The 10 Most Famous Paintings In The World

Ten paintings make almost every list of the most famous works of Western art ever produced. The list below covers them in chronological order, from Sandro Botticelli's Birth of Venus in the mid-1480s to Pablo Picasso's Guernica in 1937. Five of the ten are in continental European museums (the Uffizi in Florence, Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, the Louvre and Musée d'Orsay in Paris, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Mauritshuis in The Hague, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid), one is in Norway, and two are at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Each entry below covers when the painting was made, who made it, what it shows, and where it is now.

The Birth of Venus (Uffizi Gallery, Florence)

Sandro Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus in the mid-1480s, almost certainly on commission from the Medici family. The painting shows the goddess Venus arriving on the shore of Cyprus on a giant scallop shell, having been born fully grown from the sea foam after the castrated Uranus's blood mixed with the waves. Zephyr, the west wind, blows her toward land on the left of the composition while one of the Horae (goddesses of the seasons) waits with a flower-strewn cloak on the right. The work is one of the earliest large-scale Italian Renaissance nudes outside of a religious context and one of the first major paintings on canvas rather than wood panel. It has been at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence since 1815.

The Last Supper (Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan)

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper between 1495 and 1498 directly on the north wall of the refectory of the Dominican convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, on commission from Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. The 4.6 by 8.8 metre composition shows the moment in the Gospel of John when Christ announces that one of the twelve apostles will betray him, capturing each apostle's individual reaction in body language and gesture. Leonardo painted in an experimental tempera-and-oil mixture on dry plaster rather than the standard wet-plaster fresco technique, which gave him more time to refine details but meant the paint began flaking within decades of completion. The work has been restored more than a dozen times, most thoroughly in a 1978-1999 conservation campaign that removed centuries of overpainting and varnish.

Mona Lisa (Louvre, Paris)

The most famous painting in the world by almost any measure, the Mona Lisa is a small oil-on-poplar portrait (77 by 53 centimetres) that Leonardo da Vinci began around 1503 and continued to refine until his death in 1519. The subject is generally accepted to be Lisa Gherardini, wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo (the painting's Italian name, La Gioconda, is a play on her married name). Leonardo's distinctive sfumato technique (blurred transitions between tones rather than sharp outlines) gives the face its famously ambiguous expression. King Francis I of France acquired the painting from Leonardo's pupil Salaì for 4,000 écus, and it has been in French royal and then state collections ever since. It now hangs in the Louvre's Salle des États behind bulletproof glass and draws roughly 20,000 visitors per day, about 80 per cent of all Louvre traffic.

The Night Watch (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Rembrandt van Rijn completed The Night Watch in 1642 on commission from the civic militia of Amsterdam. The painting's actual title is Militia Company of District II under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, and the scene shows the company mustering and marching out from its arquebusiers' guild hall in broad daylight, not at night. The "night watch" nickname dates from the early 19th century and reflected the painting's then-very-dark appearance: centuries of varnish, soot from lamps and fires in the room where it hung, and slow oxidation had so darkened the surface that the daylight scene looked nocturnal. A 1946-1947 cleaning revealed the original daylight setting. The painting was attacked with a knife in 1975 and acid in 1990, both times restored; the Rijksmuseum's ongoing Operation Night Watch (begun 2019) is the most thorough scientific study of the painting ever conducted.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague)

Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring was painted around 1665 and is sometimes called the "Dutch Mona Lisa" for the ambiguous half-smile and direct gaze of its subject. The work is technically a tronie rather than a portrait: a Dutch Golden Age genre showing an idealised or anonymous head in costume rather than a specific identifiable person. The subject's blue turban is unusual for 17th-century Dutch portraiture and may signal an exotic or allegorical setting. The pearl earring itself, on close inspection, is too large to be a real pearl and was probably painted with the same artistic licence Vermeer used for the turban. The painting was purchased for two guilders at an Amsterdam auction in 1881 by a Dutch military officer who later donated it to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, where it has been since 1902.

