# The 14 Greatest Animal Artworks of All Time

> Thirty thousand years of animals on walls, canvas and paper, plus one twelve-metre terrier made of flowers.

*By YPB Team · Published September 19, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-14-greatest-animal-artworks-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Great Wave off Kanagawa** — score 1000/1000
   Hokusai's woodblock print, where the wave itself reads as a clawed animal above the boats.
2. **Whistlejacket** — score 873/1000
   George Stubbs's life-size portrait of a rearing racehorse against a bare ground, with no rider and no landscape.
3. **Dogs Playing Poker** — score 753/1000
   C. M. Coolidge's cigar-company commissions, the most mocked and most recognised animal paintings in America.
4. **Bull Leaping Fresco** — score 668/1000
   The Minoan fresco from Knossos showing acrobats vaulting a charging bull.
5. **The Lion Hunt of Ashurbanipal** — score 565/1000
   Assyrian palace reliefs from Nineveh, carved around 645 BC, and among the most admired animal sculpture ever cut.
6. **Young Hare** — score 565/1000
   Albrecht Durer's watercolour hare from 1502, painted hair by hair.
7. **Guernica** — score 439/1000
   Picasso's bull and screaming horse at the centre of the twentieth century's most reproduced anti-war painting.
8. **Chauvet Cave Lions** — score 439/1000
   A panel of hunting lions drawn over thirty thousand years ago, the oldest known figurative animal art.
9. **Puppy** — score 439/1000
   Jeff Koons's twelve-metre West Highland terrier planted in flowers outside the Guggenheim Bilbao.
10. **The Hunters in the Snow** — score 439/1000
   Bruegel's returning hunters and their exhausted dogs, the most famous winter painting in Western art.
11. **Wolf and Fox Hunt** — score 439/1000
   Rubens's crowded hunting scene, animals and horsemen tangled across four metres of canvas.
12. **The Goldfinch** — score 0/1000
   Carel Fabritius's small 1654 panel of a chained bird, painted the year an explosion killed him.
13. **Head of a Bear** — score 0/1000
   Leonardo da Vinci's silverpoint study, roughly seven centimetres square, which sold at Christie's in 2021 for a record £8.8 million.
14. **Rhinoceros** — score 0/1000
   Durer's woodcut of an Indian rhinoceros he never saw, armour-plated and wrong in ways that fixed the animal's image for centuries.

Tags: art, animals, classics, paintings