What are some of your favorite paintings?
April 14, 2023 3:17 PM   Subscribe

A friend asked me what my favorite painting is, and I realized I don't have one. I'm on a mission to find a few, and would love to be inspired by some of yours.
posted by shrimpetouffee to Media & Arts (65 answers total) 59 users marked this as a favorite
 
I enjoy visiting Sky Above Clouds IV at my local art museum. By Georgia O’Keeffe.
posted by mai at 3:20 PM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]




CW for disturbing imagery - I return to this over and over again, because it expresses so clearly the horrible violence of power: Saturn devouring his son, by Goya.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 3:25 PM on April 14, 2023 [11 favorites]


I was looking at one of mine online earlier today!

Leith Races by William Reid shows horse racing on the sands at Leith (by Edinburgh) in 1862. I don't kow if it's a great work of art, but it's a great work of humanity and society. You absolutely have to zoom right in and it's full of so many amazing tableaus - merriment, gambling, drinking, fighting, debauchery, skinny-dipping, there's just all human life there, and I love it.

Also a couple of landmarks that are still visible in a much-changed present-day Leith - a Martello tower (the 'tally toor') out at sea that's now landlocked and embedded in the expanded docks, and the Signal Tower.
posted by penguin pie at 3:31 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


Dali's The Madonna of Port Lligat
Not really a painting, but The Great Wave Off Kanagawa has been a favorite since I was a small hanov3r.
posted by hanov3r at 3:32 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


The Sun by Edvard Munch
Over Vitebsk by Marc Chagall
posted by VirginiaPlain at 3:36 PM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]


Hopper's Nighthawks. For some reason, when I see it, I remember being there, even though that's impossible.
posted by SPrintF at 3:36 PM on April 14, 2023 [17 favorites]


Here are my ten:

1) The Interior of the Church of St Catherine, Utrecht Pieter Jansz. Saenredam
2) Chardin Still Life With Plums
3) Trompe l'oeil. The Reverse of a Framed Painting Gisbrechts (sp)
4) Portrait of Juan de Pareja Velaquesez
5) The Rose Martin
6) Rachel Ruysch Flowers in a Glass Vase
7) Sam Gilliam, the installation at Marrakech Biennale 6
8) Finches and bamboo Emperor Huizong
9) Ohara Koson “Monkey reaching for the Moon”
10) Frankenthaler Mountain and Sea.

I really love the late Cezanne paintings of Mnte Ste Victorie, and Ryman is my favourite painter, but I cannot choose one of my favourites
posted by PinkMoose at 3:39 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


Off the top of my head: Starry Night (Vincent van Gogh)Frost Valley (Louis Sloan). Path Through Wheat Field (David Hockney). Flood (Elizabeth Osborne)
posted by Peach at 3:41 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


Best answer: I don't have a direct answer, but you might enjoy the New York Times' Close Read series, which dives deep into what makes the paintings it features so interesting.
posted by mdonley at 3:56 PM on April 14, 2023 [9 favorites]


Stadia II by Julie Mehretu; I went to LA in 2020, New York in 2021, and Minneapolis in 2022 to see her solo exhibit.
posted by wicked_sassy at 4:00 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Guernica. When I saw it, I cried. A reproduction tapestry hangs in the UN Security Council; I'm still angry that they covered it up to allow Colin Powell to lie about the war in Iraq.

On a lighter note, a reproduction of Van Gogh's Almond Blossoms has pride of place in my living room. I also love the melty quality of Monet.

Paintings are so subjective. If there is an art museum near you, go wander around and see what catches your eye. A lot of museums started doing virtual tours during the pandemic. I find it really helpful to find something that I intuitively like, and then listen to a Very Smart Person articulate what features that painting has, and then seek out other paintings like that.

But sometimes, like with love, it just hits you unexpectedly. I can't get behind most modern (post-WW1) art, but again, with Guernica I wept.
posted by basalganglia at 4:02 PM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]


My husband and I saw “On a Sailing Ship” by Caspar David Friedrich at the National Gallery in Ottawa and hung the poster for the exhibition in our living room. I adore its hopefulness.

Also love this Klimt landscape, Forest Slope at Unterach on Attersee.

And "Scorned as Timber, Beloved of the Sky" by Emily Carr.
posted by alicat at 4:18 PM on April 14, 2023 [6 favorites]


I love this thread!

