Key Takeaways
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15 paintings made this list, spanning nearly five hundred years, from Botticelli's Florence to Dalí's Spain.
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The Mona Lisa, The Starry Night, and Guernica sit at the top of most rankings, largely thanks to the stories behind them.
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Salvator Mundi holds the record for the most valuable painting ever sold, at $450.3 million in 2017.
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Bold, simple color blocks, as in The Starry Night and American Gothic, translate best into paint by numbers projects.
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You'll find most of these works in a handful of major museums, among them the Louvre, MoMA, the Prado, and the Rijksmuseum.
Every painting hanging in a museum today began as a private idea in someone's mind. These usually took shape in a leaky studio, a rented room, or, in Van Gogh's case, an asylum garden. That is why people continue to discuss a great painting centuries after the paint has dried. They carry gossip, grief, and outright drama, baked right into the paint.
Once you know the backstory, you cannot unsee it. The stories behind famous paintings turn a quiet gallery wall into something closer to a soap opera. Here are 15 of the most iconic works ever painted, what was happening when each one was made, and which ones you could recreate on your own canvas.
Table of Contents
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15 Iconic Paintings You Have Definitely Seen Before
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The Renaissance Icons That Still Draw Crowds
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Baroque Drama and Court Life
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Paintings That Changed How We See Emotion
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Impressionism and the Painting That Named a Movement
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Modern Masterpieces With a Message
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Quiet Portraits With Big Stories
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What These Iconic Works Actually Have in Common
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Recreate These Masterpieces Yourself
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Frequently Asked Questions
15 Iconic Paintings You Have Definitely Seen Before
Some of these took years to finish, one took five weeks, and all fifteen are still being talked about.
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Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, 1503 to 1506, Louvre, Paris
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The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci, 1495 to 1498, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan
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The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, circa 1485, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
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Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez, 1656, Museo del Prado, Madrid
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The Night Watch, Rembrandt, 1642, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
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The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893, National Museum of Norway, Oslo
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The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889, MoMA, New York
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The Kiss, Gustav Klimt, 1907 to 1908, Belvedere Museum, Vienna
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Impression Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
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Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1897 to 1926, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
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Guernica, Pablo Picasso, 1937, Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid
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The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí, 1931, MoMA, New York
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American Gothic, Grant Wood, 1930, Art Institute of Chicago
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Girl with a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer, circa 1665, Mauritshuis, The Hague
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Whistler's Mother, James McNeill Whistler, 1871, Musée d'Orsay, Paris
The Renaissance Icons That Still Draw Crowds
The Renaissance turned painting into a status symbol, and these three famous paintings are proof people still cross the world to stand in front of them.
Mona Lisa
It took Leonardo da Vinci years to finish the Mona Lisa, which he began around 1503 as a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, a Florentine merchant's wife, and he never actually handed it over to the family who probably paid for it. For centuries afterward it hung in the Louvre as a respected but not especially famous art. Then, in August 1911, a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia unscrewed it from the wall and disappeared with it for more than two years. Newspapers couldn't stop covering the empty space where it used to hang, and the painting was never ordinary again.
The Last Supper
Painting The Last Supper straight onto a dining hall wall wasn't Leonardo's best technical call. Between 1495 and 1498, he used an experimental mix of tempera and oil instead of true fresco at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, and the paint started flaking before long. Restorers have gone back to patch it more times than anyone can count, including once after a 1943 bombing damaged the building around it. Even now, it still nails the exact moment every apostle reacts to Christ's announcement of betrayal.
The Birth of Venus
Around 1485, Sandro Botticelli, working most likely for a member of the Medici family, painted a nearly life-size nude goddess arriving on a scallop shell blown ashore by the wind gods, one of the first large mythological nudes Western art had seen since antiquity. The Uffizi Gallery has kept it on display for centuries, and it's still one of the most reproduced images in art history.
Baroque Drama and Court Life
A century later, court painters had a different problem to solve, making royal families look important and human in the same breath.
Las Meninas
Las Meninas is a strange one. Diego Velázquez painted it in 1656 as a portrait of the Spanish royal court, but the young Infanta Margarita takes center stage while Velázquez paints himself off to the side, working on a canvas we never get to see. A mirror on the back wall reflects the king and queen, which suggests they're standing right where we, the viewers, are standing. People have argued for centuries about who's looking at whom.
The Night Watch
The Night Watch isn't even its real name. Rembrandt finished the group portrait in 1642 for an Amsterdam civic militia, and the actual title runs on for a full sentence. What made it different was movement; he painted the guards mid-stride, muskets raised, and a drummer mid-beat, instead of the usual stiff lineup. It's since survived two separate knife attacks and an acid attack, and the Rijksmuseum now runs a public, glass-walled restoration project so visitors can watch the repair work happen.
Paintings That Changed How We See Emotion
These next few paintings have nothing to do with court life. They reflect what was occurring in the artist's own mind, and it was not always a pleasant experience.
The Scream
Edvard Munch said the idea for The Scream came to him on a walk near Oslo at sunset, when the sky turned blood red and he felt, in his words, a scream pass through nature itself. He ended up painting several versions between 1893 and 1910, and two of them were actually stolen, once in 1994 and again in 2004. Investigators got both back. By now the swirling sky and the hollow, screaming figure have become one of the most parodied images in famous art, which is a strange fate for a painting about pure panic.
The Starry Night
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night in June 1889, and he wasn't looking at the actual view when he did it. He was a voluntary patient at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Rémy at the time, working mostly from memory, according to MoMA's own published notes. He told his brother Theo that painting kept him steady during one of the hardest stretches of his life. MoMA picked up the piece in 1941.
