From 36,000-year-old cave paintings to modern masters and nearly 600 years of tarot cards. For each work: who made it, where you can see it today, and the weather there right now.
Oldest first.Cards with an orange top name the artist: history kept only a few of those names.Loading the weather at each site…
Artists: Ice Age painters, names unknown
Lions, horses, rhinoceroses, and mammoths drawn in charcoal and red ochre, using the bulges of the rock for shape and movement. Found in 1994, they are among the oldest known figurative paintings on Earth.
See it: the cave is sealed to protect it; a full-size replica, Grotte Chauvet 2, is nearby.
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Learn more ↗Artists: generations of Aboriginal painters
Fish, turtles, and people painted in the "X-ray" style that shows bones and organs, layered on the same shelters over countless generations. It is one of the longest continuous art traditions in the world, cared for today by the Bininj/Mungguy traditional owners.
See it: Ubirr and Burrungkuy (Nourlangie) in Kakadu National Park.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Jōmon potters, names unknown
Some of the oldest pottery on Earth, named for the cord ("jōmon") pressed into the wet clay. Thousands of years later, potters in Niigata built the wild "flame-style" pots, whose rims rise like fire.
See it: Tokyo National Museum, and the Tokamachi City Museum, which holds a flame-style pot that is a National Treasure.
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Learn more ↗Artists: San hunter-gatherers
Eland, hunters, dancers, and scenes from the spirit world, painted in rock shelters high in the mountains. The range holds tens of thousands of images, the largest group of rock paintings in Africa south of the Sahara.
See it: Maloti-Drakensberg Park, with guided walks to shelters like Game Pass.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Enheduanna, poet and high priestess
The daughter of King Sargon of Akkad, she served the moon god at Ur and wrote hymns to the goddess Inanna. She is the earliest author in the world known by name.
See it: the Disk of Enheduanna, which shows her at worship, is at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Lapita potters, ancestors of today's Polynesians
Pots stamped with fine toothed patterns, including faces, made by the seafarers who first settled the remote Pacific. Following the pottery traces one of the greatest voyages in human history.
See it: museums in New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji. The name comes from the Lapita site in New Caledonia.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Thutmose, royal sculptor
The painted limestone portrait of Queen Nefertiti was found in 1912 in the ruins of Thutmose's own workshop. It is one of the few ancient masterpieces whose maker we can name.
See it: Neues Museum, Berlin.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Olmec sculptors, names unknown
Seventeen giant basalt heads, some nearly 10 feet tall, each wearing a close-fitting helmet and likely showing a real ruler. The stone was hauled from mountains many miles away.
See it: Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, and Parque-Museo La Venta in Villahermosa.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Nok sculptors, names unknown
Fired-clay heads and figures with pierced eyes and carefully dressed hair. They are the oldest known large sculptures in Africa south of the Sahara.
See it: the National Museum in Lagos, and collections around the world.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Babylonian brick makers and glazers
A city gate faced in brilliant blue glazed brick, with rows of dragons and bulls in raised relief, built for King Nebuchadnezzar II.
See it: rebuilt in Berlin's Pergamon Museum, which is closed for renovation, so check before you go. Some panels are in other museums, including Chicago's Oriental Institute.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Exekias, potter and vase painter
Two heroes of the Trojan War bend over a game in the middle of the fighting, painted in black on a red clay jar. Exekias signed it as both maker and painter.
See it: Vatican Museums, Rome.
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Learn more ↗Artists: craftsmen from across the Persian Empire
Staircases carved with long processions of people from every land of the empire, each group in its own dress and bringing its own gifts. Alexander the Great burned the palace in 330 BCE, but much of the carving survived.
See it: the ruins of Persepolis, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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Learn more ↗Artists: the Nazca people
A hummingbird, a monkey, a spider, and hundreds of straight lines, made by clearing dark stones to show the pale ground beneath. Many are so large they are best seen from the air.
See it: on a flight over the desert, or from the viewing tower beside the Pan-American Highway.
