Photograph: Lluís Ribes Mateu

The most famous paintings of

all time
A ranking of the most famous paintings, from Jan
van Eyck’s portrait to Gustav Klimt’s masterpiece.

Written by Howard Halle Friday November 10 2023

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Painting is an ancient medium and even with the

introduction of photography, film and digital
technology, it still has remained a persistent mode of
expression. So many paintings have been limned over
dozens of millennia that only a relatively small
percentage of them could be construed as "timeless
classics" that have become familiar to the public—and
not coincidentally produced by some of the most
famous artists of all time.

It leaves open the question of what mix of talent,

genius and circumstance leads to the creation of a
masterpiece. Perhaps the simplest answer is that you
know one when you see one, whatever part of the
world it's being held in. We, of course, have our
opinion of what makes the grade, and we present
them here, in our list of the best paintings of all time.
Argue amongst yourselves.

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Top famous paintings

Photograph: Courtesy CC/FlickrDystopos

1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa,

1503–19
Painted between 1503 and 1517, Da Vinci’s alluring
portrait has been dogged by two questions since the
day it was made: Who’s the subject and why is she
smiling? A number of theories for the former have
been proffered over the years: That she’s the wife of
the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del
Giocondo (ergo, the work’s alternative title, La
Gioconda); that she's Leonardo’s mother, Caterina,
conjured from Leonardo's boyhood memories of her;
and finally, that it's a self-portrait in drag. As for that
famous smile, its enigmatic quality has driven people
crazy for centuries. Whatever the reason, Mona Lisa’s
look of preternatural calm comports with the idealized
landscape behind her, which dissolves into the
distance through Leonardo’s use of atmospheric
perspective.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Nat507

2. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a

Pearl Earring, 1665
Johannes Vermeer’s 1665 study of a young woman is
startlingly real and startlingly modern, almost as if it
were a photograph. This gets into the debate over
whether or not Vermeer employed a pre-photographic
device called a camera obscura to create the image.
Leaving that aside, the sitter is unknown, though it’s
been speculated that she might have been Vermeer's
maid. He portrays her looking over her shoulder,
locking her eyes with the viewer as if attempting to
establish an intimate connection across the centuries.
Technically speaking, Girl isn’t a portrait, but rather an
example of the Dutch genre called a tronie—a
headshot meant more as still life of facial features
than as an attempt to capture a likeness.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz

3. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry

Night, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh’s most popular painting, The Starry
Night was created by Van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-
Rémy, where he’d committed himself in 1889. Indeed,
The Starry Night seems to reflect his turbulent state
of mind at the time, as the night sky comes alive with
swirls and orbs of frenetically applied brush marks
springing from the yin and yang of his personal
demons and awe of nature.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Jessica Epstein

4. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–

1908
Opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, The
Kiss, Gustav Klimt’s fin-de-siècle portrayal of intimacy,
is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the
Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his
subjects as mythical figures made modern by
luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic
motifs. The work is a highpoint of the artist’s Golden
Phase between 1899 and 1910 when he often used
gold leaf—a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the
Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw
the church’s famed Byzantine mosaics.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/arselectronica

5. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of

Venus, 1484–1486
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was the first full-length,
non-religious nude since antiquity, and was made for
Lorenzo de Medici. It’s claimed that the figure of the
Goddess of Love is modeled after one Simonetta
Cattaneo Vespucci, whose favors were allegedly
shared by Lorenzo and his younger brother, Giuliano.
Venus is seen being blown ashore on a giant
clamshell by the wind gods Zephyrus and Aura as the
personification of spring awaits on land with a cloak.
Unsurprisingly, Venus attracted the ire of Savonarola,
the Dominican monk who led a fundamentalist
crackdown on the secular tastes of the Florentines.
His campaign included the infamous “Bonfire of the
Vanities” of 1497, in which “profane” objects—
cosmetics, artworks, books—were burned on a pyre.
The Birth of Venus was itself scheduled for
incineration, but somehow escaped destruction.
Botticelli, though, was so freaked out by the incident
that he gave up painting for a while.

Photograph: REX/Shutterstock/Universal History Archive

6. James Abbott McNeill Whistler,

Arrangement in Grey and Black No.
1, 1871
Whistler’s Mother, or Arrangement in Grey and Black
No. 1, as it’s actually titled, speaks to the artist’s
ambition to pursue art for art’s sake. James Abbott
McNeill Whistler painted the work in his London
studio in 1871, and in it, the formality of portraiture
becomes an essay in form. Whistler’s mother Anna is
pictured as one of several elements locked into an
arrangement of right angles. Her severe expression
fits in with the rigidity of the composition, and it’s
somewhat ironic to note that despite Whistler’s
formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of
motherhood.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian

7. Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini

Portrait, 1434
One of the most significant works produced during
the Northern Renaissance, this composition is
believed to be one of the first paintings executed in
oils. A full-length double portrait, it reputedly portrays
an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may
not be his bride. In 1934, the celebrated art historian
Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is actually
a wedding contract. What can be reliably said is that
the piece is one of the first depictions of an interior
using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of
space that seems contiguous with the viewer’s own; it
feels like a painting you could step into.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian

8. Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of

Earthly Delights, 1503–1515
This fantastical triptych is generally considered a
distant forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it’s the
expression of a late medieval artist who believed that
God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell were real. Of the
three scenes depicted, the left panel shows Christ
presenting Eve to Adam, while the right one features
the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the
center panel depicts Heaven. In Bosch’s perfervid
vision of Hell, an enormous set of ears wielding a
phallic knife attacks the damned, while a bird-beaked
bug king with a chamber pot for a crown sits on its
throne, devouring the doomed before promptly
defecating them out again. This riot of symbolism has
been largely impervious to interpretation, which may
account for its widespread appeal.

