100 Great Paintings

Overview

100 Great Paintings is a British television series broadcast in 1980 on BBC 2, devised by Edwin Mullins. He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, the language of color, the hunt, and bathing, picking five paintings from each. The selection ranges from 12th-century China through the 1950s, with an emphasis on European paintings. He deliberately avoided especially famous paintings, such as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa or John Constable's The Haywain. The series is available on VHS or DVD. On the basis of the series, Mullins published the book Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated, which contained about half of the theme groups.