Which of These Famous Works of Art Is Not a Painting?
The most famous paintings of all fourth dimension
A ranking of the virtually famous paintings—from January van Eyck's portrait to Gustav Klimt's masterpiece
Ranking the most famous paintings of all time is a hard task.
Painting is an ancient medium and even with the introduction of photography, film and digital technology, information technology still has remained a persistent way of expression. Then many paintings have been limned over dozens of millennia that but a relatively pocket-sized percentage of them could be construed as "timeless classics" that have become familiar to the public—and not coincidentally produced by some of the nearly famous artists of all time.
It leaves open the question of what mix of talent, genius and circumstance leads to the cosmos of a masterpiece. Maybe the simplest answer is that y'all know one when yous run across one, whether it's at one of NYC'southward many museums (The Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, MoMA and elsewhere) or at institutions in other parts of the earth.
We, of course, have our opinion of what makes the grade and we present them hither in our list of the best paintings of all time.
Top famous paintings
1. Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–nineteen
Painted between 1503 and 1517, Da Vinci's alluring portrait has been indomitable by 2 questions since the day it was made: Who's the subject and why is she smiling? A number of theories for the one-time take been proffered over the years: That she's the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco di Bartolomeo del Giocondo (ergo, the work'southward alternative championship, La Gioconda); that she's Leonardo's mother, Caterina, conjured from Leonardo's boyhood memories of her; and finally, that it'south a self-portrait in elevate. As for that famous smile, its enigmatic quality has driven people crazy for centuries. Whatever the reason, Mona Lisa's wait of preternatural calm comports with the idealized landscape behind her, which dissolves into the distance through Leonardo's apply of atmospheric perspective.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Dystopos
ii. 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 equally if attempting to found an intimate connection beyond the centuries. Technically speaking, Girl isn't a portrait, but rather an instance of the Dutch genre called a tronie—a headshot meant more than equally still life of facial features than as an attempt to capture a likeness.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Nat507
3. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh's most popular painting, The Starry Nighttime was created by Van Gogh at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he'd committed himself in 1889. Indeed, The Starry Night seems to reverberate his turbulent state of listen at the time, equally 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/Wally Gobetz
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 equally mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of upward-to-the moment graphic motifs. The work is a highpoint of the artist's Gilded Phase between 1899 and 1910 when he often used aureate leaf—a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the church'due south famed Byzantine mosaics.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Jessica Epstein
five. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1484–1486
Botticelli's The Nativity of Venus was the first full-length, not-religious nude since antiquity, and was made for Lorenzo de Medici. It'southward claimed that the figure of the Goddess of Dearest is modeled afterward 1 Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, whose favors were allegedly shared by Lorenzo and his younger brother, Giuliano. Venus is seen beingness blown ashore on a giant clamshell by the current of air gods Zephyrus and Aura as the personification of bound 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 "Blaze 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 and then freaked out past the incident that he gave up painting for a while.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/arselectronica
six. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Organisation in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871
Whistler's Mother, or Organisation in Grey and Black No. 1, as it's actually titled, speaks to the creative person'due south 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 system of right angles. Her astringent expression fits in with the rigidity of the composition, and it's somewhat ironic to notation that despite Whistler's formalist intentions, the painting became a symbol of motherhood.
Photograph: King/Shutterstock/Universal History Archive
7. January van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait, 1434
1 of the most significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this composition is believed to be i of the start 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 ceremony contract. What can be reliably said is that the slice is one of the first depictions of an interior using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space that seems contiguous with the viewer'due south own; information technology feels similar 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 by and large considered a distant precursor 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 3 scenes depicted, the left panel shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the correct one features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the center panel depicts Heaven. In Bosch's perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous fix of ears wielding a phallic pocketknife 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 estimation, which may business relationship for its widespread appeal.
Photo: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Centralasian
9. Georges Seurat, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886
Georges Seurat'south masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-class suburban scene well outside the urban center's center. Seurat oft fabricated this milieu his discipline, which differed from the conservative 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 establish in Greek sculpture. And that is exactly what y'all get in this frieze-like processional of figures whose stillness is in keeping with Seurat's aim of creating a classical mural in modernistic form.
Photo: Courtesy The Fine art Institute of Chicago/Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection
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 Deoxyribonucleic acid also includes El Greco'south 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 creative person'due south native Barcelona.
Photograph: Courtesy CC/Flickr/Wally Gobetz
xi. Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565
Bruegel'south fanfare for the common man is considered 1 of the defining works of Western art. This composition was one of vi created on the theme of the seasons. The fourth dimension is probably early September. A group of peasants on the left cutting and bundle ripened wheat, while the on the right, another grouping takes their midday meal. One effigy is sacked out nether a tree with his pants unbuttoned. This attending to detail continues throughout the painting as a procession of ever-granular observations receding into infinite. It was extraordinary for a time when landscapes served more often than not as backdrops for religious paintings.
12. Édouard Manet, Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863
Manet's scene of picnicking Parisians caused a scandal when information technology debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the alternative exhibition made up of works rejected by the jurors of the almanac Salon—the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set creative standards in France. The most vociferous objections to Manet's piece of 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 equally Raphael and Giorgione, Le Déjeuner was a cheeky send up of classical figuration—an insolent mash-up of modern life and painting tradition.