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Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago/Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial

Collection

9. Georges Seurat, A Sunday

Afternoon on the Island of La Grande
Jatte, 1884–1886
Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La
Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-class
suburban scene well outside the city’s center. Seurat
often made this milieu his subject, which differed
from the bourgeois portrayals of his Impressionist
contemporaries. Seurat abjured the capture-the-
moment approach of Manet, Monet and Degas, going
instead for the sense of timeless permanence found
in Greek sculpture. And that is exactly what you get in
this frieze-like processional of figures whose stillness
is in keeping with Seurat’s aim of creating a classical
landscape in modern form.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz

10. Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles

d’Avignon, 1907
The ur-canvas of 20th-century art, Les Demoiselles
d’Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively
breaking with the representational tradition of
Western painting, incorporating allusions to the
African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris's
ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Its
compositional DNA also includes El Greco’s The
Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The women being
depicted are actually prostitutes in a brothel in the
artist's native Barcelona.

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Photograph: Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art

11. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The

Harvesters, 1565
Bruegel’s fanfare for the common man is considered
one of the defining works of Western art. This
composition was one of six created on the theme of
the seasons. The time is probably early September. A
group of peasants on the left cut and bundle ripened
wheat, while the on the right, another group takes their
midday meal. One figure is sacked out under a tree
with his pants unbuttoned. This attention to detail
continues throughout the painting as a procession of
ever-granular observations receding into space. It was
extraordinary for a time when landscapes served
mostly as backdrops for religious paintings.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/RMN (Musee

d'Orsay)/Herve Lewandowski

12. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur

l’herbe, 1863
Manet’s scene of picnicking Parisians caused a
scandal when it debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the
alternative exhibition made up of works rejected by
the jurors of the annual Salon—the official art
exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set
artistic standards in France. The most vociferous
objections to Manet’s work centered on the depiction
of a nude woman in the company of men dressed in
contemporary clothes. Based on motifs borrowed
from such Renaissance greats as Raphael and
Giorgione, Le Déjeuner was a cheeky send up of
classical figuration—an insolent mash-up of modern
life and painting tradition.

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Photograph: Courtesy Kunsthaus Zürich/Geschenk Alfred Roth/1987

13. Piet Mondrian, Composition with

Red Blue and Yellow, 1930
A small painting (18 inches by 18 inches) that packs a
big art-historical punch, Mondrian’s work represents a
radical distillation of form, color and composition to
their basic components. Limiting his palette to the
primary triad (red, yellow and blue), plus black and
white, Mondrian applied pigment in flat unmixed
patches in an arrangement of squares and rectangles
that anticipated Minimalism.

Photograph: Courtesy Museo Nacional Del Prado

14. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y

Velázquez, Las Meninas, or The
Family of King Philip IV
A painting of a painting within a painting, Velázquez
masterpiece consists of different themes rolled into
one: A portrait of Spain’s royal family and retinue in
Velázquez’s studio; a self-portrait; an almost art-for-
art’s-sake display of bravura brush work; and an
interior scene, offering glimpses into Velázquez’s
working life. Las Meninas is also a treatise on the
nature of seeing, as well as a riddle confounding
viewers about what exactly they’re looking at. It’s the
visual art equivalent of breaking the fourth wall—or in
this case, the studio’s far wall on which there hangs a
mirror reflecting the faces of the Spanish King and
Queen. Immediately this suggests that the royal
couple is on our side of the picture plane, raising the
question of where we are in relationship to them.
Meanwhile, Velázquez’s full length rendering of
himself at his easel begs the question of whether he’s
looking in a mirror to paint the picture. In other words,
are the subjects of Las Meninas (all of whom are
fixing their gaze outside of the frame), looking at us,
or looking at themselves?

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Photograph: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia/Sucesion

Pablo Picasso/VEGAP/2017

15. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937

Perhaps Picasso’s best-known painting, Guernica is
an antiwar cris de coeur occasioned by the 1937
bombing of the eponymous Basque city during the
Spanish Civil War by German and Italian aircraft allied
with Fascist leader Francisco Franco. The leftist
government that opposed him commissioned Picasso
to created the painting for the Spanish Pavillion at
1937 World’s Fair in Paris. When it closed, Guernica
went on an international tour, before winding up at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Picasso loaned
the painting to MoMA with the stipulation that it be
returned to his native Spain once democracy was
restored—which it was in 1981, six years after
Franco's death in 1975 (Picasso himself died two
years before that.) Today, the painting is housed at the
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.

