A figure in a burgundy t-shirt and black skinny leg pants with electric blue chin-length hair stands facing away from us. They are partially turned towards a large checkerboard black-and-white textile that hangs suspended between two walls. It is tied to the structure by thick red fabric, and more of the black-and-white fabric.

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Shown from the chest up, an older man with pale, peachy skin, wearing a high-collared black coat and a cream-white, ruffled collar, is shown against a deep wine-red background in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled to our right and he turns his face to look at us with gray eyes under pale gray eyebrows. He has a hooked nose and jowls along his chin line. His cheeks are flushed and his lips are set in a line. His white hair flares out along the sides of his head and is tied at the nape of his neck with a ribbon loosely painted and outlined with black. His ink-black coat has silvery gray highlights along the high collar and his right shoulder, to our left. The background is painted with light brushstrokes, deepening from scarlet red around his face to black at the upper corners.

Article:  George Washington, Pictured

For centuries, artists have depicted the military general—in paint, in print, and in plaster. These portraits continue to give us insight into Washington’s emotional life, military presence, and cultural footprint.

Article:  A Peacemaker’s Prayer for Change in Birmingham

Joe Minter has spent more than three decades creating an environmental artwork on his property. He hopes it can heal the world’s spiritual wounds through its messages of love and connection.

Close to us, a young man and three boys sit or recline in a small sailboat that tips to our left on a choppy dark green sea in this horizontal painting. The billowing sail extends off the top left corner of the canvas and is echoed in the background to our right by the tall sails of another ship in the distance. The horizon line comes about a third of the way up the composition, and puffy gray and white clouds sweep across the turquoise sky. The sun lights the scene from our right so the boys’ ruddy faces are in shadow under their hats. The young man and boys all face our left so they lean against and into the boat as it cants up to our right. The boy nearest the sail to our left reclines across the bow. Next to him to our right, a younger boy perches on the edge of the boat and holds on with both hands. The oldest, in a red shirt, sits on the floor of the boat as he maneuvers the sail with a rope. Closer to us and to our right, a younger boy sits with his bare feet pressed together in front of his bent knees on the back edge of the boat, gazing into the distance over his right shoulder as he handles the tiller. The artist signed and dated the painting in dark letters in the lower right corner: “HOMER 1876.”

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As the United States emerged from the Civil War, Homer spent years perfecting a painting to embody his hopes for America’s future. 

Artist Hannah Chalew in her New Orleans studio

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Article:  Photographing American Mining and Energy

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The image features a person with their upper body visible and slightly turned to the side. Their face is tilted upwards, and their mouth is open wide, displaying their teeth. The person's facial features are partially obscured due to low light. Their hair is short, and they are wearing earrings. They are dressed in a dark halter-top that reveals their shoulders, and they have a pendant necklace. The rest of the image is dark with little visible detail.

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Video:  "Where the Earth Meets the Sky”

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Our series In Plain Sight explores what it means to open yourself up to an art museum, one artwork, or conversation, at a time. The series Sound Thoughts on Art explores the intersection between sight and sound.

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In Plain Sight: You Already Belong in This Museum

A parent and child look at Edgar Degas's The Riders together

In Plain Sight: Finding Your First (Art) Love

In Plain Sight: What to Do When You Don’t “Get” Modern Art

A young woman with pale, peachy skin and flushed cheeks sits facing our right in profile as she plays a guitar in this horizontal painting. The scene is painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft look and making some of the details indistinct. At the center of the composition, the guitar rests against the woman’s shoulder so it almost spans the width of the painting. The instrument has a caramel-brown body, and the dark brown neck lightens to slate gray by the sound hole. The woman’s eyes are lowered as she looks toward her left hand, her long fingers pinning the strings along the fretboard. She plucks the strings with her other hand. Her hair is covered in a red headscarf tied at the nape of her neck. One end rests on her left shoulder, farther from us, and the other hangs down her back. A low, flat-topped, black, brimmed hat sits atop the scarf. The woman’s features are delicate, and her pink lips are parted. She wears a gold chain with an oval pendant around her neck. Her jacket is gold with a pattern loosely painted with dabs of lapis blue, butter yellow, and rose pink. A yellow ribbon or band is tied to the neck of the guitar and slung over her shoulder. The indistinct space behind her is painted with strokes of moss green, goldenrod yellow, and a few swipes of marigold orange near her face. The artist signed and dated the painting in brown in the lower right corner: “Renoir.98.”

Sonia De Los Santos and Auguste Renoir’s “Young Spanish Woman with a Guitar”

A six-story, narrow building stands alone in an otherwise unoccupied lot under the deck of a high bridge, with a river and cityscape in the background in this horizontal painting. Dozens of people, small in scale, are each painted with a few swipes of black and some with peach-colored faces. They gather at the foot of the building and around a fire to our left, near the lower left corner of the composition. The fire is painted with a dash of orange, a few touches of canary yellow, and a smudge of gray smoke. Several more people stand and sit against the building, which has a streetlamp near its entrance. The back end of the building angles away from us to our right, so we see the narrow, front entrance side to our left. Each of the six floors of the building has two windows with fire escape ladders on the narrow side we can see. Some strokes in red and white on the lower levels of the long, flat side of the building suggest signs or posters. The top story glows a warm sienna brown in sunlight, while the rest of the building and the scene below are in shadow. More people walk along a grayish-violet fence that encloses the lot beyond the building. The ground is painted thickly with slate gray, pale, sage green, and one smear of white to suggest snow. To our right and a short distance from us, a white horse pulls a carriage near the foot of the bridge. The ivory-white, concrete piling rises up and off the right edge of the canvas and supports the deck of the bridge above. Only a sliver of the brick-red underside of the bridge is visible, skimming the top edge of the painting in the upper right corner. Two twiggy, barren trees grow up beyond the muted purple fence, and the landscape beyond is bright in the sunlight. A terracotta-orange building rises along the left edge of the painting, with the area between it and the lot under the bridge filled with thickly painted patches of butter yellow, amethyst purple, and sage green. Beyond that, an ice-blue river flows across the composition. The shore beyond is lined with patches of beige and tan paint that could be buildings. A black tugboat puffs bright white smoke in the river. The sky above is frosty white. The artist signed the work with dark blue in the lower left corner of the painting, “Geo Bellows.”

Maria Schneider and George Bellows’s “The Lone Tenement”

Delfeayo Marsalis and Hawkins Bolden’s “Untitled”

A naked man with ghostly white skin sits upright in a canopied bed set in a narrow room in this tall, vertical painting. Wearing a black cap, he looks to our left in profile toward a skeleton who comes through a door along the left edge of the composition. The man gestures at the skeleton with one hand and, with the other, toward a bag of money held up by a small demon next to the bed to our left. The skeleton wears a white shroud and holds an arrow. A winged angel kneels next to the man in the bed, one hand on the man’s shoulder and the other lifted to gesture at a crucifix hanging in the window over the door. A small devil on the canopy above looks down onto the bed. At the foot of the bed, a man wearing a green robe and headdress drops coins into a sack held by another demon. Three more demons crawl about and hide under the chest. Pieces of armor and weapons lie on the ground to the right in front of a stone ledge in the foreground. Two pieces of clothing drape over the ledge to our left.

Peter Sheppard Skærved and Hieronymus Bosch’s “Death and the Miser”

A young man sets out in a golden boat on a river that winds from the bottom right corner of this horizontal painting across a lush landscape and into the distance before disappearing beyond two rocky outcroppings far off to our right. Hazy in the distance, the jagged peaks of a barren red mountain rise into an almost cloudless blue sky. To our left, a semi-transparent, white palace looms above and beyond the mountain, filling most of the upper left quadrant of the composition. Hills and valleys leading from the mountain and palace are dotted with trees and carpeted with grass. A winged and haloed angel wearing a white robe stands on the bank of the river under a towering palm tree in the foreground, in the bottom right corner of the canvas. The angel has pale skin and long golden hair. One hand is lifted toward the palace or a young man in a boat in the river nearby. The small boat is angled away from the riverbank to our left and toward the palace. The boat is ornately decorated and at its bow, a winged, golden figure holds an hourglass aloft above her head. The young man has pale skin, shoulder-length brown hair, and he wears a red and gold tunic. A profusion of flowers and trees line the riverbank.

Daniel Ho and Thomas Cole’s “Voyage of Life” Series

This print shows a person sitting down with their knees drawn up to their chest and their arms folded on their knees, their head resting on their arms. The person has short, curly hair, and they are wearing a jacket, pants, and shoes. Their face is mostly obscured by their arms and hands. Their skin and hair appear to be black, outlined with thin cream-colored lines. The background features a textured pattern resembling a brick wall. Below the print is a signature for "M. Burroughs" and the year 1953, with the words "Sleeping Boy" written on the left. A border of cream-colored paper surrounds the print.

Sa-Roc and Margaret Burroughs’s “Sleeping Boy”

Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.

Jenny Scheinman and El Greco’s “Laocoön”

Created with tiny, colored stones and glass, this mosaic shows groups of people along and near the edge of a brilliant, topaz-blue body of water with a large, lemon-yellow, stylized sun in the sky in this horizontal composition. The aquamarine blue and vibrant yellow along with lime green, lilac purple, oyster white, and teal used in the people and landscape give this work a shimmering look. A pair of people recline together under a tree in the lower right corner. A sheep stands nearby, and a bird perches in the tree above. Beyond the tree and to our left, a cluster of box-like forms suggests a city in the distance. Larger in scale, so seeming closer to us, a man wearing a lapis-blue toga and a yellow cap holds a stringed instrument, a lyre, in front of his body. To the left, at the center of the composition, a trio of women each wearing amethyst-purple, magenta-pink, or lapis-blue dresses stand close to each other. They have long, dark hair and their bodies and garments are outlined in black. Between them and the large sun to our left, a winged horse with a buttercup-yellow body and turquoise-blue wings rears up. Near the upper left corner, the stylized sun is represented by a disk surrounded by pointed peaks, surrounded by a larger disk outlined with another ring of triangular points. A winged person holding a set of pan pipes flies above the sun to our left, over a small crescent moon below. Near the lower left corner, two groups of people gather around a body of bright blue water occupied by two fish. The artist signed and dated the work in the lower right corner: “MArC ChAgAll 69.” The mosaic is displayed outside in front of a screen of trees, with a band of bushes with green and orange leaves below.

Dom Flemons and Marc Chagall’s “Orphée”

Series

West to East

Travel across America with us in this special series of articles and videos to learn how artists are inspired by the places they call home.

All of the series

A Peacemaker’s Prayer for Change in Birmingham

"Where the Earth Meets the Sky”

Artist Hannah Chalew in her New Orleans studio

What Is an Artist’s Role in Preserving Louisiana’s Coastline?

Art that Represents, and Misrepresents, the US-Mexico Border

Emmi Whitehorse Paints the Harmonies of Her Homelands

Sentinels and Sprawl: Photographs of the Saguaro Cactus

Called Back: On George Morrison, Land Acknowledgement, and Returning Home

An installation view of Grant Wood's Corn Room (1926) at the Sioux City Art Center, Permanent Collection, 2007.17, Gift of Alan Fredregill

An installation view of Grant Wood's Corn Room (1926) at the Sioux City Art Center, Permanent Collection, 2007.17, Gift of Alan Fredregill

Iowa Artists Craft Complex Visions of the Rural

Modernist Barns and Modern Farmers

Potter Richard Bresnahan Navigates an “Eco-mutual” Future

Rick Lowe's art blends canvas and community in the Third Ward

Marie Watt Explores the Story of Turtle Island

Create Like a Great

Our ongoing video series highlights contemporary artists modeling the techniques of their creative heroes.

Paint Like a Great: John Singer Sargent

Sculpt Like a Great: Antonio Canova

Photograph Like a Great: Dorothea Lange

Print Like a Great: Elizabeth Catlett

Artists 101

Brush up on key and unexpected facts about artists with our series of quick reads.

Who Is Anni Albers? 8 Things to Know

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Who Is Charles Ethan Porter? 7 Things to Know

Who Is Dorothea Lange? 6 Things to Know

Elizabeth Catlett in her studio, 1942

Charles White, Elizabeth Catlett in Her Studio, 1942, Courtesy of The Charles White Archives.

Who Is Elizabeth Catlett? 12 Things to Know

The painting features a valley with purple and brown mountains in the distance, surrounding a reflective body of water with a small rowboat floating on it. Closer to us, there are gray rocks, brown tree trunks and branches, and lush green vegetation at the edge of the water. The sky above is painted in warm shades of yellow, peach, and orange, which transition to pale greenish-blue at the top. The water below reflects these colors, as well as those of the distant mountain and surrounding trees.

Who Is Elizabeth Gilbert Jerome? 5 Things to Know

Who Is Ellsworth Kelly? 10 Things to Know

Greg Weight, Emily Kngwarreye, 1994, gelatin silver photograph on paper, National Portrait Gallery of Australia, Gift of Patrick Corrigan AM 2004. Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program. © Gregory Weight/Copyright Agency, 2024

Who is Emily Kam Kngwarray?

Who Is I. M. Pei? 10 Things to Know

This painting looks like a family portrait with five people: two seated adults and three children. The person on the far left is a seated woman with dark hair styled up and short, curling bangs, wearing a gray dress with puffed sleeves and lace details at the neckline. She holds a folded piece of paper in her lap and has one arm around the girl next to her. On her right stand two young girls with curly reddish-brown hair tied back, both dressed in white dresses with puffed sleeves and lace around the necklines. The girl to the left holds a pink flower, while the other holds a small pink bud. On their right is a seated man with short reddish-brown hair, wearing a dark jacket over a yellow vest and a white cravat and green trousers, holding a small book partially open. Standing to the right, partially behind the man, is a young boy dressed in a green coat with gold buttons over a pink vest and white shirt. All five of the people have pale skin. Behind the family is a black semi-circle, and around that is a gradient of brown, darker at the top and lighter towards the bottom.

Who Is Joshua Johnson? 7 Things to Know

Who Is Marisol? 7 Things to Know

Who Is Mark Rothko? 9 Things to Know

The Art of Time Lapse

Our most popular video series reveals the magic of the creative process from start to finish.

Master Printmaker LaToya Hobbs Creates a Woodblock Print Inspired by Elizabeth Catlett

John Hitchcock’s Mesmerizing Art Installation From Start to Finish

A Sculptor Recreates Antonio Canova’s “Venus," From Clay to Marble

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You’re Invited to Anna Fox’s “Work Stations” 80s Party

Alexander Calder’s “Untitled” Returns to the Sky in the East Building’s Atrium

Take Felix Gonzalez-Torres's “Untitled” With You

Watch Daniel Lind-Ramos Install His "Figura De Poder" From Start to Finish

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