My favorites: Visual arts

I have simple tastes. I enjoy figurative art with a dreamlike mood. I generally prefer drawings and prints to painterly paintings. I also like paintings with a general composition resembling something a kindergartener would draw (sky on top, land with some figures at the bottom).

Northern Renaissance

  • Jean Fouquet, Melun Diptych
  • Rogier van der Weyden, Crucifixion Diptych

Italian Renaissance

  • Antonello da Messina, Saint Jerome in His Study
  • Giovanni Bellini, Holy Allegory
  • Sandro Botticelli
  • Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius
  • Fra Carnevale
  • Jacopo de’ Barbari, Naked Lovers (reverse side of Portrait of a German)

Mannerism and Late Renaissance

  • Jan Brueghel the Elder, Jonah Leaving the Whale
  • Antoine Caron, The Tiburtine Sibyl
  • Herri met de Bles, The Story of David and Bathsheba

Baroque

  • François de Nomé
  • Matthäus Merian the Elder, engravings for Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens
  • Dirck van Delen
  • Hendrik van Steenwijk II

Romanticism

  • Francisco de Goya, The Dog
  • Victor Hugo, drawings
  • Harry Clarke
  • Vilhelm Hammershøi
  • Max Klinger
  • Alphonse Osbert
  • Odilon Redon
  • Sidney Sime
  • Léon Spilliaert

Post-Symbolism, Surrealism, and related

  • Francis Bacon
  • Giorgio de Chirico
  • Max Ernst
  • René Magritte (in small doses)
  • Kay Sage
  • Austin Osman Spare
  • Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, drawings