Top 40 World’s Most Famous Painting Of All Time

                             “Painting is a blind man’s profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.” – Pablo Picasso

Art is not only a piece of work all together it is a way of expressing one’s thoughts, feelings, and unspoken words. Today we count down on the Top 40 World’s Most Famous Painting of All Time. So that we can at least summit a token of gratitude towards the work of the Greatest Artist of All Times.

If your running short on time just have a glance at the summary table ( We advise you to have look at the whole blog  as we know you would be eager to know the reason behind their fame 😉 )

40.”Portrait of Ambroise Vollard”

Portrait of Ambroise Vollard is a colored painting created by Pablo Picasso in 1910. Ambroise Vollard is a French dealer, who is credited to provide exposure and emotional support to unknown artists including Pablo Picasso. The works reflect Analytical Cubism artwork completed by the use of oil techniques on canvas.

It is a masterpiece gift by Pablo Picasso to his godfather Ambroise Vollard for upraising him during his initial stages. The dimension of painting is 92 cm by 65 cm and is housed at Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow. The painting shows the diversity, recognization power and thought process of Ambroise Vollard through the cubical form.

The painting depicts Ambroise Vollard’s bald head, multiplying itself up the painting like an egg being broken open, his bulbous nose and the dark triangle of his beard are the first things the eye latches on to. Vollard’s eyes are a broken architecture of shards of flesh- or brick-colored painting.

39.”Portrait of Dr. Gachet”

Painted in June 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris.

One of the most revered paintings by Van Gogh of Dr. Paul Gachet, who took care of him in his last months.

There are two authentic versions of the portrait. It was sold at auction (1990) for a record price of $82.5 million.

But since 1996, the location of the Original version painting is a mystery and yet unknown.

The second version of the portrait is currently in the possession of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.

38.”Las Meninas (detail)”

This baroque painting is considered one of the most important of all-time.

The central figure is the young Margarita Teresa of Spain but the painting also shows the artist himself, an image of the king and queen, several servants, two dwarfs, and a dog.

37.“ Narcissus ”

Narcissus is a painting by the Italian Baroque master Caravaggio, painted circa 1597–1599. It is housed in the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica in Rome.

This is one of only two known Caravaggios on a theme from Classical mythology, although this reflects the accidents of survival rather than the historical reality. The story of Narcissus, told by the poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses, is of a handsome youth who falls in love with his reflection.

The story was well known in the circles of collectors, such as Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and the banker Vincenzo Giustiniani, in which Caravaggio was moving at this period.

The painting conveys an air of brooding melancholy: the figure of Narcissus is locked in a circle with his reflection, surrounded by darkness, so that the only reality is inside this self-regarding loop.

The 16th-century literary critic Tommaso Stigliani (it) explained the contemporary thinking that the myth of Narcissus “clearly demonstrates the unhappy end of those who love their things too much.”

36.“ The Night ”

The Night is a 20th-century painting by German artist Max Beckmann, created between the years of 1918 and 1919.

It is an icon of the post-World War I movement, Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity.

It is an oil painting on canvas.

Three men appear to invade a small, cramped room, where they terrorize the scene.

To the left, a man is hung by one of the intruders, and his arm twisted by another.

A woman, seemingly the man’s wife, is bound to one of the room’s supports after having been raped.

35.”The Lamentation over the Dead Christ”

The Lamentation of Christ (also known as the Lamentation over the Dead Christ, or the Dead Christ and other variants) is a painting of about 1480 by the Italian Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna.

While the dating of the piece is debated, it was completed between 1475 and 1501, probably in the early 1480s.

It portrays the body Christ supine on a marble slab.

He is watched over by the Virgin Mary and Saint John who cut-off profile is behind the Virgin Mary, who is weeping for his death.

34.“Gare Saint Lazare, Pari”

When he painted The Saint-Lazare Station, Monet had just left Argenteuil to settle in Paris.

