El Jaleo

The loudest painting on this list. A flamenco dancer swirls her skirts and stamps her feet while the men behind her sing and play guitar, and Sargent spreads the scene across a canvas almost 12 feet wide so the performance runs at full scale, left to right, like a dancer crossing the stage. He showed it at the 1882 Paris Salon. Isabella Stewart Gardner later borrowed it and built a Spanish Cloister gallery in her Boston museum to hold it, with an arch framing it like a stage, and it is still there. Few paintings are installed as theatrically as the performance they show.