Which Painting Is Older?

How to play

1. Two paintings appear side by side (stacked on a phone). The first shows its year; the second keeps its value hidden.
2. Decide whether the second one is newer or older and press Newer or Older.
3. The hidden value counts up and your answer is judged. When you are right, the second card moves across and a new one takes its place.
4. One wrong answer ends the run. There is no timer, and values stay fixed for the whole run. Two paintings made less than 15 years apart are never paired.
5. Your result is saved in this browser. Once enough people have played a game, the results also show how your score ranks, and you can copy or share an image of your result, or replay.

Understanding the comparison

Style dates a painting faster than any single detail. Flat gold grounds and rigid poses point to the fifteenth century; deep shadow and theatrical staging to the seventeenth; loose, visible brushwork and daylight to the later nineteenth. Clothing and everyday objects are the next best clue, but they can date the depicted scene rather than the work itself.

Earlier or later is a relative question

You do not need to identify the exact year to make a good comparison. First place each painting in a broad period, then look for the strongest difference between them. Clothing, objects and composition can help when the two surfaces look stylistically similar.

A museum date may be approximate or span several years. The game uses the start of the recorded range and avoids very close pairings. That scoring convention keeps answers consistent; it does not claim an approximate work was certainly completed in one exact year.

How this measure is defined

The year is the start of the date the museum records, so a painting worked on from 1884 to 1886 counts as 1884, and an approximate date is used as catalogued. Two paintings from the same year are never paired against each other. Every work here is one the Art Institute of Chicago publishes as public domain.

Sources

Source: Art Institute of Chicago · Data period: 2026 · Collected: 2026-09-08 (UTC)

The year the work was begun, from the museum’s catalogue. Works made over several years are placed at the start of that range, and a date given as approximate is used as recorded.

The collection date tells you when we retrieved the source, not when every underlying observation was made. A failed refresh does not advance that date. For comparisons, the snapshot loaded for your run supplies the answers.

• Art Institute of Chicago