After several years of painting in the countryside, he turned to urban landscapes.

At a time when the critics Duranty and Zola exhorted artists to paint their times, Monet tried to diversify his sources of inspiration and longed to be considered, like Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte, a painter of modern life.

Despite the apparent geometry of the metallic frame, what prevails here is the effects of color and light rather than a concern for describing machines or travelers in detail.

Certain zones, true pieces of pure painting, achieve an almost abstract vision. This painting was praised by another painter of modern life, Gustave Caillebotte, whose painting was often the opposite of Monet’s.

33.”Vertumnus (Vertumno)”

Vertumnus (Emperor Rudolph II) is a painting by Giuseppe Arcimboldo in the collection of the Skoklosters Slott, Bålsta.

The inspiration for painting comes from the god of seasons, Vertumnus, who was supposed to have the power to change his form at his will.

The painting displays Emporer Rudolph II with fruits, vegetables, and flowers all over his body in place of skin, muscles, and hairs.
Emporer Rudolph II von Hapsburg is portrayed as Vertumnus, the god of seasonal change.

The painting symbolizes the sovereign’s role as a synthesis of the cosmos and an emblem of man as a microcosm. According to Lomazzo, Rudolph II had asked the artist to make something amusing for him.

The protean versatility in which mythology ascribed to Vertumnus is attributed in this act of homage to the Emperor, with his vast variety of different fields of influence and activity.

32.”Women of Algiers (Version O)”

A nude courtesan stands brazenly before us, her breasts and soft stomach are bare, her hair wrapped in an elaborate headdress. A tangle of limbs, breasts, and buttocks fill the rest of the canvas, which measures 57 by 45 inches.

Here are women selling their bodies, many of them faceless, reduced to their constituent anatomical parts. Picasso began his Women Of Algiers series

Within a month of the Nationalist uprising in Algeria, a French colony, in 1954. It was the beginning of the eight-year Algerian War of Independence.

Picasso painted the work as part of a 15-painting series (versions A through O) created in 1954 and 1955, inspired by Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 ‘Women of Algiers.’

On May 11, 2015, Christie’s said ‘Women of Algiers (Version O)’ sold for $179,365,000.

31.”The Card Players”

The Card Players is a series of oil paintings by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Cézanne.

Painted during Cézanne’s final period in the early 1890s, there are five paintings in the series.

The versions vary in size and the number of players depicted.

Cézanne also completed numerous drawings and studies in preparation for The Card Players series.

One version of The Card Players was sold in 2011 to the Royal Family of Qatar for a price variously estimated at between $250 million and $300 million, making it the second most expensive work of art ever sold.

30.”Waterfall”

The Waterfall is a mid-20th-century painting by Armenian American artist Arshile Gorky.

The dimension of painting is 96.8 cm by 24 cm and is housed in Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington DC.

It is an oil painting based on surrealism style and abstract genre.

The waterfall was developed from some actual scenes. The figures in the painting are not distortions, nor do they correspond only diagrammatically to people, but they do sustain the presence of the representational figure, partaking of height width, volume, and to a limited extent, personality.

They certainly possess gender and are not merely ciphers for “people”. In the upper center at the right base of a triangle near the top, rests a dark blue-green circle that denotes the head of a man. Beneath the head is two arms, green oblongs, that rest horizontally on the shoulders of a woman. The couple is more detailed than spontaneous abstraction would seem to allow.

29.”Nafeaffaa Ipolpo (also known as When Will You Marry.)”

When Will You Marry? (Tahitian: Nafea faa ipoipo) is an oil painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.

On loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland for nearly a half-century, it was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin to an unknown buyer, reportedly to Qatar Museums, in February 2015 for close to $300m (£197m), the highest price ever paid for a work of art.

