The painting America once voted its favourite
Jules Breton (French, 1827 to 1906) painted The Song of the Lark in 1884, oil on canvas, and it hangs in Gallery 222 of the Art Institute of Chicago under accession number 1894.1033. In Breton's field a young peasant woman is walking at dawn, stopped mid-step, listening to birdsong you cannot hear.
In 1934 the Chicago Daily News ran a contest to find the most beloved work of art in America. This picture won it, and Eleanor Roosevelt unveiled the result at the Century of Progress world's fair in Chicago, adding that it was her own favourite painting. That accession number is worth a second look: 1894.1033 means the museum had owned the canvas for forty years by the time the public voted it the country's favourite, and it came in with the Henry Field Memorial Collection.
The picture is also smaller than its reputation: at 110.6 by 85.8 centimetres it is a little over a metre tall, and the frame adds about 31 centimetres in each direction, to 142.3 by 116.9. Visitors who have only seen it reproduced tend to look for something monumental and walk past it once.
One detail is worth getting right, because it is where descriptions of this painting most often go wrong: she is standing and moving, not seated. The whole composition depends on the interrupted step, the body still going forward while the head has already turned to the sound.
What to actually look at
Give it more than the 30 seconds a busy gallery invites. Three things repay a longer look.
The light. This is dawn, not sunrise-as-decoration. The sky is doing two things at once: the cold blue that still holds the field, and the warm band at the horizon that has not yet reached her. Breton put the transition exactly where the eye lands first.
The feet. She is a working figure at the start of a working day, and the painting does not prettify that. The realism here is not in the face but below it.
The absent subject. There is no lark anywhere in the picture: the bird is entirely in her posture and in Breton's title, which is a considerable risk for a painter to take and the reason the image stays with people. You are watching someone listen.
Breton belongs to the French Realist current that took rural labour as a serious subject rather than a picturesque one. Reading the painting against that background, and against the sentimentality of much late-nineteenth-century rural genre painting, is what separates it from a calendar image.
The other works people come for, with their room numbers
If you have travelled to the Art Institute for one painting, you will not want to leave having seen only one. Four more works carry the same pull, and the museum's collection pages give a room number for each, from Gallery 240 to Gallery 263:
- A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884, Georges Seurat (1859 to 1891), painted between 1884 and 1886 with the painted border added in 1888 and 1889, 207.5 by 308.1 centimetres, Gallery 240
- The Bedroom, Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890), 1889, 73.6 by 92.3 centimetres, Gallery 241
- Water Lilies, Claude Monet (1840 to 1926), 1906, 89.9 by 94.1 centimetres, Gallery 243
- American Gothic, Grant Wood (1891 to 1942), 1930, 78 by 65.3 centimetres, Gallery 263
- Nighthawks, Edward Hopper (1882 to 1967), 1942, 84.1 by 152.4 centimetres, Gallery 262
Two things in Galleries 240 and 241 are worth knowing in advance, because almost no article mentions them. Seurat's small oil sketch for the Grande Jatte, 15.5 by 24.3 centimetres, hangs in Gallery 240 alongside the finished canvas, so you can see the idea and the 6.4-square-metre result in one glance. And Van Gogh's Self-Portrait of 1887 is in Gallery 241 with The Bedroom, which means two of his best-known works are in the same room rather than in separate wings.
Note the coincidence of dates: Seurat's Grande Jatte and Breton's Song of the Lark are both from 1884. Two painters, the same year, both working out how to put light on a canvas, one dissolving it into dots of pigment and the other keeping it whole. Seeing them within an hour of each other takes no planning beyond knowing the two room numbers, 240 and 222.
Beyond that list the collection runs to nearly 300,000 objects, with an Impressionist holding among the strongest anywhere, which is also the warning: 300,000 objects is not a museum you finish.
The building, the lions, and the scale of the Seurat
The Art Institute was founded in 1879 as both a museum and a school, and it has been in its present home since 1893, in a building put up for the World's Columbian Exposition at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street. The two bronze lions at the entrance are by Edward Kemeys and were unveiled on 10 May 1894. They are commonly said to have come from the 1893 fair itself. They did not: Kemeys's pair went up on 10 May 1894, months after the fair had closed, and the misconception is worth dropping before you repeat it to whoever you are visiting with.
One number changes how you plan the Seurat. At 207.5 by 308.1 centimetres it stands more than two metres tall and over three metres wide, about 6.4 square metres of canvas, which is nearly seven times the surface of the Breton in Gallery 222. Every reproduction you have seen shrinks it to a postcard, and that destroys the effect the technique depends on: the dots resolve into figures at a distance and dissolve again as you step closer. So the bench in Gallery 240 matters: sit down, look from across the room, then walk in until the surface breaks apart. Spend two minutes standing directly in front of it and you will have seen the paint but not the painting.
A realistic route for one visit
Two hours, five paintings, one loop, and five room numbers to follow: 240, 241, 243, 222, then 262 and 263.
Start in Gallery 240 with the Grande Jatte and its oil sketch, then step into Gallery 241 for The Bedroom and the 1887 Self-Portrait, then Gallery 243 for the Water Lilies. Take the Breton in Gallery 222 next, while your eye is still calibrated to nineteenth-century French painting; the contrast between his intact daylight and Seurat's fractured version is the point of doing it in this order.
Then cross to the American galleries for American Gothic in Gallery 263 and Nighthawks in Gallery 262. Leave those two for last deliberately: they are the best-known American paintings in the building, the crowd around them is constant, and they survive being seen in a crowd better than a quiet dawn field does.
If you have half a day rather than two hours, add one department you know nothing about, such as the Japanese prints, the Thorne miniature rooms or the arms and armour, rather than a sixth famous painting. The marginal return on another masterpiece is lower than the return on a surprise.
Practical notes before you go
Admission is free year-round for several groups, and this is the part worth checking against your own party: children aged 13 and younger, Chicago teens under 18, active-duty service members, Link and WIC cardholders, and Illinois educators all enter free. Illinois residents also get free admission on selected dates through the year, published as a schedule by the museum. Ticket prices are reduced for seniors, college and university students, and teens.
Two cautions about any article that prints room numbers such as Gallery 222, including this one. Museums rotate works, lend them to other institutions and close galleries for reinstallation, so a painting's location is a fact with a shelf life, and a work out on loan is simply not there at all. Each object page on the museum's own site shows its current gallery and whether it is on view, which is one minute of checking against a wasted crossing of the building: search the title, read the room number, and note the accession number, such as 1894.1033 for the Breton or 1926.224 for the Seurat, since titles repeat across a collection this size.
The same applies to opening hours: they vary by day and change around holidays, so confirm them for your date rather than relying on a figure printed in a guide.
About "25 must-see" lists
This page used to promise twenty-five essential artworks and then describe one. It is worth saying plainly, because the pattern is everywhere in museum guides: the number in the headline is chosen for the search engine, and the article delivers a fraction of it.
A list of twenty-five paintings is also not much use inside the building. Five works with a route between them is a visit, while twenty-five is a spreadsheet you abandon in the second gallery. If you want the full set, the museum's own collection search returns far more than twenty-five highlights with current room numbers attached, which is exactly what a static list cannot do.
So: one painting worth crossing a city for, four more worth the same trip, six room numbers, and an order that makes sense on the floor. That is the honest version of this article.