100 Famous Paintings and the Museums That Hold Them

The paintings

The 100 famous paintings and their museums

1. 

   1of 100

   Leonardo da Vinci

   Mona Lisa

   Leonardo never delivered this portrait of Lisa Gherardini; he carried it to France, where Francis I bought it. Its theft in 1911 and two-year disappearance made it a global celebrity. Most of the Louvre's nine million yearly visitors now file past its bulletproof glass, making it the most visited painting on earth.

2. 

   2of 100

   Pablo Picasso

   Guernica

   Commissioned for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris World's Fair, Picasso painted the bombing of the Basque town in five weeks, in grey and black only. He refused to let it enter Spain under Franco; it stayed at MoMA until 1981. It remains the most famous anti-war image ever painted.

3. 

   3of 100

   Vincent van Gogh

   The Starry Night

   Painted from memory in the asylum of Saint-Rémy, one month after Van Gogh's arrival, the swirling sky over an invented village sold for almost nothing in his lifetime. MoMA acquired it in 1941. It is now one of the most reproduced images in the world and the model for every 'night sky' painted since.

4. 

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   Leonardo da Vinci

   The Last Supper

   Leonardo painted the mural in tempera on dry plaster, an experiment that began flaking within twenty years. It survived a doorway cut through Christ's feet, Napoleon's stables and a 1943 bomb that destroyed the refectory roof. A 21-year restoration ended in 1999; visits are limited to 15 minutes.

5. 

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   Edvard Munch

   The Scream

   Munch recorded the moment on an Oslo fjord path when 'the sky turned blood red' and he felt 'an infinite scream passing through nature'. He made four versions; two were stolen, in 1994 and 2004, and both recovered. The 1895 pastel sold for 119.9 million dollars in 2012.

6. 

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   Johannes Vermeer

   Girl with a Pearl Earring

   Not a portrait but a 'tronie', a study of a face in exotic costume, bought at auction in 1881 for two guilders. The 'pearl' is two strokes of lead white with no hook. Tracy Chevalier's 1999 novel and the 2003 film turned Vermeer's quiet girl into the 'Mona Lisa of the North'.

7. 

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   Sandro Botticelli

   The Birth of Venus

   Botticelli painted the first large-scale nude on canvas since antiquity for the Medici, probably after a poem by Poliziano. The elongated goddess on her shell ignores the laws of anatomy on purpose. Saved from Savonarola's bonfires, it has hung in the Uffizi since 1815 and fixed the image of Venus for ever.

8. 

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   Hieronymus Bosch

   The Garden of Earthly Delights

   A triptych that reads from Eden on the left to a nocturnal hell on the right, crowded with hybrid creatures and a tree-man wearing a disc hat. Philip II of Spain hung it in the Escorial. Five centuries later it is the most zoomed-into image in the Prado's online collection.

9. 

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   Diego Velázquez

   Las Meninas

   The five-year-old Infanta Margarita, her maids of honour, a dwarf, a mastiff, the king and queen in a mirror and Velázquez himself at his easel: the most analysed composition in painting. Luca Giordano called it 'the theology of painting'; Picasso made 58 variations of it in 1957.

10. 

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    Salvador Dalí

    The Persistence of Memory

    Smaller than a sheet of paper, Dalí's melting watches were painted in one evening after a dinner of Camembert, he claimed, while Gala was at the cinema. The cliffs are Cap de Creus near his home. It has belonged to MoMA since 1934 and is the Surrealist image everyone can name.

11. 

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    Katsushika Hokusai

    The Great Wave off Kanagawa

    The first of Hokusai's 'Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji', printed in thousands of copies using the imported pigment Prussian blue. Monet, Van Gogh and Debussy owned impressions. Today it is the best-known Japanese image in the world and the 'wave' emoji on every phone.

12. 

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    Eugène Delacroix

    Liberty Leading the People

    Painted within months of the July Revolution of 1830, Delacroix's bare-breasted Liberty with the tricolour was bought by the new king, then hidden as too inflammatory until 1874. Reproduced on the 100-franc note and a postage stamp, it is the image France uses for itself.

