The best Metropolitan Museum of Art artwork

Bruegel's fanfare for the common man is considered one of the defining works of Western art, but it wasn't always so. Sought out by patrons in his own lifetime, Bruegel emphasized the ordinary in a way that made him seem old-fashioned in the years following his death; his reputation remained in eclipse until 20th-century tastes revived his quotidian subject matter and vast, cinematic vistas. This composition was one of six created on the theme of the seasons. The time is probably early September: A group of peasants on the left cut and bundle ripened wheat, while the ones on the right take their midday meal. They're eating bread and drinking bowls of milk; one guy is sacked out with the top of his pants unbuttoned. This attention to detail continues throughout the painting, a procession of ever-granular observations receding into space. It was extraordinary for a time when landscapes served mostly as backdrops for religious paintings. Instead, Bruegel articulates a humanistic vision in which the ordinary outshines the divine.

The work of Francisco de Goya y Lucientes marks the transition from Old Master tradition to the birth of modern art. Beginning in the 1790s, his work shifted from bright, colorful depictions of peasants at play to much darker subjects: lunatic asylums, nightmares and the horrors of war. It's easy to suppose that this stylistic change was prompted by events. Goya became court painter to a Spanish dynasty in deep decline, and watched from afar as the French Revolution unfolded. He personally experienced one result: Napoleon's 1808 invasion of Spain. This image of an aristocratic child was probably painted after the boy's death at age eight in 1792. A postmortem provenance would explain the elegiac tone. Only his finery gives us an indication of his status; otherwise, he stands in a shallow space empty of everything except his pets: a cage of finches, a magpie on a string and a pair of evidently hungry cats. Though his face is wreathed in a penumbra of light, the rest of the composition is plunged into a brown murk that throws his red outfit into sharp relief. In this play of contrasts—light and dark, color and its relative absence, life and death—the painting evokes epochal transformations and Goya's reaction to them.

Photograph: Courtesy The Met/The Jules Bache Collection

Miró is generally considered to be one of most prominent figures in Surrealism, known for bold, graphic explorations of dreams and the subconscious. But during a ten-year period starting in the late 1920s, he began to experiment with the very act of painting itself, becoming what we’d call a deconstructionist today. He described his role as an “anti-painter” out to “assassinate” the medium. Of course, he did no such thing. Instead, he broke painting down into its constituent elements of figure and ground, support and surface. He enlarged the possibilities of the medium, making forays into collage and assemblage. He also reexamined modernism in the context of art history, pitting it against the old masters of yore. Dutch Interior (III) is a case in point. It’s one of three compositions inspired by postcards of 17th-century Dutch genre scenes that he picked up during a two-week trip to Holland. This particular image isn’t based on an interior at all, but rather a hunting scene of an archer going after birds—transformed here into an interplay of the artist’s signature amoeboid shapes. Even so, you can make out the hunter, his avian quarry and his arrows as they fly through the air.

Photograph: Peter Horree/Alamy Stock Photo

Born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola into a cultured French-Polish family, Balthus bucked the modernist trends of the 20th-century’s first half, embracing instead a figurative style with dark sexual undertones. He was a realist, but one who eschewed naturalism for a heavily stylized, mannerist approach that suited the surreal drama of his subjects—the most favorite of which were young girls on the cusp of puberty. The effect of his approach could be quite uncanny, with figures that seemed at once waxen and electrified with an erotic charge. Early on, his palette often resembled an Old Master painting yellowed with age. But starting around mid-century, he lightened his color scheme, most notably in this image of teenage nude examining herself in a mirror. Rather than appearing vulnerable, the girl possesses a sculptural monumentality abetted by the work’s life-size scale. Bathed in silvery light, she seems to have miraculously stepped out of ancient frieze into a room of a typical bourgeois home.

Photograph: Tomas Abad/Alamy Stock Photo