13. Piet Mondrian, Limerick with Red Blue and Yellow, 1930
A modest painting (18 inches past xviii inches) that packs a big art-historical dial, Mondrian's work represents a radical distillation of form, color and limerick to their basic components. Limiting his palette to the primary triad (red, yellow and blue), plus black and white, Mondrian applied paint in apartment unmixed patches in an arrangement of squares and rectangles that anticipated Minimalism.
fourteen. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Las Meninas, or The Family of King Philip 4
A painting of a painting within a painting, Velázquez masterpiece consists of dissimilar themes rolled into i: A portrait of Spain's majestic family and retinue in Velázquez'southward studio; a self-portrait; an almost art-for-fine art'south-sake display of bravura castor piece of 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 equally a riddle misreckoning viewers near what exactly they're looking at. It'southward the visual art equivalent of breaking the fourth wall—or in this example, the studio'due south far wall on which in that location hangs a mirror reflecting the faces of the Spanish Male monarch and Queen. Immediately this suggests that the royal couple is on our side of the flick aeroplane, 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?
xv. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937
Perhaps Picasso's all-time-known painting, Guernica is an antiwar cris de coeur occasioned by the 1937 bombing of the eponymous Basque urban center during the Spanish Civil War by German and Italian aircraft centrolineal with Fascist leader Francisco Franco. The leftist government that opposed him deputed Picasso to created the painting for the Castilian Pavillion at 1937 World's Off-white in Paris. When it airtight, 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 exist returned to his native Spain one time democracy was restored—which it was in 1981, six years after Franco's decease in 1975 (Picasso himself died two years earlier that.) Today, the painting is housed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid.
16. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Naked Maja, circa 1797–1800
Definitely comfy in her own skin, this female nude staring unashamedly at the viewer caused quite a stir when information technology was painted, and even got Goya into hot water with the Castilian Inquisition. Amidst other things, it features one of the first depictions of public hair in Western art. Deputed past Manuel de Godoy, Spain'due south Prime number Minister, The Naked Maja was accompanied past another version with the sitter clothed. The identity of the woman remains a mystery, though she is most thought to exist Godoy'south immature mistress, Pepita Tudó.
17. Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
Commissioned by Napoleon's sis, 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 exist described as Mannerist, though it'southward generally thought of every bit a transition to Romanticism, a motion 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 wrong, this enigmatic, uncanny effigy was greeted with jeers by critics at the time, though it eventually became one of Ingres almost enduring works.
eighteen. Eugène Delacroix, Freedom Leading the People, 1830
Commemorating the July Revolution of 1830, which toppled Rex Charles X of France, Liberty Leading the People has get synonymous with the revolutionary spirit all over the world. Combining allegory with gimmicky 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 tempest 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.
xix. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1874
The defining figure of Impressionism, Monet virtually gave the move its name with his painting of daybreak over the port of Le Havre, the artist'southward hometown. Monet was known for his studies of light and color, and this sail 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.
20. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer higher up the Sea of Fog, 1819
The worship of nature, or more precisely, the feeling of awe information technology inspired, was a signature of the Romantic style in fine art, and there is no better case on that score than this image of a hiker in the mountains, pausing on a rocky outcrop to take in his environment. His dorsum is turned towards the viewer equally if he were too enthralled with the landscape to plough around, but his pose offers a kind of over-the-shoulder view that draws us into vista every bit if we were seeing it through his eyes.
21. Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–1819
For sheer bear on, information technology's difficult to summit 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, simply fifteen remained later on a 13-twenty-four hours ordeal at ocean that included incidents of cannibalism amidst the desperate men. The larger-than-life-size painting, distinguished by a dramatic pyramidal limerick, captures the moment the raft's emaciated crew spots a rescue ship. Géricault undertook the massive canvas on his own, without anyone paying for information technology, and approached it much like an investigative reporter, interviewing survivors and making numerous detailed studies based on their testimony.
22. Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942
An iconic depiction of urban isolation, Nighthawks depicts a quarter of characters at night within a greasy spoon with an expansive wraparound window that most takes upward the unabridged 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 upshot that heightens the sense that the subjects (3 customers and a counterman) are alone together. It'south a study of breach equally the figures studiously ignore each other while losing themselves in a land 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 past Vincent van Gogh's Café Terrace at Night, which was on exhibit at a gallery Hopper frequented at same fourth dimension he painted Nighthawks Also of note: The redheaded adult female on the far right is the artist'southward wife Jo, who frequently modeled for him.
23. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912
At the beginning of the 20th-century, Americans knew niggling about modernistic art, but all that abruptly inverse when a survey of Europe'southward leading modernists was mounted at New York City's 69th Regiment Arsenal on Lexington Avenue betwixt 25th and 26th Streets. The bear witness was officially titled the "International Exhibition of Modern Art," but has only been known every bit the Armory Evidence e'er since. It was a succès de scandale of epic proportions, sparking an outcry from critics that landed on the front page of newspapers. At the center of the brouhaha was this painting by Marcel Duchamp. A stylistic mixture of Cubism and Futurism, Duchamp's depiction of the titular subject in multiple exposure evokes a movement through time besides every bit space, and was inspired by the photographic motility studies of Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey. The figure's planar construction drew the virtually ire, making the painting a lighting rod for ridicule. The New York Times's art critic dubbed it "an explosion in a shingle factory," and The New York Evening Sun published a satirical cartoon version of Nude with the explanation, "The Rude Descending a Staircase (Blitz 60 minutes at the Subway)," in which commuters push and shove each other on their way onto the railroad train. Nude was one of a scattering of paintings Duchamp made before turning total time towards the conceptualist experiments (such equally the Readymades and The Large Glass) for which he's known.
An email you lot'll actually love
🙌 Awesome, yous're subscribed!
Cheers for subscribing! Expect out for your first newsletter in your inbox before long!
Source: https://www.timeout.com/newyork/art/top-famous-paintings-in-art-history-ranked