13. 

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    Michelangelo

    The Creation of Adam

    The fourth of nine Genesis scenes on the Sistine ceiling, painted by a sculptor who insisted he was no painter. The two fingers that almost touch have become the most quoted detail in Western art. Some anatomists read the red mantle around God as a human brain, a joke by a man who dissected corpses.

14. 

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    Raphael

    The School of Athens

    Raphael's fresco for the papal library gathers Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Euclid under Bramante's vaults. Plato has Leonardo's face, Heraclitus Michelangelo's, and the young man in a black cap on the right is Raphael himself. It is the picture of philosophy in every textbook.

15. 

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    Rembrandt

    The Night Watch

    A group portrait of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq's militia company, paid for by its eighteen members, that Rembrandt turned into a scene in motion. It was cut down on all sides in 1715 to fit a wall, slashed twice and sprayed with acid, and is being restored in public since 2019.

16. 

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    Gustav Klimt

    The Kiss

    Austria bought the unfinished canvas for 25,000 crowns before Klimt had shown it, the highest price ever paid for a painting in the country. Gold leaf, a technique he learned from his father, an engraver, and Byzantine mosaics seen in Ravenna, wraps two lovers on a flower-strewn cliff edge.

17. 

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    Georges Seurat

    A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte

    Seurat spent two years and 28 drawings building this Parisian Sunday from millions of dots of pure colour, the first manifesto of Pointillism. Shown at the last Impressionist exhibition in 1886, it reached Chicago in 1926 and inspired Sondheim's musical 'Sunday in the Park with George'.

18. 

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    Jan van Eyck

    The Arnolfini Portrait

    A Bruges merchant and his wife in a bedroom, every surface rendered in the new oil technique Van Eyck perfected: the convex mirror reflects two visitors, and the painter signed the wall 'Johannes de Eyck fuit hic'. Historians still argue whether it is a wedding, a betrothal or a memorial.

19. 

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    Grant Wood

    American Gothic

    Grant Wood saw the small Carpenter Gothic house in Eldon, Iowa, and posed his sister and his dentist in front of it. The Art Institute bought it for 300 dollars after it won a bronze medal. It is the most parodied American painting, from the Addams Family to breakfast-cereal boxes.

20. 

    20of 100

    Claude Monet

    Water Lilies

    Monet painted his pond at Giverny about 250 times over thirty years, with cataracts clouding his sight. The eight curved panels he gave France in 1922 fill two oval rooms at the Orangerie, opened in 1927, months after his death. A 1919 canvas sold for 80.4 million dollars in 2008.

21. 

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    Pablo Picasso

    Les Demoiselles d'Avignon

    Five prostitutes from a brothel on Barcelona's Carrer d'Avinyó, faces fractured into masks, after Picasso's visit to the ethnographic museum at the Trocadéro. Friends were horrified; Braque said it was like 'drinking paraffin'. Rolled up for years, it is where 20th-century painting begins.

22. 

    22of 100

    Edward Hopper

    Nighthawks

    Hopper finished the all-night diner, inspired by a restaurant on Greenwich Avenue, weeks after Pearl Harbor; his wife Jo posed for the woman in red. The Art Institute bought it the same year for 3,000 dollars. No door is visible: the four figures are sealed behind glass.

23. 

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    Claude Monet

    Impression, Sunrise

    The port of Le Havre in orange mist, painted in a single session. When the critic Louis Leroy mocked the title in 1874, the word 'Impressionists' stuck to a whole movement. Stolen in 1985 with eight other Monets, it was recovered in Corsica in 1990.

24. 

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    Leonardo da Vinci

    Lady with an Ermine

    Cecilia Gallerani, the 16-year-old mistress of the Duke of Milan, turns as if someone has spoken, an animal in her arms whose Greek name puns on hers. Hidden from the Nazis, seized by Hans Frank, recovered in 1946: Poland bought it with the whole Czartoryski collection in 2016 for 100 million euros.

25. 

