100 Great Paintings

100 Great Paintings is a British television series broadcast in 1980 on BBC Two, devised by Edwin Mullins. He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, the language of colour, 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 Hay Wain. The series is available on VHS and DVD.

On the basis of the series, Mullins published the book Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated (1981), which contained the 50 paintings broadcast to that point. A German translation of Mullins' book appeared as 100 Meisterwerke in 1983. In 1985, a second volume came out, only in Germany, which discussed the remaining 50 paintings.

Although the TV series is titled “100 Great Paintings,” the actual number of paintings introduced is 220. This can be confirmed in the list below.

From 1980 through 1994, the West German broadcaster WDR produced a television series called 1000 Meisterwerke (originally named 100 Meisterwerke aus den großen Museen der Welt; "100 Masterworks from the Great Museums of the World"), which was broadcast by ARD, ORF and BR. In each of the 10-minute broadcasts, a single painting was presented and analyzed by an art historian. The Sunday evening broadcasts had five million viewers.