like naturalism made it the iconic Pre-Raphaelite picture

Wilton Diptych

Unknown English artist

The National Gallery London

it is one of the supreme survivals of medieval English painting

The Ambassadors

Hans Holbein the Younger

The National Gallery London

its anamorphic skull turned portraiture into a puzzle about mortality and knowledge

The Rokeby Venus

Diego Velázquez

The National Gallery London

it is Velázquez’s rare surviving nude and a masterpiece of reflective ambiguity

The Swing

Jean-Honoré Fragonard

The Wallace Collection

its flirtatious fantasy became the signature image of Rococo

Fountain

Marcel Duchamp

Tate Modern London

it made the idea and institutional framing central to art

A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

Édouard Manet

The Courtauld Gallery

its mirrored ambiguities made urban modern life enigmatic

Guernica

Pablo Picasso

Museo Centro de Arte Reina Sofia

it became the defining anti-war image of the twentieth century

Las Meninas

Diego Velázquez

Museo Nacional del Prado

its complex gaze, mirror and self-portrait structure made it endlessly modern

The Garden of Earthly Delights

Hieronymus Bosch

Museo Nacional del Prado

its fantastical imagery made it one of the most discussed paintings in history

Saturn Devouring His Son

Francisco de Goya

Museo Nacional del Prado

its terrifying psychological force made it one of art’s darkest images

The Third of May 1808

Francisco de Goya

Museo Nacional del Prado

its raw anti-war message transformed history painting

The Spinners

Diego Velázquez

Museo Nacional del Prado

its layered narrative and hidden myth show Velázquez at his most subtle

The Nobleman with his Hand on his Chest

Doménikos Theotokópoulos – El Greco

Museo Nacional del Prado

The Night Watch

Rembrandt van Rijn

Rijksmuseum

it reinvented the civic group portrait with movement and dramatic light

The Milkmaid

Johannes Vermeer

Rijksmuseum

its quiet dignity and radiant everyday realism are quintessential Vermeer

The Potato Eaters

Vincent van Gogh

Van Gogh Museum

it shows Van Gogh’s first great ambition to paint peasant life seriously

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Johannes Vermeer

Mauritshuis

its direct gaze and luminous pearl made it a global icon

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp

Rembrandt van Rijn

Mauritshuis

it announced Rembrandt’s genius for drama and individual psychology

View of Delft

Johannes Vermeer

Mauritshuis

its atmosphere made it one of Europe’s great city views

The Kiss

Gustav Klimt

Österreichische Galerie Belvedere

its sensual embrace made it one of sculpture’s most famous couples

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

Caspar David Friedrich

Hamburger Kunsthalle

it became the emblem of Romantic solitude and the sublime

The Two Fridas

Frida Kahlo

Museo de Arte Moderno MAM

its split identity and exposed hearts made it Frida’s most famous statement

The Scream

Edvard Munch

Munch Museum

it became the quintessential image of modern anxiety

Rage, the Flower Thrower

Banksy

Street Bethlehem Graffiti

The Dance

Henri Matisse

The State Hermitage Museum St Petersburg

its simplified red bodies made rhythm and color the real subject