Ranking of famous paintings is not so easy and also, we have to realize that the act of painting is an ancient practice. It was started like 40000 years ago, when early humans used charcoals to create images to cave walls. Besides that, the history of western art began through different genres. Although, there are many remarkable paintings to study from these art movements.
Paintings are not just a piece of artwork to look at. And, a painting includes a feeling and emotions poured out from the soul of an artist. So, a painting should touch the viewers at the exact same place where it came from. And, many famous artists left their legacy behind. But, the world will continue to remember for generations to come.
We can look at some of the most renowned paintings created by artists who’ve spent their lives, mastering the art of it. So, among this list of masterpieces are some that are so well known they’ve become a part of popular culture.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–19 | famous paintings to recreate
Painted between 1503 and 1517 by Da Vinci’s portrait has been dogged by two questions from the day it was made. Who’s the subject and why is she smiling? However, a number of concepts have been submitted over the years. #famous paintings to recreate
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, 1665 | most famous paintings
A young woman is startlingly real and startlingly modern and almost as if it were a photograph. This gets into the debate over employed a pre-photographic device called a camera to create the image. #most famous paintings
Sandro Botticelli, 1484–1486 | Famous paintings
Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus was the first full-length and non-religious nude since ancient times. And it was made for Lorenzo de Medici. It’s claimed that the figure of the Goddess of Love is showed. #famous painters
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Vincent Van Gogh’s most popular painting is The Starry Night in 1889. #famous paintings with meaning
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, 1871
Whistler’s Mother, 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.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907–1908
Opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, The Kiss, portrayal of intimacy, is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil. And, Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs. #famous artists paintings
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. Also, a full-length double portrait portrays an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may not be his bride.
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.
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.
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907
The Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting and incorporating allusions to the African masks. And, Picasso had seen in Paris’s ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro.