Routes
Plan your visit.
Room-by-room painting routes, one museum at a time. Every room number, date and detail below is checked against the museum’s own collection records.
The Louvre
The Musée d’Orsay
Impressionism at the Musée d’Orsay Manet, Caillebotte, Morisot, Monet and Van Gogh, five rooms on the upper level. →
Before Impressionism Ingres, Delacroix, Millet, Courbet and Manet, on the ground floor. →
The Musée d’Orsay away from the crowds Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, Vuillard and Bonnard, on the median level. → The National Gallery, London
Room 34: eighteenth-century England tells its own story Hogarth, Gainsborough and Stubbs — a marriage plot, a couple and their land, a horse larger than reason. →
Five rooms for the Dutch Golden Age From Hobbema’s flat landscape to Vermeer’s domestic light, taking in Van Dyck and Rembrandt. →
The Arnolfini Portrait: what Van Eyck actually painted The mirror, the inscription and a disputed identity, still debated six centuries later. → The Musée de l’Orangerie
Monet’s Water Lilies: inside the two oval rooms Why the Orangerie’s installation is unlike any other museum room. →
The School of Paris through its dealer’s eyes Modigliani, Soutine and Utrillo, seen through Paul Guillaume’s collection. →
Renoir, Room 12: painting to the very end Renoir’s last decade, and the link his dealer drew to Picasso and Matisse. → The Musée Jacquemart-André
The Italian Wing of the Jacquemart-André Museum Uccello, Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna and Carpaccio in two rooms. →
The reception rooms A Tiepolo fresco, a Bernini bust, and the art of entertaining Parisian society. →
The Library and the Study A Rembrandt, a royal cabinet, and Édouard André’s private taste. → The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
The German Renaissance, room by room Cranach, Baldung Grien and Holbein the Elder, from Bavaria to Saxony. → Fauves and Expressionists, the same year, two countries Vlaminck and Dufy alongside Kirchner, Pechstein and Nolde. → From geometry to dream Russian Constructivism, De Stijl and Surrealism, from Larionov to Dalí. → The Musée Picasso, Paris
Dulwich Picture Gallery, London
The Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Three golden Madonnas, a battle in perspective From Cimabue’s icon to Uccello’s battle, a century and a half of Florentine painting in two rooms. →
Before Botticelli The master who trained him, and two brothers, one of whom dissected corpses to paint muscles. →
Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo An angel painted by an apprentice, and a wedding that hired two geniuses at once. → MoMA, New York
The painting Picasso hid for nine years Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and its road from a Paris studio to MoMA. →
The Matisse room A studio repainted red, and a commission a Moscow collector first refused. →
The house that inspired Psycho Hopper, Wyeth and Neel — three American stories from 1925 to 1935. →
The Matisse room A studio repainted red, and a commission a Moscow collector first refused. →
The house that inspired Psycho Hopper, Wyeth and Neel — three American stories from 1925 to 1935. → Tate Britain, London
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
Two brothers-in-law, two dead Christs Mantegna and Bellini’s radically different visions, painted for the same family. →
The pupil who surpassed his master Raphael’s Sposalizio, and its journey to Milan in a Napoleonic officer’s luggage. →
Il Bacio’s hidden message A political message about Italian unity, disguised as a medieval kiss. → Cleveland Museum of Art
The face Picasso painted over An X-ray revealed a self-portrait hidden beneath Picasso’s La Vie. →
A Caravaggio lost for three centuries The only Caravaggio altarpiece in the US, and four witches painted for the Medici. →
Rubens paints his wife An intimate portrait five years before Isabella Brant’s death from plague. →
A Caravaggio lost for three centuries The only Caravaggio altarpiece in the US, and four witches painted for the Medici. →
Rubens paints his wife An intimate portrait five years before Isabella Brant’s death from plague. → National Portrait Gallery, London
The portrait that invented royal propaganda Elizabeth I’s Ditchley portrait, and Holbein’s Thomas Cromwell. → The Churchill portrait his wife destroyed A burned Churchill portrait, and Bacon’s small triptych of Lucian Freud. →
The faces of the Enlightenment Newton, Locke, Swift and Hogarth in a single room. → National Gallery of Art, Washington
The only Leonardo in the Americas A hidden love note beneath the paint, and a painting cut short of its hands. →
A painting Stalin sold in secret How a Soviet sale of Hermitage masterpieces founded an American museum. → The Rothko Room, born of a scandal A landmark lawsuit recovered the paintings now on view here. → Art Institute of Chicago
La Grande Jatte, next to its own sketch See Seurat’s brushwork before and after it broke into dots. →
Nighthawks and the wartime blackout Hopper’s most famous painting, born from Pearl Harbor darkness. →
American Gothic’s married-couple myth The models were Grant Wood’s sister and his dentist — not a couple. → Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
The room where the founders hang Portraits of the collectors, an alchemist and astrologers who built the museum. →
Uccello’s last known painting A night hunt in perfect perspective, next to an unattributable Madonna. →
The painting that inspired Virginia Woolf Sickert’s Ennui, and an early Van Gogh from his first Paris year. → Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Five Vermeers under one roof The world’s largest Vermeer collection, and a self-portrait hidden beneath one canvas. →
A self-portrait painted over an old canvas Van Gogh, Gauguin and Seurat’s final study for La Grande Jatte. →
Color against line: two rivals, one room Delacroix and Ingres, the great feud of nineteenth-century French painting. → Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Petit Palais, Paris
The Courbet banned from public view for a century From his first Salon success to a painting hidden until 1988. →
The Monet the Salon jury rejected Two versions of the same view, one tame, one true to his eye. →
A lost Rubens, a doubted Poussin The only trace of a masterpiece destroyed by fire in 1861. → Royal Museums Greenwich, London
An admiral shot “to encourage the others” Byng’s execution, and a defeated Napoleon watched by sightseers. →
From Armada triumph to naval disaster A century of English sea power, at its best and its worst. →
Glorious in Antarctica, lost in the Arctic Two ships, found again 170 years after they vanished. →