Christian iconography

Featured Artworks

The Child's Bath

Mary Cassatt (1893)

Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893) recasts an ordinary ritual as modern devotion. From a steep, print-like vantage, interlocking stripes, circles, and diagonals focus attention on touch, care, and renewal, turning domestic labor into a subject of high art [1][3]. The work synthesizes Impressionist sensitivity with Japonisme design to monumentalize the private sphere [1][2].

American Gothic

Grant Wood (1930)

Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) turns a plain Midwestern homestead into a moral emblem by binding two flinty figures to the strict geometry of a Carpenter Gothic gable and a three‑tined pitchfork. The painting’s cool precision and echoing verticals create a compressed ethic of work, order, and restraint that can read as both tribute and critique [1][2][3].

The Third of May 1808

Francisco Goya (1814)

Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 turns a specific reprisal after Madrid’s uprising into a universal indictment of state violence. A lantern’s harsh glare isolates a civilian who raises his arms in a cruciform gesture as a faceless firing squad executes prisoners, transforming reportage into modern anti-war testimony [1][2].

The Arnolfini Portrait

Jan van Eyck (1434)

In The Arnolfini Portrait, Jan van Eyck stages a poised encounter between a richly dressed couple whose joined hands, a single burning candle, and a convex mirror transform a domestic interior into a scene of status and sanctity. The painting asserts the artist’s own presence—"Johannes de eyck fuit hic 1434"—as if to validate the moment while showcasing oil painting’s power to make belief tangible through light, texture, and reflection [1][2].

The Son of Man

Rene Magritte (1964)

Rene Magritte’s The Son of Man stages a crisp everyman in bowler hat and overcoat before a sea horizon while a green apple hovers to block his face. The tiny glimpse of one eye above the fruit turns a straightforward portrait into a riddle about seeing and knowing [1][2].

Liberty Leading the People

Eugene Delacroix (1830)

Liberty Leading the People turns a real street uprising into a modern myth: a bare‑breasted Liberty in a Phrygian cap thrusts the tricolor forward as Parisians of different classes surge over corpses and rubble. Delacroix binds allegory to eyewitness detail—Notre‑Dame flickers through smoke, a bourgeois in a top hat shoulders a musket, and a pistol‑waving boy keeps pace—so that freedom appears as both idea and action [1][2]. After its 2024 cleaning, sharper blues, whites, and reds re‑ignite the painting’s charged color drama [4].

The Gleaners

Jean-Francois Millet (1857)

Three peasant women bend in a solemn rhythm, gleaning leftover stalks under a dry, late-afternoon light. In the far distance, tiny carts, haystacks, and an overseer on horseback signal abundance and authority, while the foreground figures loom with monumental gravity, asserting the dignity of labor amid inequality [1][2].

The Weeping Woman

Pablo Picasso (1937)

Picasso’s The Weeping Woman turns private mourning into a public, iconic emblem of civilian grief. Shattered planes, acidic greens and purples, and jewel-like tears force the viewer to feel the fracture of perception that follows trauma [1][2].

Campbell's Soup Cans

Andy Warhol (1962)

Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans turns a shelf-staple into art, using a gridded array of near-identical red-and-white cans to fuse branding with painting. By repeating 32 flavors—Tomato, Clam Chowder, Chicken Noodle, and more—the work stages a clash between mass production and the artist’s hand [1][3].

Marilyn Diptych

Andy Warhol (1962)

Marilyn Diptych crystallizes the paradox of fame: dazzling allure and inevitable decay. Warhol’s 50 repeated silkscreens—color at left, fading grayscale at right—turn a movie-star headshot into a mass-produced icon and a memento of mortality [1][2].