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    Caspar David Friedrich

    Wanderer above the Sea of Fog

    A man seen from behind, stick in hand, over a sea of cloud in Saxon Switzerland. Friedrich never explained who he was. Rediscovered in the 20th century after a long eclipse, it became the cover of countless books on Romanticism, Nietzsche and solitude, and the default image of the sublime.

26. 

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    Théodore Géricault

    The Raft of the Medusa

    The 1816 wreck of a French frigate, whose 147 abandoned passengers resorted to cannibalism, painted by a 27-year-old who interviewed survivors and studied corpses in the morgue. A political bomb at the 1819 Salon, it made Géricault's name; he died at 32. Delacroix posed for one of the dead.

27. 

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    Édouard Manet

    Luncheon on the Grass

    Rejected by the Salon and shown at the Salon des Refusés, a naked woman picnicking with two clothed men caused the scandal of 1863. The pose is lifted from a Raphael engraving; the flat lighting broke every academic rule. It is the painting usually credited with starting modern art.

28. 

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    Francisco Goya

    Saturn Devouring His Son

    One of fourteen 'Black Paintings' Goya painted directly on the walls of his house outside Madrid, deaf and in his seventies, never meant to be seen. Transferred to canvas after his death, the god eating his child has become the internet's favourite image of horror.

29. 

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    Leonardo da Vinci

    Salvator Mundi

    Bought in 2005 as an overpainted copy for about 1,175 dollars, it was restored and shown at London's National Gallery in 2011 as Leonardo's lost Christ as Saviour of the World. Christie's sold it in November 2017 for 450.3 million dollars, a record for any painting. Its attribution is still debated.

30. 

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    Francisco Goya

    The Third of May 1808

    Goya's record of Napoleon's troops executing Madrid citizens on Príncipe Pío hill: a man in a white shirt, arms raised like a crucifixion, faces the faceless firing squad. Kenneth Clark called it 'the first great picture which can be called revolutionary in every sense'. Picasso's Guernica answers it.

31. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Sunflowers

    Van Gogh painted the series in Arles in August 1888 to decorate Gauguin's bedroom, using the new chrome yellows. He made seven versions; one was destroyed in Japan in 1945. Another version sold for 39.9 million dollars in 1987, then a record for any painting.

32. 

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    Michelangelo

    The Last Judgment

    Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel 25 years after the ceiling to cover the altar wall with 300 writhing figures. The nudity so scandalised the Council of Trent that Daniele da Volterra was paid to paint loincloths over them in 1565, earning the nickname 'the breeches-maker'.

33. 

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    Gustave Courbet

    The Origin of the World

    Painted for the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey, Courbet's close-up of a woman's body was kept hidden behind a sliding panel for over a century; its last private owner was the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It entered the Musée d'Orsay in 1995 and still sets off censorship disputes on social networks.

34. 

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    Sandro Botticelli

    Primavera

    Venus, the Three Graces, Mercury and Flora in an orange grove with 500 identified plant species and 190 flowers, painted for a Medici wedding. Botanists have catalogued every one. With the Birth of Venus next door, it draws the longest queue in Florence.

35. 

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    Jacques-Louis David

    The Death of Marat

    David, a Jacobin deputy, had visited his friend the day before Charlotte Corday stabbed him in his bath. He painted the revolutionary as a secular Christ, skin smoothed, letter in hand. It hung in the hall of the National Convention, then stayed with David's family until 1893.

36. 

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    Francisco Goya

    The Nude Maja

    One of the first life-size female nudes in Western art without a mythological pretext, painted for the royal favourite Manuel Godoy, who owned it together with its clothed twin. The Inquisition summoned Goya in 1815 to explain it. The two Majas have hung side by side in the Prado since 1901.

37. 

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    James McNeill Whistler

    Whistler's Mother

    Officially 'Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1', the seated Anna Whistler was bought by the French state in 1891, the first American painting to enter the Louvre collections. A 1934 US postage stamp made it the national icon of motherhood; Mr Bean dropped it in a 1997 film.

38. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Café Terrace at Night

    The first canvas Van Gogh painted outdoors at night, on the Place du Forum in Arles, without using black. He wrote to his sister that the night was 'more alive and richly coloured than the day'. The café still trades on the square under the name 'Café Van Gogh'.

39. 

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    Gustav Klimt

    Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I

    Klimt spent three years and 100 drawings on the Viennese hostess, dressed in gold and silver leaf. Seized by the Nazis in 1938 and renamed 'The Lady in Gold' to hide her Jewish identity, it was returned to her niece Maria Altmann in 2006 after a US Supreme Court case, and sold for 135 million dollars.

40. 

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    Édouard Manet

    Olympia

    Victorine Meurent as a Parisian courtesan, staring at the viewer, a black cat at her feet in place of Titian's dog. At the 1865 Salon guards were posted to protect it from umbrellas. Monet raised a subscription in 1890 to buy it for the nation; it entered the Louvre in 1907.

41. 

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    Pierre-Auguste Renoir

    Bal du moulin de la Galette

    A Sunday dance in a Montmartre garden, dappled light falling through acacia leaves on Renoir's friends and models. Caillebotte bought it and bequeathed it to the state in 1894. A smaller version sold for 78.1 million dollars in 1990 to a Japanese paper tycoon.

42. 

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    Jan van Eyck

    The Ghent Altarpiece

    Hubert and Jan van Eyck's polyptych of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb is often called the most stolen artwork in history: taken to Paris by Napoleon's armies, sold in part to Prussia, hidden by the Nazis in an Austrian salt mine. The Just Judges panel, stolen in 1934, has never been found.

43. 

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    Jean-Honoré Fragonard

    The Swing

    A courtier asked for a painting of his mistress on a swing pushed by a bishop while he admired her from below; Fragonard replaced the bishop with an old husband. A slipper flies off, a stone Cupid demands silence. It is the Rococo in one image, and the visual model for Disney's 'Tangled'.

44. 

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    Leonardo da Vinci

    The Virgin of the Rocks

    Leonardo painted the subject twice for a Milan confraternity. The first version, now in the Louvre, never reached the chapel after a dispute over the fee; this second one, finished with assistants, stayed there until 1785. Infrared scans in 2019 revealed an abandoned composition hidden beneath the London panel.

45. 

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    John Everett Millais

    Ophelia

    Millais painted the riverbank at Ewell for five months, then the 19-year-old Elizabeth Siddal floating in a bathtub heated by oil lamps; she caught a severe cold when the lamps went out. Every flower follows Shakespeare's text. Henry Tate gave it to the nation in 1894.

46. 

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    Jacques-Louis David

    The Death of Socrates

    Condemned to death for impiety, Socrates reaches for the cup of hemlock while still teaching, his disciples collapsing in grief around him. Shown at the 1787 Salon, it confirmed David as the leader of Neoclassicism; Joshua Reynolds compared it to the Sistine Chapel. The Metropolitan Museum bought it in 1931.

47. 

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    René Magritte

    The Treachery of Images

    A carefully painted pipe over the handwritten line 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe'. 'Could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation,' Magritte explained. Foucault wrote a book about it in 1973. It is the painting philosophers and advertising agencies quote most.

48. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    The Potato Eaters

    Van Gogh's first major painting, made in Nuenen after dozens of studies of peasant heads: a family eating, by lamplight, the potatoes they have dug. He wrote to his brother that it should make people think of the hands that worked the soil. His friend Anthon van Rappard condemned it; Van Gogh still called it his best.

49. 

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    René Magritte

    The Son of Man

    A self-portrait commissioned by Magritte's patron Harry Torczyner: bowler hat, overcoat, sea wall, and a green apple hiding the face. Magritte said 'everything we see hides another thing'. It has become the shorthand for Surrealism in advertising and film, from 'The Thomas Crown Affair' onward.

50. 

