100 Great Paintings

Lore & Background

Edwin Mullins devised the series, selecting 100 paintings organized into 20 thematic groups, each containing five works. The selection spans from 12th-century Chinese painting to works from the 1950s, with a focus on European art. Mullins deliberately excluded especially famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and The Hay Wain. The series was broadcast in 1980 on BBC Two and later made available on VHS and DVD.

Reader's Guide

Based on the series, Mullins published the book Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated in 1981, which contained the 50 paintings broadcast to that point. A German translation appeared as 100 Meisterwerke in 1983. In 1985, a second volume was released only in Germany, covering the remaining 50 paintings. The series and its associated publications provided a structured thematic approach to art history, influencing later television art programming such as the West German WDR series 1000 Meisterwerke, which began in 1980 and ran through 1994, presenting single paintings in 10-minute broadcasts analyzed by art historians.

Did You Know?

• The series was devised by Edwin Mullins and broadcast in 1980 on BBC Two.
• Mullins chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, and bathing, each with five paintings.
• The selection deliberately avoided especially famous paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Hay Wain.
• A German translation of Mullins' book appeared as 100 Meisterwerke in 1983.

Curatorial Vision and Thematic Architecture

When Edwin Mullins set out to design a television series for BBC Two in 1980, he rejected the conventional approach of simply ranking masterpieces by fame. Instead, he organized one hundred paintings into twenty thematic clusters—subjects as varied as war, the Adoration, the language of colour, the hunt, and bathing—and selected exactly five works for each group. This structural choice meant that a viewer might encounter a 12th-century Chinese landscape alongside a 1955 Josef Albers composition, united not by chronology or nationality but by a shared visual or conceptual thread. Mullins also made a pointed editorial decision to steer clear of the most universally recognized canvases; Leonardo's Mona Lisa and Constable's The Hay Wain were conspicuously absent. While the selection leaned heavily toward European art, it still stretched from medieval China to the mid-twentieth century, and the finished programme was later made available on both VHS and DVD, extending its reach well beyond the original broadcast window.

From Broadcast to Book: The Publication Legacy

The television series did not exist in isolation; it served as the foundation for a written companion. In 1981, Mullins published Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated, a volume that covered the first fifty canvases that had already aired on BBC Two. The book's title itself signals its intent: not merely to catalogue but to unpack each work's meaning, technique, and context for a general audience. The project quickly crossed linguistic borders. A German edition appeared in 1983 under the title 100 Meisterwerke, translating the full scope of the series into the German-speaking market. Two years later, in 1985, a second volume was released exclusively in Germany, dedicating its pages to the remaining fifty paintings that had not been included in the initial English-language book. This staggered, market-specific publishing strategy ensured that the complete set of one hundred works eventually reached readers on both sides of the Channel, even though no single English volume ever contained them all.

The German Television Expansion

The cultural footprint of Mullins's project grew dramatically through a separate but related German television initiative. Between 1980 and 1994, the West German broadcaster WDR produced a long-running series initially titled 100 Meisterwerke aus den großen Museen der Welt, later shortened to 1000 Meisterwerke. Unlike the BBC programme's thematic groupings, this format presented a single painting per episode, with an art historian walking viewers through its analysis in a tightly structured ten-minute slot. The series was distributed across multiple networks—ARD, ORF, and BR—giving it a broad audience across German-speaking Europe. Its scheduling on Sunday evenings proved particularly effective: those broadcasts drew approximately five million viewers per episode, a remarkable figure for an art-history programme. Over its fourteen-year run, the format evolved from a hundred masterworks to a thousand, suggesting that the appetite for guided, episode-by-episode engagement with individual paintings was far deeper than the original BBC series had anticipated.

A Panorama Across Centuries and Schools

The one hundred paintings selected for the series trace an extraordinary arc of artistic history, beginning with a 12th-century Chinese work, Clear Weather in the Valley, and extending to mid-century pieces such as Lucio Fontana's 1957 spatial concept and Alberto Giacometti's 1955 portrait of Jean Genet. Within that span, the list encompasses an astonishing breadth of movements and media: Caravaggio's dramatic chiaroscuro, Dürer's meticulous portraiture, Van Gogh's turbulent self-portrait and café scenes, the Futurist speed of Balla and Boccioni, the fractured planes of Braque and Gris, the dream logic of Dalí and Ernst, and the raw social commentary of Dix, Grosz, and Hannah Höch. Religious subjects appear alongside landscapes, nudes, still lifes, and abstract compositions, while the thematic grouping—war, bathing, the hunt, colour—forces unexpected juxtapositions. The result is not a linear survey but a mosaic in which a Bosch triptych sits beside a Cézanne bather and a Jasper Johns flag, each illuminated by its neighbours rather than by a single narrative of progress.

Gallery