The Kiss
Between 1907 and 1908, Gustav Klimt painted The Kiss during the gold-leaf period that made him famous, a habit he picked up from his father, who worked as a goldsmith. The couple in the painting stands wrapped together on a flowered cliff edge, their patterned robes blurring so completely that it's difficult to tell where one figure ends and the other begins. The Belvedere Museum bought it straight out of the 1908 exhibition where it first showed, and it has never really left.
Impressionism and the Painting That Named a Movement
A handful of painters working around Paris grew weary of stiff studio realism and took their easels outside instead, working quickly and loosely. Critics mostly hated it at first.
Impression, Sunrise
In 1872, Claude Monet painted a hazy view of Le Havre harbor at dawn, all loose, quick brushstrokes, and called it Impression, Sunrise. A critic reviewing the show wasn't impressed and used the word "Impressionist" as an insult aimed at the whole group showing alongside Monet. It backfired. The name stuck, the painters claimed it as their own, and an entire movement ended up named after one hazy harbor scene.
Water Lilies
For the last three decades of his life, Monet barely left his own garden. He painted the pond at Giverny again and again for what became the Water Lilies series, roughly 250 times, across every season and light condition he could catch. Cataracts were wrecking his eyesight through most of that stretch, and it shows in the increasingly loose, almost abstract brushwork of his later canvases. Several of the largest Water Lilies panels now hang in a specially built oval room at the Orangerie in Paris, arranged so you're surrounded by water on every side.
Modern Masterpieces With a Message
By the twentieth century, plenty of painters had stopped chasing beauty altogether. War, politics, and their own subconscious took over instead.
Guernica
In 1937, warplanes bombed the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, and Picasso responded with a canvas so large it barely fits in a room. He finished it in about five weeks for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World's Fair, stripping out color entirely and painting the screaming figures, the dying horse, and the bull looming over the chaos only in black, white, and gray. It hangs today at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
The Persistence of Memory
The Persistence of Memory is barely the size of a notebook, which surprises almost everyone who sees it in person for the first time. Dalí painted it in 1931, draping melting pocket watches over a barren, dreamlike scene, and he later claimed the idea came from watching a wheel of Camembert cheese melt in the sun. MoMA has kept it on near-constant display since acquiring it in 1934.
American Gothic
Grant Wood spotted a small farmhouse with an oddly Gothic-style window in Eldon, Iowa, in 1930, and started wondering who might live there. He painted American Gothic soon after, asking his dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby, and his sister, Nan Wood Graham, to pose as the stern farmer and his daughter, pitchfork included.
He entered it in the Art Institute of Chicago's annual exhibition that same year, won a three-hundred-dollar prize, and a museum patron then talked the Art Institute into keeping it for the permanent collection, which has to be one of the better returns on investment in art history.
Quiet Portraits With Big Stories
Not every one of these iconic paintings needs to shout. A couple of them get their power from what they leave out, and both women pictured here get a longer look in a piece built around women in art history.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Nobody knows who the girl in Girl with a Pearl Earring was, and that's kind of the point. Vermeer painted her around 1665 as what the Dutch call a tronie, a style built around an imagined or generic face rather than a paying client, which is exactly why she has no recorded name. That oversized pearl, the turned head, and the parted lips earned her the nickname the Dutch Mona Lisa. The Mauritshuis has held onto the painting since 1902.
Whistler's Mother
Whistler didn't set out to paint a sentimental tribute to his mother. He called the 1871 portrait Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 because he saw it as a study in composition, not emotion, and Anna reportedly only sat for it because his original model canceled. That stark side profile against a bare wall has become one of the most recognized portraits in American art, even though it's lived at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris since 1891.
Recreate These Masterpieces Yourself
You don't need an art degree to get one of these images onto your own wall. Canvas by Numbers turns famous paintings into numbered, pre-mixed kits, and nine of the fifteen covered here already exist as one.
For easy famous paintings to recreate, start with bold, high-contrast picks like The Starry Night, American Gothic, and Water Lilies. Order the kit version of your favorite today and turn one of these fifteen stories into something you painted yourself.
FAQs
What are the most famous paintings in history?
Names like the Mona Lisa, The Starry Night, Guernica, and The Birth of Venus usually top these rankings, mostly because each one changed how people saw art, politics, or emotion.
Who painted the Mona Lisa?
Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa in Florence and later Amboise, refining it for roughly 16 years until his death in 1519.
What makes a painting famous?
A painting usually gets famous through some mix of technical skill, a real story behind it, one dramatic event such as a theft, and enough time in a major museum for millions of people to see it.
What is the story behind Starry Night?
Van Gogh painted The Starry Night from memory at an asylum near Saint-Rémy in 1889, turning the view from his window into a swirling sky during a difficult stretch of his life.
Which famous paintings are easiest to recreate?
Works with bold outlines and flat color blocks, such as The Starry Night, American Gothic, and Water Lilies, recreate more easily than portraits like Girl with a Pearl Earring or Las Meninas.
Where can I see these paintings?
Most live in specific museums, including the Louvre, MoMA, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum, and the Uffizi Gallery.
What are the most valuable paintings ever sold?
Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, holds the record, selling for $450.3 million at a 2017 Christie's auction, according to Britannica.
Which famous paintings suit paint by numbers?
Paintings built on large color fields and clear shapes, like The Starry Night, The Kiss, and American Gothic, work best as paint by numbers projects since the sections stay large and forgiving.
What era are most famous paintings from?
Most cluster around two periods, the Renaissance and Baroque era from the 1400s to the 1600s, and the run of movements between Impressionism and Surrealism from about 1870 to 1940.
How can I paint a famous masterpiece myself?
The most direct way to do it is a Canvas by Numbers paint by numbers kit, since it pre-prints the outline and numbers every section to a matching paint color, so you're filling in an already-mapped version of the original.
