Beautiful sad paintings
Artworks that are hard to look away from, even when you know where the story ends.
Read: Is Ophelia Already Dead in the Painting? · Why Is The Fighting Temeraire So Beautiful and So Sad?
Themes
Themes in art, sorted by feeling
I sort themes in art by feeling rather than by movement or century, because that is how paintings find me. If you know the mood you are in, start there.
Paintings about loneliness
Paintings that make solitude feel huge, and sometimes even hopeful.
Read: Why Does Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Feel So Lonely?
Paintings that feel nostalgic
Artworks that feel like memories you never had.
Read: Why Does Constable's The Cornfield Make Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Lived In?
Paintings with amazing light
Turner painting light as drama, Constable painting it as home, and Vermeer making a quiet room glow.
Read: Why Is The Fighting Temeraire So Beautiful and So Sad? · Why Does Constable's The Cornfield Make Me Nostalgic for a Time I Never Lived In?
Paintings about endings
Where beauty and loss sit side by side.
Read: Why Is The Fighting Temeraire So Beautiful and So Sad?
Tragic women in art
Ophelia, the Lady of Shalott and the other women that painters kept returning to, and what that says about the painters as much as the stories.
Paintings that feel mythic
Gods, legends and stories older than the paintings themselves.
Collection coming soon
Dark Romanticism art
The shadow side of Romantic painting: ruins, graveyards, storms and things half seen.
Collection coming soon
Symbolism art, explained simply
What the flowers, the water and the strange gold backgrounds were trying to say.
Collection coming soon