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    Jacques-Louis David

    The Coronation of Napoleon

    David's vast record of the ceremony of 2 December 1804 at Notre-Dame shows Napoleon about to crown Josephine after crowning himself. At the emperor's request David added Napoleon's mother in the gallery, although she had stayed away. A second version, painted between 1808 and 1822, hangs at Versailles.

51. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Bedroom in Arles

    Van Gogh's room in the Yellow House, painted to express 'absolute rest' with flat colours like a Japanese print; the walls were violet, now faded to blue. He made three versions after a flood damaged the first. Visitors can sleep in a full-size replica built by the Art Institute of Chicago.

52. 

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    Jacques-Louis David

    Napoleon Crossing the Alps

    Napoleon crossed the Great St Bernard Pass in May 1800 on a mule; he asked David to paint him calm on a fiery horse. Charles IV of Spain commissioned the first picture, and David's studio made five versions, now at Malmaison, Charlottenburg, Versailles and the Belvedere. In 1850 Delaroche answered it with the mule.

53. 

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    Rembrandt

    The Storm on the Sea of Galilee

    Rembrandt's only seascape shows the disciples fighting a wave that is about to capsize their boat, while one of them looks out at the viewer with the painter's own face. Thieves cut it from its frame in the 1990 Gardner Museum robbery, still unsolved, and the empty frame hangs in its place.

54. 

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    Raphael

    The Sistine Madonna

    Painted for the church of San Sisto in Piacenza and bought by Augustus III in 1754, Raphael's Madonna steps forward on clouds between parted curtains. The two leaning cherubs at the bottom became one of the most reproduced details in art. Taken to Moscow in 1945, the painting was returned to Dresden in 1955.

55. 

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    Andy Warhol

    Campbell's Soup Cans

    Thirty-two canvases, one for each flavour the company sold, shown in a Los Angeles gallery on a shelf like groceries. Five sold at 100 dollars each; the dealer bought them back to keep the set. Warhol said he had eaten the soup for lunch every day for twenty years.

56. 

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    Ilya Repin

    Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan

    Repin shows the tsar clutching the son he has just struck dead with his staff in 1581. Alexander III had it withdrawn from exhibition for months. In 1913 a visitor slashed it with a knife, and in 2018 another broke its glass with a metal post. It is the best-known image of Russian history.

57. 

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    Kazimir Malevich

    Black Square

    Malevich hung the first version across the corner of the room, where an icon belongs, at the '0.10' exhibition in Petrograd in 1915, calling it the 'zero of form'. Under the cracked black paint an earlier coloured composition and a racist joke were found in 2015. Four versions exist.

58. 

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    Hans Holbein the Younger

    The Ambassadors

    Holbein portrayed two French envoys to the court of Henry VIII among globes, books and instruments, including a lute with a broken string. Across the floor floats a distorted skull that becomes legible only from the side, an anamorphosis reminding the viewer of death. The National Gallery bought it in 1890.

59. 

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    Rembrandt

    The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp

    Rembrandt's first Amsterdam commission at 25: the city's anatomist demonstrates the tendons of a hanged thief, Aris Kindt, before seven surgeons who paid to be included. Surgeons still debate the anatomy of the dissected forearm. It made his reputation and remains the picture of medicine's beginnings.

60. 

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    Titian

    Venus of Urbino

    Painted for the Duke of Urbino, a woman reclines on a bed in a Venetian palace, a dog asleep at her feet, maids searching a chest behind. Mark Twain called it 'the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses'. Manet copied its pose exactly for Olympia.

61. 

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    Édouard Manet

    A Bar at the Folies-Bergère

    Manet's last major work, finished a year before his death. The barmaid Suzon stands before a mirror whose reflection does not match the room: the customer she faces appears on the right, the bottles shift. Generations of art historians have tried, and failed, to make the geometry work.

62. 

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    Caravaggio

    The Calling of Saint Matthew

    A shaft of light from an unseen window crosses a Roman tavern as Christ points at a tax collector counting coins. Caravaggio's first public commission still hangs in the chapel it was painted for; visitors feed a coin into a meter to light it. Pope Francis has said he sees himself in Matthew.

63. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Wheatfield with Crows

    A double-square canvas of a field under a stormy sky with three diverging paths and a flock of crows, painted in Auvers in July 1890. Long presented as his last work before he shot himself in a similar field; it was not, but the legend made it the picture of an artist's final despair.

64. 

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    Pieter Brueghel the Elder

    The Tower of Babel

    Bruegel modelled the tower on the Colosseum, which he had drawn in Rome, and filled it with hundreds of tiny builders, cranes and a visiting king. The spiral already leans and the top floors are being built before the lower ones are finished. It is the picture of every overreaching project since.

65. 

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    Pierre-Auguste Renoir

    Luncheon of the Boating Party

    Fourteen friends on the balcony of the Maison Fournaise at Chatou, including Renoir's future wife Aline with a dog and the painter Caillebotte in a straw hat. Duncan Phillips bought it in 1923 for 125,000 dollars, then a record. The restaurant still serves lunch on the same terrace.

66. 

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    Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

    La Grande Odalisque

    Commissioned by Napoleon's sister Caroline, Queen of Naples, a concubine looks back over a spine critics said had 'three vertebrae too many'. Ingres lengthened it on purpose. The distortion that shocked the 1819 Salon is why the figure is remembered, and why the Guerrilla Girls put a gorilla mask on it.

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    Pieter Brueghel the Elder

    The Hunters in the Snow

    Three hunters and their dogs return with a single fox to a village skating on frozen ponds, the first great winter landscape in European art, painted during the 'Little Ice Age'. Part of a cycle of the months for an Antwerp banker. Tarkovsky filmed it in 'Solaris'.

68. 

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    John Singer Sargent

    Madame X

    Sargent painted the Parisian society beauty Virginie Gautreau in a black satin dress, one jewelled strap slipping from her shoulder. The 1884 Salon was scandalised; he repainted the strap and soon left Paris for London. He sold the portrait to the Metropolitan Museum in 1916, calling it the best thing he had done.

69. 

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    Paul Gauguin

    Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

    Gauguin painted his largest canvas in Tahiti in a month, he said, before a failed suicide attempt with arsenic. Read from right to left, from a sleeping baby to an old woman, with the title written in the corner. He considered it his masterpiece; Boston bought it in 1936.

70. 

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    Jacques-Louis David

    Oath of the Horatii

    Three Roman brothers swear on their swords to fight for the city while the women weep: a royal commission that became, five years later, the image of Revolutionary virtue. Painted in Rome and exhibited there first, it is the founding picture of Neoclassicism.

71. 

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    Ilya Repin

    Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks

    Repin spent more than ten years on these Cossacks roaring with laughter as they compose an insulting letter to the Ottoman sultan, after a legendary 17th-century text. Alexander III bought it for 35,000 roubles, then a record for a Russian painting. A second version is in Kharkiv; the scene is a symbol of Ukrainian defiance.

72. 

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    Marcel Duchamp

    Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2

    Rejected by the Cubists themselves at the 1912 Salon des Indépendants, the figure in twenty superimposed positions, inspired by chronophotography, became the scandal of the 1913 Armory Show in New York, where a critic called it 'an explosion in a shingle factory'. It made Duchamp famous in America.

73. 

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    Johannes Vermeer

    The Milkmaid

    A kitchen maid pours milk in a corner lit from a window, every nail hole and crumb of bread recorded with dots of light. The Rijksmuseum bought it in 1908 after a national debate in parliament over the price. Vermeer's 36 surviving paintings make each one a destination.

74. 

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    Arnold Böcklin

    Isle of the Dead

    A rowing boat carries a white-shrouded figure and a coffin towards a rocky island of cypresses. Böcklin painted five versions between 1880 and 1886, and prints of it hung in countless German homes. Rachmaninoff wrote a symphonic poem after it, and Hitler bought the third version in 1933. The first version is in Basel.

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    Rembrandt

    The Return of the Prodigal Son

    One of Rembrandt's last paintings: the ragged son kneels against the chest of his half-blind father while the elder brother looks on. Catherine the Great bought it for the Hermitage in 1766. Henri Nouwen's 1992 book about it turned it into a meditation image for millions of readers.