The painting was on exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler, Riehen, until 28 June 2015

28.”The Dream”

Le Rêve (The Dream in French) is a 1932 oil painting (130 × 97 cm) by Pablo Picasso, then 50 years old, portraying his 24-year-old mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter.

It is said to have been painted in one afternoon, on January 24, 1932. It belongs to Picasso’s period of distorted depictions, with its oversimplified outlines and contrasted colors resembling early Fauvism.

The erotic content of the painting has been noted repeatedly, with critics pointing out that Picasso painted an erect penis, presumably symbolizing his own, in the upturned face of his model.

27.”Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I”

This painting, which took three years to complete, was commissioned by the wealthy industrialist Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, who made his money in the sugar industry.

Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer favored the arts, especially Klimt, and commissioned him to complete another portrait of his wife Adele in 1912. Adele Bloch-Bauer was the only person to be painted twice by Klimt.

This painting is perhaps most famous not for its artistic quality, but because of its scandalous history since inception.

Upon her death, Adele Bloch-Bauer wished the painting to be given to the Austrian State Gallery, but it was seized by advancing German forces in World War II.

In 1945, Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer designated the paintings to be the property of his nephew and nieces, including Maria Altmann. Nonetheless, the Austrian government retained ownership of the painting and was not returned to the Altmann family until 2006 after a long court battle.

The painting was then sold at auction for 135 million dollars, which at that time was the highest price paid at auction for a painting. It is now displayed the Neue Art Gallery in New York.

26.”Harmony in Red”

The Dessert: Harmony in Red is a painting by French artist Henri Matisse, from 1908.

It is considered by some critics to be Matisse’s masterpiece. This Fauvist painting follows the example set by Impressionism with the overall lack of a central focal point.

The painting was ordered as “Harmony in Blue,” but Matisse was dissatisfied with the result, and so he painted it over with his preferred red. It is in the permanent collection of the Hermitage Museum.

25.”The School of Athens (Stanza Della Segnatura)”

This wall painting, located in the Vatican, contains pictures of many famous philosophers.

Plato and Aristotle are the two in the middle. As an inside joke, Raphael based Plato’s face on fellow artist Leonardo da Vinci. He also included Michelangelo and himself elsewhere in the painting.

24.”Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, Arles, at Night”

Café Terrace at Night, also known as The Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum, is a colored oil painting executed by the Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh.

The painting is not signed but described and mentioned by the artist in his letters on various occasions. There is also a large pen drawing of the composition which originates from the artist’s estate

The painting is currently at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands.

After finishing Café Terrace at Night, Van Gogh wrote a letter to his sister expressing his enthusiasm:

      ” I was only interrupted by my work on a new painting representing the exterior of a night café. On the terrace, there are small figures of people drinking. An immense yellow lantern illuminates the terrace, the facade, the side walk and even casts light on the paving stones of the road which take a pinkish violet tone. The gables of the houses, like a fading road below a blue sky studded with stars, are dark blue or violet with a green tree. Here you have a night painting without black, with nothing but beautiful blue and violet and green and in this surrounding the illuminated area colors itself sulfur pale yellow and citron green. It amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot. Normally, one draws and paints the painting during the daytime after the sketch. “.

23.”Creation of Adam”

The Creation of Adam is arguably the most famous section of Michelangelo’s fresco Sistine Chapel ceiling painted circa 1511–1512.

It is the most well-known of the Sistine Chapel fresco panels, and its fame as a piece of art is rivaled only by the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

The image of the near-touching hands of God and Adam has become one of the single most iconic images of humanity and has been reproduced in countless imitations and parodies

The Creation of Adam is one of the most well-known and famous artworks of all time, and as such has been the subject of several references and parodies.

22.”The Third of May 1808″

This painting shows Napoleon’s attack on Spain in 1808.

Before this, most paintings showed war as being a glorious thing.

This painting shows it as being cruel and subhuman (see how the soldiers look mechanical whereas the ones being shot look full of life).

