The 100 Greatest Paintings of All Time: From Botticelli and Bosch to Bacon and Basquiat

It would be a worth­while exer­cise for any of us to sit down and attempt to draw up a list of our 100 favorite paint­ings of all time. Nat­u­ral­ly, those not pro­fes­sion­al­ly involved with art his­to­ry may have some trou­ble quite hit­ting that num­ber. Still, how­ev­er many titles we can write down, each of us will no doubt come up with a mix­ture of the near-uni­ver­sal­ly known and the rel­a­tive­ly obscure, with paint­ings we’ve been see­ing repro­duced in pop­u­lar cul­ture since birth along­side works that made a strong and unex­pect­ed impres­sion on us the one time we came across them in a book or gallery. The 100-favorite-paint­ings list in video form above by Luiza Liz Bond is no excep­tion.

You may rec­og­nize Bond’s name from her work on the YouTube chan­nel The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy, many of whose videos — on David Lynch, on Quentin Taran­ti­no, on ani­ma­tion, on cin­e­matog­ra­phy, on the great­est films ever made — we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Recent­ly rebrand­ed as The House of Tab­u­la, that chan­nel now makes its aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al explo­rations into not just film but art broad­ly con­sid­ered.

And though paint­ing may not be the art form with which we spend most of our time these days, it’s still one of the first art forms that comes to our minds, per­haps thanks to its twen­ty or so mil­len­nia of his­to­ry. It’s from a rel­a­tive­ly nar­row but enor­mous­ly rich slice of that his­to­ry, span­ning the four­teenth cen­tu­ry to the twen­ti­eth, that Bond makes her 100 selec­tions.

Among them are more than a few paint­ings that long­time Open Cul­ture read­ers will remem­ber us hav­ing cov­ered before: Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights, Michelan­gelo’s Sis­tine Chapel ceil­ing, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meni­nas, Frag­o­nard’s The Swing, Goy­a’s The Dog, Manet’s Lun­cheon on the Grass, Sar­gen­t’s Car­na­tion, Lily, Lily, Rose, van Gogh’s The Star­ry Night, Klimt’s The Kiss, Matis­se’s The Dance, Magrit­te’s The Lovers, Dalí’s The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry, Picas­so’s Guer­ni­ca, Wyeth’s Christi­na’s World, and Basquiat’s Unti­tled. These works and many oth­ers con­sti­tute a jour­ney through the “world of high sym­bol­ism and reli­gios­i­ty to a pri­vate space where painters tell their per­son­al sto­ries through images on can­vas,” as Bond puts it. Wher­ev­er art’s next major des­ti­na­tion may be, only human cre­ativ­i­ty can take us there.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Real­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

1540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.