I love the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

I came to it via W. H. Auden's poem Musee Des Beaux Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
posted by Well I never at 4:23 PM on April 14, 2023 [19 favorites]


It’s not my favorite style of painting but I always liked The Fighting Temeraire.
posted by Glinn at 4:40 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


About one third of the paintings on this abandoned art site.

Every now and again I browse it randomly and never fail to find something that stops me dead in my tracks, amazed.
posted by Jane the Brown at 4:41 PM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


Gericault's "The Raft of The Medusa" ever since I saw it during my first trip to Paris, I make time to visit and see it again when I am in the city.
posted by alchemist at 4:52 PM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


Guernica made me cry too! So so overwhelming in person. Nothing prepares you for how Big it feels up close.

What I really like though is to go to a gallery and see a retrospective. I love seeing how artists develop a visual language over time and the motifs they return to. Picasso is great for this obviously but maybe my pleasantest day in a museum ever was just a deep dive into Miró for like four hours. Seeing one Miró is like "eh" for me but seeing dozens from a span of decades was incredible. Even if I don't actually like the artist that much at first I always end up appreciating the work they were trying to do in the world.
posted by potrzebie at 4:59 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Old Models, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
posted by Melismata at 5:00 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze is my favorite. I make a point of going to see it every time I go to the Met (if possible. There was that one time they were renovating the American Wing. Upsetting). It's so full of motion, and there are a lot of great little details. I love it.
posted by May Kasahara at 5:03 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


Buuuut really the only answer for me is actually The Garden of Earthly Delights lol
posted by potrzebie at 5:04 PM on April 14, 2023 [9 favorites]


I loved Klimt, and then I found the works of Mary MacDonald Mackintosh, whom Klimt straight up ripped off.
posted by cyndigo at 5:21 PM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]


The Resurrection, Tidying by Stanley Spencer. After my mom had died, it made me cry when I saw it because the woman front left having her hair brushed reminded me a bit of her. It's a very human(e) take on what it would be like to be freed from death - reunion, gossip, kids playing hide and seek.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 5:57 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


Modigliani’s Little Servant Girl. I live in Minneapolis, where it in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. I even used to work there. In any case, I majored in art and usually go through galleries quickly until something calls me, and then I can spend a very long time looking at just one painting. This one really captures my heart.
posted by advicepig at 5:58 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Dali's La Gare de Perpingnan - there's something about the light.

Also, when I'm in London I make a point of popping into the national gallery - mainly to see the Turners they have there, but also because the main hall has this horse in it. (It really is life size.)
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 6:28 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


George Bellows, Summer Night, Riverside Drive. I like the streetlamps.
posted by kevinbelt at 6:32 PM on April 14, 2023 [4 favorites]


I have a lot of paintings I really like, but I don't think I have a favorite. Here are some I really like from museums I visit regularly: At the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (where I grew up), the one I keep going back to is The Corn Poppy. At the Kimbell, I always visit The Allen Brothers, Portrait of May Sartoris, and Skeletons Warming Themselves. I didn't really like Picasso for a long time but after seeing a good exhibit of his work in black and white at the MFAH, I always visit this Portrait of Sylvette at the McNay in San Antonio. I also really like Portrait of the Artist with Idol at the McNay. I don't have a firm visit-every-time at the Dallas Museum of Art, but when I skimmed their collection I remembered this Eiffel Tower and the joy I had in seeing it.

I've also read a number of Ross King books about art over the years that have helped me figure out what artistic movements I like. My taste is pedestrian (Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites are up there for me) but really figuring it out involved going to museums regularly and just seeing what's there to gut check what works for me and doesn't. I do think seeing the art in person is important if you can do it: I didn't "get" Jackson Pollock at all until I saw the 3D texture of his work at full size, and the Picasso exhibit I mentioned above really changed my view of his art.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 6:44 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


I'd have a very hard time picking a favorite.

Today I might have to go with The Cave of Beasts. I'll never see it in person, but every once in a while I look to see if I can find new photos because I find it fascinating. Art from when the Sahara was green, from a lost world.

There's a decent amount of Saharan art from the green period, but this one is also wonderfully weird in a way that really makes me really wonder about what the figures represented, and by extension, the experiences and stories of the people who painted them, which have been lost forever. What are the unidentifiable beasts supposed to be? Why do some look to be part human? Why are some missing heads?
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:44 PM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]


I have been obsessed with the painting Laughing while Leaving by Roxana Halls ever since I saw it on a women's art Twitter account a few years ago. I recently bought a print from the artist's website.

