Painting
52 posts
Medusa
Painting · Caravaggio
Caravaggio's Medusa (c. 1597), painted on a ceremonial parade shield, fixes the Gorgon at the instant of decapitation, the scream and serpents rendered with the violent realism that drove the whole Ba
The Cyclops
Oil on panel · Odilon Redon
Odilon Redon painted The Cyclops around 1914. The one-eyed giant Polyphemus rises from behind a hill of flowers, his single eye fixed on the small sleeping figure of the nymph Galatea below him. In Re
Hylas and the Nymphs
Oil on canvas · John William Waterhouse
John William Waterhouse painted Hylas and the Nymphs in 1896. The subject is Greek: Hylas, the young companion of Heracles on the voyage of the Argonauts, goes to fill a pitcher at a forest pool and i
The Great Day of His Wrath
Oil on canvas · John Martin
John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath, painted around 1851 to 1853, depicts the end of the world from the Book of Revelation. Whole mountains are torn loose and hurled through a red-black sky; a ci
The Triumph of Death
Oil on panel · Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Triumph of Death around 1562. Across a scorched, panoramic landscape, an army of skeletons harvests the living without distinction of rank: a king's gold is tipped
The Abbey in the Oakwood
Oil on canvas · Caspar David Friedrich
Painted between 1809 and 1810, Caspar David Friedrich's The Abbey in the Oakwood is one of the starkest images of German Romanticism. Through a screen of leafless, broken oaks rises the ruined Gothic
The Sin
Oil on canvas · Franz von Stuck
Franz von Stuck's Die Sünde (The Sin), first shown in Munich in 1893, is among the defining images of fin-de-siecle Symbolism. A nude woman emerges from near-black shadow, a massive serpent coiled aro
Oedipus and the Sphinx
Oil on canvas · Gustave Moreau
Gustave Moreau exhibited Oedipus and the Sphinx at the Paris Salon of 1864, and it made his reputation. The painting fixes the moment from Greek myth when Oedipus confronts the Sphinx outside Thebes,
The Birth of Venus
Tempera on canvas · Sandro Botticelli
Painted around 1485 for the Medici circle in Florence, Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus shows the goddess Venus, the Greek Aphrodite, arriving on the shore of Cythera. Born of the sea foam, she stan
Louis XIV in Coronation Robes
Painting (oil on canvas) · Hyacinthe Rigaud
Painted in 1701, Rigaud's official portrait of Louis XIV is the canonical image of European absolute monarchy at its rhetorical peak. Louis is dressed in the regalia of the coronation ceremony: the bl
The Ambassadors
Painting (oil on oak) · Hans Holbein the Younger
Painted in 1533, Holbein's The Ambassadors depicts the French ambassador Jean de Dinteville and the bishop-diplomat Georges de Selve standing on either side of a two-tiered table loaded with the instr
The Nightmare
Painting (oil on canvas) · Henry Fuseli
Painted in 1781, Fuseli's The Nightmare is the founding image of Gothic-Romantic visualization of dream and the unconscious. A young woman lies sleeping across a bed, her body arched backwards in unre
Anubis Attending the Mummy of Sennedjem
Tomb painting · Anonymous (19th Dynasty Egyptian artisan)
Painted on the wall of the tomb of Sennedjem (TT1) in Deir el-Medina around the 19th Dynasty (c. 1295-1213 BCE), this scene shows the jackal-headed god Anubis attending Sennedjem's mummified body on a
The Lady of Shalott
Painting (oil on canvas) · John William Waterhouse
Painted in 1888, Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott illustrates the climactic stanza of Tennyson's 1832 poem: the Lady, having looked directly at Lancelot in the mirror and broken the curse, leaves her
The Scream
Painting (oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard) · Edvard Munch
Painted in 1893, The Scream is the defining image of European proto-expressionism and one of the most reproduced artifacts in cultural history. A figure on a bridge holds its head and emits a wordless
Death and Life
Painting (oil on canvas) · Gustav Klimt
Klimt began Death and Life in 1908 and completed it around 1915. A robed figure of Death stands at the left side of the canvas, watching a sleeping cluster of human bodies, lovers, mothers, children,
The Apparition
Watercolor · Gustave Moreau
Completed in 1876, Moreau's The Apparition is the central image of French Haute Symbolism and the most famous of the artist's many Salomé works. Salomé stands centre, jeweled and tense, while the dise
Hope
Painting (oil on canvas) · George Frederic Watts
Completed in 1886, Watts's Hope is the great late-Victorian allegory and one of the most reproduced images of the nineteenth century. A blindfolded woman sits crouched on a globe, bent over a lyre wit
I Lock My Door Upon Myself
Painting (oil on canvas) · Fernand Khnopff
Painted in 1891, I Lock My Door Upon Myself is the defining canvas of Belgian Symbolism and one of the foundational images of late nineteenth-century European decadence. The title is borrowed verbatim
Scenes from the Massacres at Chios
Painting (oil on canvas) · Eugène Delacroix
Delacroix's decision in 1824 was to paint the aftermath, not the action. The Ottoman massacre of the Greek population of Chios had occurred two years earlier, in April 1822, during the Greek War of In
