King Don Jon: My Top Ten Favourite Pictures

A tricky question

I started off trying to decide my top ten favourite pictures, but realised it is pretty impossible to choose a list. I Googled top ten and mostly I don't particularly like them. Do I prefer old to modern artists, pictures showing skilled brushstrokes, is the immediate impact or story told important and how much should knowledge of the artist/picture/environment/rarity/history be important? I appear to have another impossible task. Annette suggested picking my two favourite artists from each century but even this proved a headache.

Criteria

I think my main criteria are:

how much or how long I enjoy looking at a picture
is the composition interesting
are the colours expressive
whether it is an enduring opinion rather than a whim
is there an interesting story
does it have a strong emotional effect
is its rarity/age admirable
is great skill evident
does the work communicate a strong message

My approach

I have a photo collection from the principal galleries I have visited so I will restrict myself to choosing from the pictures on my website. Even so there is a great variety to choose from, I find it hard even to compare artists from different times. My approach will be a sort of knock-out tournament. When deciding which images to capture for my website I aim to choose about four per room and each gallery comprises a number of groups of rooms. I will start the first round by choosing four pictures per group and move on in the second round to choose four of the winners to get the top four pictures in a gallery. Galleries and Galley exhibitions are classified separately so I will end up with about 10 groups of four in the semi-final.