I also love this self-portrait At the Dressing Table by Zinaida Serebriakova. It's from 1909 but feels so fresh and modern.
posted by emd3737 at 7:37 PM on April 14, 2023 [10 favorites]


Oooh! I also love Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly series. Five stars, would see again.
posted by emd3737 at 7:43 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


And a couple more portraits I like, both I used to visit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts although the first one is now at the Met. John Singer Sargent paints a sexy gynecologist. Scott Prior paints his wife and dog.
posted by emd3737 at 7:53 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


Hopper has a painting called New York Movie that has always fascinated me. Like a lot of Hopper's paintings, the usher screams out that she has a story to tell, but the painting itself gives no clues as to what that story is.
posted by wittgenstein at 8:07 PM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]


Georgia O'Keeffe's "The Lawrence Tree". There is some debate on the proper orientation to hang it. I love it because I grew up on the edge of pine woods and this painting vividly evokes looking up through tree branches at the night sky.

Also, Margaret Nazon is a Gwich'in artist who does beadwork art inspired by Hubble Telescope photos.
posted by gudrun at 8:55 PM on April 14, 2023 [7 favorites]


Night and Her Daughter Sleep by Mary L. Macomber. This picture unfortunately does nothing to capture the depth of the blacks and dark blues in it; it's just lovely and I fell in love with it when I saw it and spent so much time looking at it, the security person was getting nervous. I hate the Smithsonian for keeping it off view; I had to make arrangements to go off site to see it last time I was in DC. I love this question!
posted by kitten kaboodle at 9:21 PM on April 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Burn, Baby, Burn by the Chilean artist Matta is the only painting I ever made a special trip to revisit. It grabbed me the first time I saw it and held my attention for 15 minutes. It’s at LACMA.

Las Meninas and Night Watch are pretty cool, too. And Goya’s drowning dog isn’t a favorite, so much as the painting that haunts my dreams.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 11:24 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


Two of my favorites, both by Ilya Repin:
Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan
Barge Haulers on the Volga
posted by pseudoinversedly at 11:47 PM on April 14, 2023 [5 favorites]


I always loved this picture by Marie Laurencin.
posted by zompist at 11:55 PM on April 14, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Old Guitarist by Picasso is one of my favorites that I prefer to see in person. When you look at it from certain angles there are raised areas that the light will reflect off of and you can just barely make out the outlines of a person that was painted over.
posted by simplethings at 12:50 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I've always liked Uccello's St George and the Dragon, and Rousseau's Tiger in a Tropical Storm, or Surprised!

Also, Bruegel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and his The Tower of Babel. I don't think I've ever seen Landscape... for real, but Tower of Babel is much larger than I'd realised, and very rewarding to see in person. You really can get lost in the details.

Holbein's The Ambassadors has a delightful skull.

Speaking of skulls, I also have an inexplicable fondness for a rather sinister painting in the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge, Human Fragility by Salvator Rosa.

The detail in the mirror in The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck has always drawn me in.

It's hard to choose a single Bridget Riley, but perhaps Cataract 3. Always fun when an artwork messes with my perceptions.

And finally, a painting I doubt I'll ever see other than online: In the Winter's Twilight Glow by John Atkinson Grimshaw, for its sense of wintry quiet.

You might enjoy looking through a copy of The Art Book for more inspiration.
posted by ManyLeggedCreature at 5:49 AM on April 15, 2023 [5 favorites]


Birthday by Dorothea Tanning
posted by OrangeVelour at 7:19 AM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Nanny and Rose by Scott Prior. I first saw it when I was in my 20s and I found it so peaceful and somehow a symbol of what I wanted out of life.
posted by tangosnail at 7:33 AM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]




Gauguin’s Vision After the Sermon. It had an impact on me when I was young and studying art history.