21.”The Night Cafe [1888]”

The Night Café is an oil painting created in Arles in September 1888, by Vincent van Gogh.

Its title is inscribed lower right beneath the signature.

The five customers depicted in the scene have been described as “three drunks and derelicts in a large public room […] huddled down in sleep or stupor.”

One scholar wrote, “The cafe was an all-night haunt of local down-and-outs and prostitutes, who are depicted slouched at tables and drinking together at the far end of the room.“.

In August 1888 the artist told his brother in a letter:

  “ Today I am probably going to begin on the interior of the café where I have a room, by gaslight, in the evening. It is what they call here a “café de Nuit” (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night. “Night prowlers” can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for lodging or are too drunk to be taken in. ”

In the first days of September 1888, Van Gogh sat up for three consecutive nights to paint the picture, sleeping during the day. Little later, he sent the water-color, copying the composition and again simplifying the color scheme to meet the simplicity of Japanese woodblock prints.

Van Gogh’s Cafe Terrace at Night, showing outdoor tables, a street scene, and the night sky, was painted in Arles at about the same time. It depicts a different cafe, a larger establishment on the Place du Forum.

20.”The Great Bathers “

The Bathers is an oil painting on canvas made between 1918 and 1919 by the French painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir. After being given to the State by his three in 1923, it is currently kept at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

In the painting, Renoir removed any reference to the contemporary world and showed “a timeless nature”. The theme of the bather is predominant in the final season of Renoir’s paintings: the women portrayed by the painter are free and uninhibited.

These bathers are “melted in nature and the forms merge with the trees, flowers and the shares of red water”.
The painting received criticism because of “the enormousness of the legs and arms, the weakness of the flesh, and the pinkish color of the models”.

19.”Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles”

Bedroom in Arles is the title given to each of three similar paintings by 19th-century Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh.

Van Gogh started the first version during mid-October 1888 while staying in Arles, and explained his aims and means to his brother Theo:

“This time it simply reproduces my bedroom but color must be abundant in this part, its simplification adding a rank of grandee to the style applied to the objects, getting to suggest a certain rest or dream. Well, I have thought that on watching the composition we stop thinking and imagining.

I have painted the walls pale violet. The ground with checked material. The wooden bed and the chairs, yellow like fresh butter the sheet and the pillows, lemon light green. The bedspread, scarlet-colored. The window, green. The washbasin, orangey
the tank, blue. The doors, lilac. And, that is all.

There is not anything else in this room with closed shutters. The square pieces of furniture must express unswerving rest
also the portraits on the wall, the mirror, the bottle, and some costumes.

The white color has not been applied to the picture, so its frame will be white, aimed to get me even with the compulsory rest recommended for me. I have depicted no type of shade or shadow
I have only applied simple plain colors, like those in crêpes.”

18.”The Sea of Ice”

The Sea of Ice also called The Wreck of Hopeis an oil painting of 1823–1824 by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.

The two titles originally referred to the present work and another older work by Friedrich, now missing. The lost painting was shown in 1822 at the Dresden Academy exhibition under the title A Wrecked Ship off the Coast of Greenland in the Moonlight. Own Invention. The present painting was first shown in 1824 at the Prague Academy exhibition under the title An Idealized Scene of an Arctic Sea, with a Wrecked Ship on the Heaped Masses of Ice.

Accounts of expeditions to the North Pole were occasionally published during those years which is likely how Friedrich became familiar with William Edward Parry’s 1819–1820 expedition to find the Northwest Passage. In the winter of 1820–21, Friedrich made extensive oil studies of ice floes on the river Elbe, near Dresden. These were probably incorporated into The Sea of Ice.

17.”Saturn Devouring His Son”

Saturn Devouring His Son is the name given to a painting by Spanish artist Francisco Goya.

According to the traditional interpretation, it depicts the Greek myth of the Titan Cronus (in the title Romanised to Saturn), who, fearing that he would be overthrown by one of his children, ate each one upon their birth.