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Learn more ↗Artists: thousands of workers; some figures carry the stamped names of their workshop foremen
Thousands of life-size clay soldiers, horses, and chariots buried to guard the tomb of Qin Shi Huang, China's first emperor. Farmers digging a well found them in 1974.
See it: the Emperor Qinshihuang's Mausoleum Site Museum, outside Xi'an.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Buddhist monks and painters, names unknown
About thirty temples and monasteries cut into a cliff above a river gorge, their walls painted with stories of the Buddha's past lives.
See it: the Ajanta Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Dioskourides of Samos, mosaic maker
A tiny-tile scene from a comedy: masked musicians play a tambourine, cymbals, and a double flute. The artist set his own name into the mosaic.
See it: National Archaeological Museum of Naples.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Gandharan sculptors, names unknown
Some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form, carved in gray schist with wavy hair and flowing robes that echo Greek and Roman sculpture.
See it: the Peshawar Museum and the Taxila Museum in Pakistan.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Moche potters, names unknown
Clay jars shaped as faces so lifelike that the same people can be recognized on different pots, at different ages.
See it: Museo Larco in Lima, and the Huaca de la Luna near Trujillo.
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Learn more ↗Artists: Aksumite stonemasons
Towering granite monuments carved to look like many-story buildings, with false doors and windows. One was taken to Rome in 1937 and came home in 2005.
See it: the Northern Stelae Park in Aksum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Wang Xizhi, calligrapher
Written at a spring gathering of poets, this short preface is the most famous work of Chinese calligraphy. The original is lost; it lives on through careful copies made centuries ago.
See it: the Palace Museum in Beijing holds a celebrated Tang dynasty copy.
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Learn more ↗Dates are approximate, as they are for most ancient art. Weather: Open-Meteo, the same free source as our Global page. Temperatures in °F, times in each site's own local time.
Fourteen works that changed what art could be, from the painting that named Impressionism to a room of endless lights. Four are an hour from La Porte, in Chicago. Pictures appear only for works old enough to be in the public domain; for newer ones, follow “Learn more.”
Artist: Claude Monet
A harbor at dawn in a few quick strokes: blue haze, dark boats and a small orange sun. A critic mocked the title, and the name stuck. That’s how Impressionism got its name.
See it: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.
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Artist: Gustave Caillebotte
Parisians under umbrellas cross wet cobblestones on a gray afternoon. Caillebotte caught an everyday rainy moment like a photograph, on a canvas almost 7 by 9 feet.
See it: the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Artist: Vincent van Gogh
Van Gogh painted the view from his window at an asylum in southern France, adding a village, a flame-like cypress and a sky that swirls with stars and a crescent moon.
See it: the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
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Learn more ↗_-_1933.1155_-_Art_Institute_of_Chicago.jpg/500px-Claude_Monet_-_Stack_of_Wheat_(Snow_Effect,_Overcast_Day)_-_1933.1155_-_Art_Institute_of_Chicago.jpg)
Artist: Claude Monet
Monet painted the same stacks of wheat near his home again and again, in snow, frost, fog and low sun, to show how weather and light change one scene.
See it: the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns six from the series.
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Artist: Edvard Munch
A figure clutches its face on a road above the Oslo fjord under a blazing red sky. Munch wrote that he sensed “an infinite scream passing through nature.” Scientists still debate whether the sky was real: red sunsets after the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, or rare “mother-of-pearl” clouds.
See it: the National Museum, Oslo. The Munch Museum holds other versions.
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Artist: Gustav Klimt
Two lovers wrapped in robes of real gold leaf kneel at the edge of a flower meadow. It’s the high point of what’s called Klimt’s “golden period.”
See it: the Upper Belvedere, Vienna.
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Artist: Wassily Kandinsky
One of the first great abstract paintings: no people or places, just color and line meant to work like music. Kandinsky made dozens of studies first, then painted the final canvas in a few days.
See it: the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Tarsila do Amaral
A giant figure with enormous feet sits beside a cactus under a hot sun. The title means “the man who eats people” in the Tupi language, and it sparked a Brazilian art movement: take ideas from everywhere and make them your own.