Whistler's Mother (Musée d'Orsay, Paris)

The American expatriate painter James McNeill Whistler completed Whistler's Mother in 1871 in London, where he was then living. The painting's actual title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, reflecting Whistler's musical-analogy approach to titling his work (and his interest in colour harmony for its own sake rather than narrative content). The subject is the painter's 67-year-old mother Anna McNeill Whistler, seated in profile against a grey wall with a black curtain behind her. The painting was rejected by London's Royal Academy in 1872 and bought by the French state in 1891, making it the first American painting acquired by a French museum. It hung at the Musée du Luxembourg before moving to the Louvre and then in 1986 to the Musée d'Orsay, where it remains.

The Starry Night (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Vincent van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889 in his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had voluntarily admitted himself in May 1889 after the breakdown that culminated in his cutting off part of his left ear the previous December. The composition shows a partially imagined village (the church spire at centre is northern European in style rather than Provençal) under a sky filled with eleven stars, a crescent moon, and Venus (the brightest object in the sky at lower left), all rendered in the swirling impasto strokes that became Van Gogh's most recognisable visual signature. The painting was sold by Van Gogh's sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger in 1900 and entered the Museum of Modern Art in 1941, where it has been displayed in the same fourth-floor gallery for most of the past 80 years.

The Scream (National Museum, Oslo)

Edvard Munch made at least five distinct versions of The Scream between 1893 and 1910 in different media. The best-known is the 1893 painting in oil, tempera, and pastel on cardboard (91 by 73 centimetres), held since 1910 by the National Gallery and now displayed at the National Museum of Norway in Oslo (the National Gallery merged into the National Museum, which opened in a new building on Oslo's harbourfront in June 2022). The composition shows a wraithlike figure on a bridge over the Oslofjord clutching its head against an orange-red sky; Munch's journal indicates the colours were drawn from an actual sunset over Oslo that he witnessed in 1892. The 1893 National Gallery version was stolen in 1994 and recovered the same year; a separate 1910 version held at the Munch Museum was stolen in a 2004 daylight raid and recovered in 2006.

The Persistence of Memory (Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Salvador Dalí painted The Persistence of Memory in 1931 at his home in Port Lligat on the Costa Brava of Catalonia. The composition, only 24 by 33 centimetres, shows three soft, melting pocket-watches draped over a barren landscape with the cliffs of Cap de Creus visible in the background. Dalí said the immediate visual inspiration came from watching a wheel of Camembert cheese melt in the sun at his lunch table; the broader Surrealist interest in dreams, time, and the unconscious gives the imagery its philosophical reading. The painting entered the Museum of Modern Art's collection in 1934 as an anonymous gift and has been on near-continuous display since. The pocket-watch imagery is sometimes connected to Einstein's relativity, but Dalí himself denied any direct influence.

Guernica (Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid)

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in June 1937 on commission from the Spanish Republican government for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition. The 3.5 by 7.8 metre painting responds to the April 26, 1937 bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi German Luftwaffe and Italian Fascist aircraft operating in support of Franco's Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. The grey-scale composition uses fragmented Cubist forms to depict suffering humans, a screaming horse, a fallen warrior, and a bull, with no direct reference to a specific real-world location. Picasso refused to allow the painting to be displayed in Spain until the country returned to democracy; after his death in 1973 and Franco's death in 1975, the painting moved from MoMA in New York (where it had spent the dictatorship years) to the Prado in 1981 and to the Reina Sofía in 1992, where it now hangs in its own dedicated gallery.

What Makes a Painting World-Famous

The ten paintings above became famous through different routes. The Mona Lisa's worldwide celebrity dates only to its 1911 theft from the Louvre by an Italian handyman, which kept the painting on front pages for two years before its recovery in 1913. Guernica's status as the defining anti-war painting of the 20th century reflects both its political circumstances and its decades-long exile from Franco's Spain. The Scream became a recognisable visual shorthand for modern anxiety partly through reproduction in popular culture. The Night Watch was famous in the Dutch Golden Age and never really lost its standing. What the ten share is technical achievement (the sfumato of the Mona Lisa, the impasto of The Starry Night, the chiaroscuro of The Night Watch), a memorable single image that survives reproduction and reuse, and a museum home that has guarded the work for at least several generations.