The work is one of the 14 Black Paintings that Goya painted directly onto the walls of his house sometime between 1819 and 1823. It was transferred to canvas after Goya’s death and has since been held in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

16.”Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Young Ladies of Avignon, and originally titled The Brothel of Avignon) is a large oil painting created in 1907 by the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).

The work portrays five nude female prostitutes from a brothel on Carrer d’Avinyó (Avinyó Street) in Barcelona.

Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally feminine. The women appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and disjointed body shapes.

Two are shown with African mask-like faces and three more with faces in the Iberian style of Picasso’s native Spain, giving them a savage aura. In this adaptation of Primitivism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Picasso makes a radical departure from traditional European painting.

The work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both cubism and modern art. Demoiselles was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends.

15.”Dance at Moulin de la Galette”

Bal du moulin de la Galette (commonly known as Dance at Le moulin de la Galette) is an 1876 painting by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

It is housed at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and is one of Impressionism’s most celebrated masterpieces.

The painting depicts a typical Sunday afternoon at Moulin de la Galette in the district of Montmartre in Paris. In the late 19th century, working-class Parisians would dress up and spend time there dancing, drinking, and eating galettes into the evening.

For many years it was owned by John Hay Whitney. On May 17, 1990, his widow sold the painting for US$78 million at Sotheby’s in New York City to Ryoei Saito (Saitō Ryōei), the honorary chairman of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Company, Japan.

At the time of sale, it was one of the top two most expensive artworks ever sold, together with van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which was also purchased by Saito. Saito caused international outrage when he suggested in 1991 that he intended to cremate both paintings with him when he died.

However, when Saito and his companies ran into severe financial difficulties, bankers who held the painting as collateral for loans arranged a confidential sale through Sotheby’s to an undisclosed buyer. Although not known for certain, the painting is believed to be in the hands of a Swiss collector.

14.”Time transfixed”

Time Transfixed (La Durée poignardée, 1938) is an oil on canvas painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. It is part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and is usually on display in the museum’s new Modern Wing.

The painting depicts a “Black Five” locomotive jutting out of a fireplace, at full steam, in an empty room. Above the mantlepiece is a tall mirror. Only the clock and one candlestick standing on the mantlepiece are reflected in the mirror, suggesting that there are neither people nor furniture in the room.

Magritte described his motivation for this painting:
“I decided to paint the image of a locomotive . . . In order for its mystery to be evoked, another immediately familiar image without mystery—the image of a dining room fireplace—was joined.”

13.” Olympia, Musee d’Orsay, Paris”

This painting is an example or realism — a style that shows exactly what the eye sees. It created an uproar, not because the subject was nude, but because of the way he painted her gaze and other subtleties indicating that she was a mistress.

12.”The Son of Man”

The Son of Man is a 1964 painting by the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte.

The painting consists of a man standing in front of the wall wearing a coat and a hat with his half face covered by an apple. Though his face is covered by apple he can be seen peeking over the edge of the apple.

About the painting, Magritte said: “At least it hides the face partly. Well, so you have the apparent face, the apple, hiding the visible but hidden, the face of the person. It’s something that happens constantly. Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see. There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”

11.”Arrangement in Grey and Black. Portrait of the Painter’s Mother”

Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1, famous under its colloquial name Whistler’s Mother, is an 1871 oil-on-canvas painting by American-born painter James McNeill Whistler.

The painting is 56.81 by 63.94 inches (144.3 cm × 162.4 cm), displayed in a frame of Whistler’s own design in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, having been bought by the French state in 1891.

It is now one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States. It has been variously described as an American icon and a Victorian Mona Lisa.