See it: MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires).
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Learn more ↗Artist: Frida Kahlo
Two Fridas sit hand in hand under a stormy sky, their hearts showing and joined by a single vein. Kahlo painted it the year she and Diego Rivera divorced.
See it: Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Georgia O’Keeffe
After years of flying, O’Keeffe painted the view down onto rows of white clouds stretching to a pink horizon. At 24 feet wide, it’s the largest painting she ever made.
See it: the Art Institute of Chicago.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Emily Kam Kngwarray
A huge web of white lines on black, about 8 meters (26 feet) wide, tracing the underground roots of the pencil yam, a food and a Dreaming of her country. She began painting on canvas in her late seventies.
See it: the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, as Anwerlarr anganenty.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Anish Kapoor
Chicagoans call it “the Bean”: 168 stainless steel plates welded and polished until the seams disappeared. It mirrors the skyline and the sky, so it looks different in every kind of weather.
See it: Millennium Park, Chicago. Free and outdoors.
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Learn more ↗Artist: El Anatsui
From across the room it looks like shimmering cloth. Up close it’s thousands of flattened aluminum caps and seals from liquor bottles, joined with copper wire. El Anatsui, born in Ghana, has worked in Nigeria for decades.
See it: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Yayoi Kusama
Step into a small mirrored room full of hanging colored lights, and they repeat forever in every direction. Its full title is The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away. Kusama has been making art about dots and infinity for more than 70 years.
See it: The Broad, Los Angeles.
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Learn more ↗Tarot began in northern Italy in the 1400s as a card game, with trump cards painted by hand for noble families. Using the cards to tell fortunes came much later, in France in the 1780s. These five decks shaped how tarot looks today.
Artist: Bonifacio Bembo (attributed)
Painted by hand, with backgrounds of gold leaf, for the ruling families of Milan. 74 cards survive, the most complete deck of its time. Four are lost, including the Devil and the Tower.
See it: 35 cards at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, 26 at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, and 13 with the Colleoni family in Bergamo.
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Learn more ↗Artists: unknown engravers, colored by hand
The oldest complete 78-card tarot, and the first to put a scene on every card, even the number cards. Pamela Colman Smith likely saw photos of it in London in 1907, and some of its scenes show up in her famous deck.
See it: the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, which acquired it in 2009.
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Learn more ↗Artists: card makers such as Jean Noblet, Jean Dodal and Nicolas Conver
Printed from carved woodblocks and colored through stencils in a few bold colors. This pattern became the standard, and most decks since follow its order of 22 trump cards.
See it: early decks at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Conver’s 1760 design is still printed.
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Artist: Pamela Colman Smith, with A. E. Waite
Smith drew all 78 cards in about six months for a flat fee, giving every card a scene. It became the best-known tarot in the world, while she died poor in 1951 and her name was left off the box for decades. The card of the day below uses her 1909 art.
See it: her original drawings are lost. Early printings survive in libraries and private collections.
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Learn more ↗Artist: Salvador Dalí
The producers of the James Bond film Live and Let Die asked Dalí to paint its tarot cards. His fee was too high, so another artist made the film’s deck, but Dalí kept going, mixing surrealism with famous old paintings. It was published in 1984.
See it: the deck is still printed. Dalí’s own museum is in Figueres, Spain.
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Learn more ↗Pictures on this page are public-domain works, loaded from Wikimedia Commons. Newer works are still under copyright, so we describe them and link to more instead.
Tarot can’t tell the future, and we won’t pretend it can. For centuries, though, these pictures have been a good prompt for thinking things over. Today’s card is picked by the date, so everyone sees the same one.
⛅ Weather in this card: a clear night full of stars
What’s painted: A woman kneels by a pool under eight bright stars, pouring water onto the land and into the pool.
Traditionally stands for: hope, renewal and calm after a storm
Think about: What gives me hope right now?
The 22 picture cards of the 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith deck, painted by Pamela Colman Smith (public domain).