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Starry Night Over the Rhône

    Painted on the river bank in Arles by gaslight, with the Great Bear reflected in the water and a couple walking in the foreground, nine months before the Saint-Rémy 'Starry Night'. Van Gogh exhibited it at the Salon des Indépendants in 1889, one of the few times he showed work in public.

77. 

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    Jean-François Millet

    The Gleaners

    Three peasant women bend to pick leftover stalks after the harvest, a right of the poor, while the bountiful farm glows in the background. The 1857 Salon saw a socialist threat in their monumental bodies. It is now the image of rural labour in every history book.

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    Andrew Wyeth

    Christina's World

    Anna Christina Olson, who had a degenerative muscle disease and refused a wheelchair, crawls across a field toward her farmhouse in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth used his wife as the body model. MoMA bought it for 1,800 dollars in 1949; its director later called it their most popular painting.

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    Ilya Repin

    Barge Haulers on the Volga

    Repin painted eleven men dragging a barge upstream after meeting haulers on the Volga in 1870. Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich bought it, it won a medal at the 1873 Vienna World's Fair and Dostoevsky praised its honesty. Soviet schoolbooks later used it as the image of the labour of the poor.

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    Thomas Gainsborough

    The Blue Boy

    A merchant's son in a Van Dyck costume a century out of date, painted to prove that a portrait could be built on blue, against Reynolds's advice. Its sale to Henry Huntington in 1921 for 728,000 dollars, then the highest price for any painting, caused national mourning in Britain.

81. 

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    Paul Cézanne

    The Card Players

    Cézanne painted five versions of Provençal peasants absorbed in a game of cards, from five players down to two. The Orsay picture, the smallest, shows two men facing each other across a bottle. In 2011 another version was sold privately to the royal family of Qatar for a price reported at over 250 million dollars.

82. 

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    Frida Kahlo

    The Two Fridas

    Painted in the months of her divorce from Diego Rivera, Kahlo's largest canvas shows two selves holding hands, hearts exposed and joined by an artery that one Frida clamps with surgical forceps. The Mexican government bought it in 1947 for 4,000 pesos, her highest price in her lifetime.

83. 

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Portrait of Dr Gachet

    The homeopathic doctor who looked after Van Gogh in Auvers, leaning on a red table with a foxglove, painted with 'the heartbroken expression of our time'. Sold in 1990 for 82.5 million dollars to a Japanese businessman, a world record, it has not been seen in public since.

84. 

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    Gustave Courbet

    A Burial at Ornans

    Courbet gave the funeral of an ordinary villager in his native Ornans the size of a history painting, with about fifty life-size inhabitants as his models. The 1850–1851 Salon was outraged that common people filled such a canvas. It became the manifesto of Realism, and Courbet called it the burial of Romanticism.

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    Francesco Hayez

    The Kiss (Hayez)

    Painted the year the Austrians were driven out of Lombardy, the embrace of a young man about to leave and the woman he loves was read as a symbol of Italian unification, the colours of their clothes recalling the French and Italian flags. Hayez painted at least four versions; the first hangs in the Brera.

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    Pieter Brueghel the Elder

    Netherlandish Proverbs

    Bruegel packed more than a hundred Flemish proverbs into one village square: a man banging his head against a wall, another filling the well after the calf has drowned, a globe turned upside down. Historians are still identifying them. His son Pieter the Younger painted about twenty copies of it.

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    Vincent van Gogh

    Irises

    Painted in the asylum garden at Saint-Rémy in Van Gogh's first week there, before his first attack; his brother Theo showed it at the Salon des Indépendants. In 1987 it sold for 53.9 million dollars, a world record, to a buyer who could not pay; the Getty bought it in 1990.

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    El Greco

    The Burial of the Count of Orgaz

    El Greco painted the legend of Saints Stephen and Augustine coming down to bury a 14th-century benefactor, with portraits of Toledo notables below and heaven opening above. It has never left the church it was made for. The boy in the foreground is the painter's son; the handkerchief in his pocket is dated 1578, his birth year.