The sensibilities of a Victorian-era viewing audience would not accept what was apparently a portrait being exhibited as a mere “arrangement”
thus the explanatory title “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother” was appended. It was from this that the work acquired its popular name. After Thomas Carlyle viewed the painting, he agreed to sit for a similar composition, this one being titled Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 2. Thus the previous painting became Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 more or less by default

10.”American Gothic”

American Gothic is a painting by Grant Wood in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Wood’s inspiration came from what is now known as the American Gothic House, and a decision to paint the house along with “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.”

The painting shows a farmer standing beside his spinster daughter. The figures were modeled by the artist’s sister and their dentist. The woman is dressed in a colonial print apron evoking 19th-century Americana, and the couple is in the traditional roles of men and women, the man’s pitchfork symbolizing hard labor, and the flowers over the woman’s right shoulder suggesting domesticity.

Wood decided to paint the house along with “the kind of people I fancied should live in that house.” He recruited his sister Nan (1899–1990) to model the woman, dressing her in a colonial print apron mimicking 19th-century Americana.

The man is modeled on Wood’s dentist, Dr. Byron McKeeby (1867–1950) from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The three-pronged hay fork is echoed in the stitching of the man’s overalls, the Gothic window of the house, and the structure of the man’s face. However, Wood did not add figures to his sketch until he returned to his studio in Cedar Rapids.

He would not return to Eldon again before his death in 1942, although he did request a photograph of the home to complete his painting.

9.”A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”.

A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – 1884 (French: Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte – 1884) is one of Georges Seurat’s most famous works, and is an example of pointillism.

Motivated by study in optical and color theory, Seurat contrasted miniature dots of colors that, through optical unification, form a single hue in the viewer’s eye.

He believed that this form of painting called divisionism at the time but now known as pointillism would make the colors more brilliant and powerful than standard brush strokes. The use of dots of almost uniform size came in the second year of his work on the painting, 1885-86.

To make the experience of the painting even more vivid, he surrounded it with a frame of painted dots, which in turn he enclosed with a pure white, wooden frame, which is how the painting is exhibited today at the Art Institute of Chicago.

The painting was first exhibited in 1886, dominating the second Salon of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, of which Seurat had been a founder in 1884.

8.”Water Lilies”

Water Lilies is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926).

The paintings depict Monet’s flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet’s artistic production during the last thirty years of his life. Many of the works were painted while Monet suffered from cataracts.

On 19 June 2007, one of Monet’s water lily paintings sold for £18.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London. On 24 June 2008 another of Monet’s water lily paintings, Le Bassin aux nymphéas, sold for almost £41 million at Christie’s in London, almost double the estimate of £18 to £24 million.

7.”The Kiss (Bacio)”

The Kiss was painted by the Austrian Symbolist painter Gustav Klimt between 1907 and 1908, the highpoint of his “Golden Period” when he painted a number of works in a similar gilded style.

A perfect square, the canvas depicts a couple embracing, their bodies entwined in elaborate robes decorated in a style influenced by both linear constructs of the contemporary Art Nouveau style and the organic forms of the earlier Arts and Crafts movement.

The work is composed of oil paint with applied layers of gold leaf, an aspect that gives it its strikingly modern, yet evocative appearance. The painting is now in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere museum in the Belvedere palace, Vienna, and is widely considered a masterpiece of the early modern period. It is a symbol of Vienna Jugendstil—Viennese Art Nouveau—and is considered Klimt’s most popular work

It is thought that Klimt and his companion Emilie Flöge modeled for the work, but there is no evidence or record to prove this. Others suggest the female was the model known as ‘Red Hilda’ she bears a strong resemblance to the model in his Woman with a feather boa, Goldfishand Danaë. Klimt’s use of gold was inspired by a trip he had made to Italy in 1903.

When he visited Ravenna he saw the Byzantine mosaics in the Church of San Vitale. For Klimt, the flatness of the mosaics and their lack of perspective and depth only enhanced their golden brilliance, and he started to make unprecedented use of gold and silver leaf in his own work.

6.”Night Watch”

The Night Watch or The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq is the common name of one of the most famous works by Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn.

