Genre is what a painting shows: a landscape, a portrait, a still life. Style, or movement, is how and when it was made, like Impressionism or Baroque. They're separate, so a landscape can be Romantic, Impressionist or Cubist.
Pick a genre to see its paintings and the museums that hold them. For style, browse art movements.
560 paintings · Religious
Religious paintings depict scenes from scripture and the lives of saints. Churches and patrons were the main source of commissions for centuries, so many famous works in European museums began as altarpieces or devotional pictures.
306 paintings · Portrait
Portraits record a specific person, from royal commissions to quiet studies of friends and family. Clothing, hands and props usually say something about status, so the small details are worth a second look.
157 paintings · Landscape
Landscape paintings put the natural world at the center: hills, rivers, fields, weather and light. The subject was minor in European art until the 1600s, when Dutch painters made it a specialty.
95 paintings · Self-Portrait
Self-portraits are artists painting themselves. Some are plain records of a face, others read as statements about ambition, age or identity, and many painters came back to the subject across a whole career.
72 paintings · Cityscape
Cityscapes show streets, squares, canals and skylines. Venetian view painters and Dutch townscape artists built whole careers on them, and later painters kept the subject going with boulevards and bridges.
70 paintings · Mythological
Mythological paintings tell stories from Greek and Roman myth, from gods and nymphs to heroes and monsters. They were a common way for painters to show large figure groups, drama and allegory.
51 paintings · Animal
Animal paintings feature horses, dogs, big cats, cattle and other creatures as the main subject. Artists studied anatomy and movement closely, and the subject runs from hunting scenes to farm studies.
34 paintings · Still Life
Still lifes arrange everyday objects such as fruit, glassware, books and tableware. Many 17th century Dutch examples carry quiet messages about time and the fragility of life, and the form stayed popular with modern painters.
33 paintings · Marine
Marine paintings cover the sea, harbors, ships and the weather around them. Dutch and British painters made seascapes a major subject, and coastlines stayed popular with Romantic and Impressionist artists.
33 paintings · Nude
Nudes study the human body, from classically inspired figures to modern, less idealized takes. This page lists works where the nude is the main subject, not a figure inside a mythological or religious story.
24 paintings · Floral
Flower paintings run from tightly detailed bouquets to loose garden studies. Flowers show up in plenty of other pictures, so this page only covers works where the flowers are the subject.
5 paintings · Everyday Life
Art historians call these genre scenes: ordinary people at work, at home or at leisure. Card players, kitchens, markets and village dances were a staple for Dutch painters of the 1600s.
3 paintings · History
History paintings show significant events and stories from history, literature and scripture, usually on a large scale. European academies ranked them above every other kind of painting.
1 painting · Abstract
Abstract paintings don't depict a recognizable scene. Color, shape, line and surface carry the work. The approach took hold in the early 20th century and grew through movements like Abstract Expressionism.