Photograph: Courtesy Museo Nacional Del Prado

16. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes,

The Naked Maja, circa 1797–1800
Definitely comfortable in her own skin, this female
nude staring unashamedly at the viewer caused quite
a stir when it was painted, and even got Goya into hot
water with the Spanish Inquisition. Among other
things, it features one of the first depictions of public
hair in Western art. Commissioned by Manuel de
Godoy, Spain’s Prime Minister, The Naked Maja was
accompanied by another version with the sitter
clothed. The identity of the woman remains a mystery,
though she is most thought to be Godoy’s young
mistress, Pepita Tudó.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Web Gallery of Art

17. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres,

Grande Odalisque, 1814
Commissioned by Napoleon’s sister, Queen Caroline
Murat of Naples, Grande Odalisque represented the
artist’s break with the Neo-classical style he’d been
identified with for much of his career. The work could
be described as Mannerist, though it’s generally
thought of as a transition to Romanticism, a
movement that abjured Neo-classicalism’s precision,
formality and equipoise in favor of eliciting emotional
reactions from the viewer. This depiction of a
concubine languidly posed on a couch is notable for
her strange proportions. Anatomically incorrect, this
enigmatic, uncanny figure was greeted with jeers by
critics at the time, though it eventually became one of
Ingres most enduring works.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Erich Lessing/Art

Resource NY/Artres

18. Eugène Delacroix, Liberty

Leading the People, 1830
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which
toppled King Charles X of France, Liberty Leading the
People has become synonymous with the
revolutionary spirit all over the world. Combining
allegory with contemporary elements, the painting is a
thrilling example of the Romantic style, going for the
gut with its titular character brandishing the French
Tricolor as members of different classes unite behind
her to storm a barricade strewn with the bodies of
fallen comrades. The image has inspired other works
of art and literature, including the Statue of Liberty
and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Art Database

19. Claude Monet, Impression,

Sunrise, 1874
The defining figure of Impressionism, Monet virtually
gave the movement its name with his painting of
daybreak over the port of Le Havre, the artist’s
hometown. Monet was known for his studies of light
and color, and this canvas offers a splendid example
with its flurry of brush strokes depicting the sun as an
orange orb breaking through a hazy blue melding of
water and sky.

Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Cybershot800i

20. Caspar David Friedrich,

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,
1819
The worship of nature, or more precisely, the feeling
of awe it inspired, was a signature of the Romantic
style in art, and there is no better example on that
score than this image of a hiker in the mountains,
pausing on a rocky outcrop to take in his
surroundings. His back is turned towards the viewer
as if he were too enthralled with the landscape to turn
around, but his pose offers a kind of over-the-shoulder
view that draws us into vista as if we were seeing it
through his eyes.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons

21. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of

the Medusa, 1818–1819
For sheer impact, it’s hard to top The Raft of the
Medusa, in which Géricault took a contemporary news
event and transformed it into a timeless icon. The
backstory begins with the 1818 sinking of the French
naval vessel off the coast of Africa, which left 147
sailors adrift on a hastily constructed raft. Of that
number, only 15 remained after a 13-day ordeal at sea
that included incidents of cannibalism among the
desperate men. The larger-than-life-size painting,
distinguished by a dramatic pyramidal composition,
captures the moment the raft’s emaciated crew spots
a rescue ship. Géricault undertook the massive
canvas on his own, without anyone paying for it, and
approached it much like an investigative reporter,
interviewing survivors and making numerous detailed
studies based on their testimony.

Photograph: Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago/Friends of American

Art Collection

22. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks,

1942
An iconic depiction of urban isolation, Nighthawks
depicts a quarter of characters at night inside a
greasy spoon with an expansive wraparound window
that almost takes up the entire facade of the diner. Its
brightly lit interior—the only source of illumination for
the scene—floods the sidewalk and the surrounding
buildings, which are otherwise dark. The restaurant's
glass exterior creates a display-case effect that
heightens the sense that the subjects (three
customers and a counterman) are alone together. It's
a study of alienation as the figures studiously ignore
each other while losing themselves in a state of
reverie or exhaustion. The diner was based on a long-
demolished one in Hopper's Greenwich Village
neighborhood, and some art historians have
suggested that the painting as a whole may have
been inspired by Vincent van Gogh’s Café Terrace at
Night, which was on exhibit at a gallery Hopper
frequented at same time he painted Nighthawks Also
of note: The redheaded woman on the far right is the
artist's wife Jo, who frequently modeled for him.

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Photograph: Courtesy CC/Wikimedia Commons/Philadelphia Museum

of Art

23. Marcel Duchamp, Nude

Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
A stylistic mixture of Cubism and Futurism,
Duchamp’s depiction of the titular subject in multiple
exposure evokes a movement through time as well as
space, and was inspired by the photographic motion
studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules
Marey. The figure's planar construction drew the most
ire, making the painting a lighting rod for ridicule.
Nude was one of a handful of paintings Duchamp
made before turning full time towards the
conceptualist experiments (such as the Readymades
and The Large Glass) for which he’s known.

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