# What is the greatest painting series in art history?

> Artists who could not leave a subject alone: the same haystack, the same mountain, the same face, again and again until something changed.

*By YPB Team · Published September 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-greatest-painting-series-in-art-history*

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## Current results (1 vote)

1. **Canaletto's Venice vedute** — score 1000/1000
   Dozens of near-identical views of the Grand Canal, painted for British visitors in the 1730s.
2. **Van Gogh's Sunflowers** — score 832/1000
   Cut sunflowers in a vase, painted in Arles to decorate a room for Gauguin.
3. **Degas' Dancers** — score 718/1000
   Hundreds of rehearsal-room studies in paint, pastel and wax.
4. **Monet's Water Lilies** — score 636/1000
   Roughly 250 canvases of one pond at Giverny, painted over thirty years.
5. **Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji** — score 538/1000
   The woodblock series that includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
6. **Hogarth's A Rake's Progress** — score 538/1000
   Eight paintings following one man from inheritance to the madhouse.
7. **Monet's Haystacks** — score 538/1000
   Twenty-five canvases of grain stacks in a field next door.
8. **Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons** — score 418/1000
   Sixteen etched fantasy dungeons, made in the 1750s and reworked a decade later.
9. **Picasso's Las Meninas** — score 418/1000
   Fifty-eight canvases taking apart one Velazquez painting in 1957.
10. **Durer's Apocalypse** — score 418/1000
   Fifteen woodcuts of the Book of Revelation, published by the artist himself in 1498.
11. **Monet's Poplars** — score 418/1000
   A line of trees on the river Epte, painted through a whole season.
12. **Monet's Rouen Cathedral** — score 0/1000
   About thirty views of one facade at different hours and weathers.
13. **Goya's Black Paintings** — score 0/1000
   Fourteen murals painted straight onto the walls of Goya's own house.
14. **Hiroshige's Fifty-three Stations** — score 0/1000
   Fifty-five woodblock prints of the road from Edo to Kyoto, published in 1833.
15. **Cezanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire** — score 0/1000
   The same Provencal mountain painted more than sixty times.

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