There’s a handful of other paintings, mostly portraits that I seek out when I visit certain museums. It’s like visiting old friends. A few are… I teared up when I saw Diego Rivera’s National Palace murals in person in Mexico City. There’s some painting that are so impactful in person (like Picasso’s Guernica, mentioned above).
posted by Bunglegirl at 8:53 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


Salvador Dali's Last Supper is my favorite (and I'm not even religious).
posted by alex1965 at 9:20 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Monk by the Sea - Caspar David Friedrich
Approach to Venice - William Turner
Nocturne: Blue and Gold - James McNeill Whistler
posted by jabah at 9:35 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


So not original, but two of my favorite paintings are Van Gogh's Starry Night and Irises. They are beautiful and alive and there is no other way for me to explain them except for Starry Night is also dreamy.
posted by loveandhappiness at 9:46 AM on April 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


One of my favorites is Artist in Greenland by Rockwell Kent. I love the color palette and the painting itself, but I also love that it was painted in two parts. The landscape was painted in 1935, and then in 1960, the painter's owner had Kent add an image of himself at work surrounded by sled dogs. I love imagining how that happened. Did the painting pass on to someone who didn't care for landscapes? Was the owner a friend who decided they wanted Rockwell literally in their painting? Is one of the sled dogs actually a portrait of one of the owner's dogs, and this is a very high end custom pet portrait?

I'm also fond of The Good Life by James E. Reynolds: twitter/nitter.
posted by the primroses were over at 10:01 AM on April 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


Mark Tansey, Action Painting
posted by dfan at 10:30 AM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Mulberry Tree by Van Gogh at the Norton Simon. I chose this version of this image because you can really see the thickness of the paint; there's such an impact to seeing the original art with all its texture.
There was a deep blue/black/purple Rothko at the LA County Museum for years, it has such depth. You'd enter that gallery but it was on the wall of the door, so you wouldn't see this massive darkness until you turned around to leave.
This guy, the Baron Joseph-Pierre Vialetes de Mortarieu, by Ingres. So pretty, just the sort of boy I would wistfully imagine when I was listening to early Cure songs, the sad ones.
And this Rembrandt cartoon/drawing, self portrait, making silly face.

Thanks for asking this question, so much good stuff to look at!
posted by winesong at 11:15 AM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


This one fascinated me at a recent museum visit: Monet / Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light. One of those wonderful experiences where I was cruising through the museum thinking about what to get for dinner and then it stopped me in my tracks. I guess I like paintings with early morning light because The Song of the Lark also sticks in my mind.
posted by qxntpqbbbqxl at 12:08 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I love El Greco, and I would pick out The Adoration of the Shepherds. The colours, the composition, the contorted figures, it’s just amazing.
posted by Bloxworth Snout at 12:22 PM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Christina's World has long haunted me.
posted by BeBoth at 12:30 PM on April 15, 2023 [5 favorites]


Otto Dix: The Dancer Anita Berber
Tamara de Lempicka: Autoportrait in Green Bugatti
Lawren Harris: Baffin Island
Kehine Wiley: Simeon the God Receiver
Maria Helena Vieira da Silva: Bibliothèque
Chua Mia Tee: Workers in a Canteen

That was fun... but it is hard to actually pick a favourite. So many great paintings out there. It depends a lot on the day, and where I've been, and what I've seen recently.
posted by Laura in Canada at 12:50 PM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Florence Miller Pierce, Untitled, 1952, oil on board. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Transcendental Painters Group.

I stared at this for hours a few months ago, and it's currently on display at LACMA at the Another World: The Transcendental Painting Group, 1938–1945 Exhibition Dec 18, 2022–Jun 19, 2023. The color mixing is ethereal and so gently graduated at many parts, it's just so gentle.
posted by yueliang at 12:55 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I don't have a favorite painting, but here are two that made a big impression. I really recommend seeing both of these in person, if you're ever in NYC and/or SF.

Lawdy Mama (1969) by Barkley L. Hendricks, from a Studio Museum in Harlem traveling exhibition that came to MoAD in 2019. The effect of the portrait against the gold leaf background contained in the shape of an icon is pretty awesome.

Woman with a Hat / Femme au Chapeau (1905) by Henri Matisse, at SF MoMA. I had some thought of being an art history major when I was in college, and more than one professor talked about this painting and how it almost caused a riot - particularly about the use of green in the face of the portrait.
posted by expialidocious at 1:29 PM on April 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


Joining Bloxworth Snout in El Greco appreciation: View of Toledo. Nobody does blue the way El Greco did blue. Nobody.

Close second: Penitent Magdalen (and yes, I've actually seen it). I don't travel much any more, but when I did, I made a habit of seeing new-to-me El Grecos in museums.

