100 Great Oil Paintings was a television series created by Edwin Mullins for BBC 2 in 1980, in which he also acted as moderator. He chose 20 thematic groups, such as war, the Adoration, the language of color, the hunt, and bathing, picking five oil paintings from each. The selection ranges from 12th century China through the 1950s, with an emphasis on European oil paintings. He deliberately avoided the greatest oil paintings, such as Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or John Constable's The Haywain. The series is available on VHS or on DVD.

On the basis of the series, Mullins published the book "Great Paintings: Fifty Masterpieces, Explored, Explained and Appreciated", which contained about half of the theme groups, in 1981.
From 1980 through 1994, the German broadcaster WDR produced a television series called "1000 Meisterwerke" which was broadcast by ARD, ORF and BR. In each of the 10-minute broadcasts, a single oil painting was presented and analyzed by an art historian. The Sunday evening broadcasts had five million viewers.

The Fine Arts Editor of WDR, Wibke von Bonin, developed the German version of the series. The series was produced by RM Arts, directed by Reiner E. Moritz, and narrated by Rudolf Jürgen Bartsch and the distinctive title melody was composed by Wilhelm Dieter Siebert.

Each episode showed and discussed one oil painting, with other oil paintings of the artist and of other artists being drawn in for comparison.

The German or the English version of the series was shown in West Germany, the USA, England, the Netherlands, South Africa, Austria, Scandinavia and Japan.

The 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. The text in the books and the television series are largely the same.

After the end of the original series, it was continued under the title, "1000 Meisterwerke", only in Germany. The concept was changed, so that instead of theme groups, several pictures from the same museum were now grouped into a series of broadcasts. The emphasis was on German museums at first, and in addition, European museums and individual international museums were considered. Painters who had already appeared in "100 Meisterwerken" were not included at first. Many times, the authors of the episode were also the curators in charge of the oil painting. Occasionally, the fixed framework of the series was deviated from, such as when several paintings were treated in a single broadcast in the "Greek cycle", or when the painter, Konrad Klapheck, wrote the script about his own oil painting, but using the third person.