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    Diego Velázquez

    The Rokeby Venus

    The only surviving female nude by Velázquez shows Venus from behind, her face blurred in the mirror held by Cupid. It hung at Rokeby Park in Yorkshire until the National Gallery bought it in 1906. In 1914 the suffragette Mary Richardson slashed it seven times with a meat cleaver; the cuts were repaired.

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    Alexandre Cabanel

    The Fallen Angel

    Painted in Rome by the 24-year-old Cabanel, then a student of the French Academy, it shows Lucifer lying on a rock after his fall, a tear running from eyes full of anger. The Musée Fabre in Montpellier, the painter's home town, owns it; its furious, tearful face became a widely shared image online in the 2010s.

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    Paolo Veronese

    The Wedding at Cana

    The largest painting in the Louvre, made for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, sets Christ's first miracle in a Venetian banquet of more than 130 guests. Napoleon's troops cut it in two in 1797 to carry it to Paris. It now faces the Mona Lisa across the Salle des États.

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    John Constable

    The Hay Wain

    A cart crossing the Stour by Willy Lott's cottage at Flatford, painted in Constable's London studio from oil sketches. Ignored in England, it won a gold medal at the 1824 Paris Salon and changed Delacroix's palette. In a 2005 BBC poll it was voted Britain's second favourite painting.

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    J. M. W. Turner

    The Fighting Temeraire

    A veteran of Trafalgar towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be broken up, under a sunset Turner set in the wrong direction on purpose. He refused every offer to sell it, calling it 'my darling'. Voted Britain's greatest painting in 2005; printed on the 20-pound note since 2020.

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    Henry Fuseli

    The Nightmare

    A woman lies swooning with a demon squatting on her chest while a ghostly horse peers through the curtains. Shown at the Royal Academy in 1782, it made Fuseli famous overnight; engravings of it sold across Europe and he painted several more versions. Freud is said to have kept a print of it in his Vienna apartment.

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    Caravaggio

    Judith Beheading Holofernes

    Caravaggio shows the very moment the young widow cuts through the Assyrian general's neck, her face torn between disgust and resolve while her old servant waits with the bag. Rediscovered in a private collection in 1951, it entered the Palazzo Barberini in 1971. Artemisia Gentileschi answered it with her own versions.

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    Johannes Vermeer

    The Art of Painting

    Vermeer shows a painter from behind, at work on a model posed as Clio, the muse of history, under a large map of the Netherlands. He kept the picture until his death, and his widow tried to save it from his creditors. Hitler bought it in 1940; it was returned to Austria in 1946.

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    Henri Matisse

    The Dance

    Five red figures circle on a green hill under a blue sky, painted for the staircase of Sergei Shchukin's Moscow mansion, who nearly cancelled the order after the 1910 Salon d'Automne booed it. Matisse used only three colours. It is the image of joy that modern art keeps coming back to.

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    Pablo Picasso

    The Weeping Woman

    Painted in the months after Guernica, it shows Dora Maar, Picasso's companion and the photographer who documented Guernica, her face broken into acid colours as she cries into a handkerchief. Picasso painted a whole series of weeping women that year. The Tate bought this one in 1987; another version was stolen in Melbourne in 1986.

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    Banksy

    Girl with Balloon

    Banksy stencilled a girl letting go of a red heart-shaped balloon on the South Bank stairs in London in 2002. A framed version shredded itself at Sotheby's in October 2018 just after selling for 1.04 million pounds; renamed Love is in the Bin, it resold for 18.6 million pounds in 2021. A 2017 poll named it the UK's favourite artwork.

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     Eugène Delacroix

     The Massacre at Chios

     Delacroix painted the slaughter of Greek islanders by Ottoman troops in 1822, two years after it happened, while Europe took sides in the Greek War of Independence. At the 1824 Salon Gros called it the massacre of painting, yet the French state bought it. It made the 26-year-old Delacroix the leader of Romanticism.