I think the Saint-Martin-dividing-his-cloak is in DC? Well worth looking at, that one.
posted by humbug at 8:12 PM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


I like works by the cubists, futurists (who were fascist assholes), op artists, and others who either take a deeper look into the world, and its mechanics or perhaps see a different world all together. My favorite is Nude Descending a Staircase no.3 by Marcel Duchamp. The first time I saw it, I was amazed that an artist could see the world and communicate a fluid moment in time as a static image, and decades later, I could be moved by the beauty of his image and his ability to make me see this moment.
Or maybe it reminded me of taking LSD.
Regardless, I love it still.
posted by evilDoug at 8:45 PM on April 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


I adore this thread!

Trees and Undergrowth which I saw at the Van Gogh Museum has always been a favorite. And Judith Beheading Holofernes has been speaking to me extra strongly since 2016.
posted by Threeve at 9:58 PM on April 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I once walked into a room and was confronted by Paterson Ewen's Northern Lights. I had to immediately sit down as it literally took my breath away. Photos don't do it justice as it's gouged plywood and much of its affect is due to texture.

Recently I've fallen in love wth the work of Hilma af Klint. Hollywood's working on a film about her right now.
posted by dobbs at 2:57 AM on April 16, 2023 [4 favorites]


Probably Vermeer's The Milkmaid. It is tiny and utterly luminous, and it stopped me in my tracks in a museum full of masterpieces.

Also, Yves Klein's The Void is spectacularly beautiful. I would link to it, but I think you need to be familiar with his early monochromes to really see it.
posted by surlyben at 9:00 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]


Like pseudoinversedly, I like Repin, but I particularly like him when he's doing spellbinding and fantastical: Sadko in the Underwater Kingdom

On a spiritually similar note, I adore Alphonse Mucha. This is a lithograph, not a painting, but Reverie is a favorite.

My favorite work of art is not anywhere near being a painting but including it here for completion's sake; it's Electronic Superhighway by Nam June Paik.
posted by capricorn at 12:43 PM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]


Balthus' "Figure in front of a mantel".

I am three years older than my cousins and my brother, so I hit puberty first, and alone; I was no longer interested in the kid stuff the others still did. But I didn't feel I was old enough ought to hang with the grownups yet either. So there were a few years of family gatherings where I would be off by myself, holed up in the guest room I'd claimed (my aunt had a huge house then and it was our party central), just sort-of trying to wrap my head around what my body was doing and how it changed everything, and how nevertheless I kind of liked that.

This picture is of my mental state from those days.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:30 PM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]


The Last Snow (Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra) (1975). Yuriy Khymych. Khymych's bold gouaches make me want to visit Kyiv again.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (1880–1891) Ilya Repin. I'll never get tired of looking at all these faces, and just the general energy captured in this painting. The history/myth behind it is great too. I've never seen the original, but it was really cool to once see some of Repin's preliminary pencil sketches for the piece on display at the Musee d'Orasay.

The Bubble Boy (1884) Paul Peel. I remember sitting in the AGO doing a small number of sketches and studies of this painting for an art college assignment, many years ago. A simple painting that offered me so much to discover in terms of form, line, pattern, light, color, etc. So I'm delighted whenever I see it again at the gallery, both because of its joyfull, playful subject matter, and because of the nostalgic memories it triggers.

Hot Day in Kensington Market (1972) William Kurelek. Kurelek is best known for his paintings of life in the Canadian Prairies, but I love this frenetic scene of one of my favourite parts of Toronto.
posted by Kabanos at 7:27 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]


Basically any random background in a Studio Ghibli movie. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But: the capital-P Paintings that come to my mind were both in my local musuem when I was growing up. Sargent's Pailleron Children: the intensity of Marie-Louise's fury can only be gauged in person. Creeped me out so much as a kid. Then, 15 years later on a hot, miserable day in New York City, nearly run over, confronted by shitty humans at every turn... I went into the Met, and there they were, on loan, their disdainful stares the exact affirmation I needed that humans are trash.

And Francis Bacon's Study after Velázquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, which was the totemic image of my teenage rejection of Christianity.
posted by McBearclaw at 8:53 PM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]


I'm not one for paintings in general, but two works did give me a taste of the impact they have on others:

The Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg is my favourite, it's superficially nice to look at but also has a deep kindness.

And an honorable mention for The Wounded Angel, by the same.
posted by snusmumrik at 6:04 PM on April 18, 2023 [1 favorite]


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