I don't have an all time fav painting but Pieter Bruegel the Elder has been my fav painter these last three years, and this may be my fav of his. The Hunters in the Snow (1565).
....and put your hands together for Mrs Barrett and her children Roger and Rosemary who have just entered the arena.
The School of Athens by Raphael, 1509-1510. It's kind of the Sgt. Pepper album cover of Renaissance art, as many of the figures in the painting are famous Greek philosophers. A bit right of center and braced against the wall is the scribe featured on G N' R's Use Your Illusion album covers. Sleep by Dali, 1937. Remember those Time-Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" books from the late '80s-early '90s? There was one book about dreams and it opened with a section on Surrealist art which included this painting. There's a piece here on why the technical composition is so successful, but the details that always stayed with me are the eerie balance of not quite day and not quite night, the mysterious structure in the background, and the text in that Time-Life book pointing out that the face resembles a fetus.... Almost twenty years ago I went to some artsy print shops in the city looking for new stuff to hang in my bedroom to replace my old metal band posters. I walk into one and there was a framed print of this painting, prominently placed there despite this not really being one of Dali's better known works, as if waiting for me to walk in. Still have it.
Maybe this... (Georges Seurat - Bathers at Asniere; I also like A Sunday Afternoon at the Grand Jatte; but I have to go all the way to Chicago to see that one; this is just up the road in the National Gallery) or possibly this... (Veronese - the Marriage at Cana; this is in the same room as the Mona Lisa at the Louvre; as I recall it takes up all the wall to your left if you're facing the Mona Lisa; obviously you can't make it all out here, but I just love all the detail and stuff going on in this painting) or possibly the Jackson Pollock posted on the previous page, or one similar. I love all these (I have a jigsaw of 'Blue Poles' that I got from the gallery in Canberra, Australia where the original hangs. That's a jigsaw you don't attempt more than once! When I finished it, I pasted it all to a board; gathering dust behind a wardrobe now I think; wife doesn't like it so has never let me hang it on the wall!) Here's a miniature...
Oh, I literally love the marine art and this one is a strikingly beautiful painting. One of my very favorites of this form of figurative art is The Ninth Wave (1850) by the russian painter Ivan Aivazovsky. Indeed, one of the greatest paintings ever.
But seriously... I don't have one in particular, but in general the Italian Renaissance fascinates me. When you see them in person, they look like they could have been painted yesterday. The colors are incredible. Here's one more or less at random:
As with some others here I don't have a favourite as there are many diverse paintings and artists I love, but this one came to mind as it's the first painting I remember being entranced by as a kid - Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico, from 1914 and my fave of his "metaphysical" paintings. Dig the skewed sight lines, too:
You need to see the one in the Smithsonian that looks as though light is actually coming out of it. We'll go one day and see it.
I wonder if you can help me find the painting i like Its of a nun there are incense burning on the floor She is in white there are beige and red tones thru out the paintinf and a persian/ oriental rug on the floor She has a vail and is either Hindi or Asian