The painting may be more properly titled The Company of captain Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch preparing to march out. It is prominently displayed in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, as the best-known painting in its collection. Night Watch is one of the most famous paintings in the world.

5.”The Girl with a Pearl Earring”

The painting Girl with a Pearl Earring is one of Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s masterworks and, as the name implies, uses a pearl earring for a focal point.

Today the painting is kept in the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague. It is sometimes referred to as “the Mona Lisa of the North” or “the Dutch Mona Lisa”.

In general, very little is known about Vermeer and his works. This painting is signed “IVMeer” but not dated. It is unclear whether this work was commissioned, and, if so, by whom. In any case, it is probably not meant as a conventional portrait.

More recent Vermeer literature points to the image being a tronie, the Dutch 17th-century description of a ’head’ that was not meant to be a portrait. After the most recent restoration of the painting in 1994, the subtle color scheme and the intimacy of the girl’s gaze toward the viewer have been greatly enhanced. During the restoration, it was discovered that the dark background, today somewhat mottled, was initially intended by the painter to be a deep enamel-like green. This effect was produced by applying a thick transparent layer of paint, called a glaze, over the present-day black background. However, the two organic pigments of the green glaze, indigo, and weld, have faded.

4.”Three Musicians”

Three Musicians is the title of two similar collage and oil paintings by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.

They were both completed in 1921 in Fontainebleau near Paris, France, and exemplify the Synthetic Cubist style. One version is currently owned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City the other is found in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Each painting features a Harlequin, a Pierrot, and a monk, who are generally believed to represent Picasso, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Max Jacob, respectively.

Apollinaire and Jacob, both poets, had been close friends of Picasso during the 1910s. However, Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu in 1918, while Jacob decided to enter a monastery in 1921.

3.”The Scream”

The Scream is the popular name given to each of four versions of a composition, created as both paintings and pastels, by the Expressionist artist Edvard Munch between 1893 and 1910. Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature) is the title Munch gave to these works, all of which show a figure with an agonized expression against a landscape with a tumultuous orange sky. The landscape in the background is the Oslofjord, viewed from Ekeberg, Oslo, Norway.

Edvard Munch created the four versions in various media. The National Gallery, Oslo, holds one of two painted versions (1893, shown at right). The Munch Museum holds the other painted version (1910, see gallery) and a pastel version from 1893. These three versions have not traveled for years.

The fourth version (pastel, 1895) was sold for $119,922,600 at Sotheby’s Impressionist and Modern art auction on 2 May 2012 to financier Leon Black, the highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction. The painting is on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for six months from October 2012 to March 2013.

2.”Starry-Night”

The Starry Night is a painting by the Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh.

The painting depicts the view outside his sanitarium room window at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence (located in southern France) at night, although it was painted from memory during the day. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, part of the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest, since 1941. The painting is among Van Gogh’s most well-known works

1.” Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)”

The Mona Lisa (La Gioconda or La Joconde, or Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo) is a half-length portrait of a woman by the Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci, which has been acclaimed as “the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world.”

The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a poplar panel and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

The ambiguity of the subject’s expression, frequently described as enigmatic, the monumentality of the composition, the subtle modeling of forms and the atmospheric illusionism were novel qualities that have contributed to the continuing fascination and study of the work.
The painting’s title Mona Lisa stems from a description by Giorgio Vasari: “Leonardo undertook to paint, for Francesco del Giocondo, the portrait of Mona Lisa, his wife….” In Italian, ma donna means my lady. This became madonna and its contraction mona. Mona was thus a polite form of address, similar to Ma’am, Madam, or my lady in English. Though traditionally spelled “Mona” (as used by Vasari), in modern Italian, this short form of madonna is now usually spelled Monna. The title is therefore sometimes given Monna Lisa, but this is rare in English. “Monna Lisa” is the normal spelling in modern Italian.