Some paintings become familiar far beyond the galleries, churches or palaces that hold them. Their figures are quoted, their compositions are reworked, and their titles become shorthand for whole moments in art. Familiarity alone, however, does not explain why a painting deserves attention. The more useful question is what each work changed, concentrated or made newly visible.
This directory brings together 18 famous paintings made between 1434 and about 1909. It is a guided route through recognisable works rather than a league table. The selection favours paintings with clear identities, strong historical consequences and enough contrast to make comparison rewarding. Portraits sit beside landscapes, religious narratives, scenes of work, political allegory and experiments in colour. Several artists appear twice because the paired works reveal different ambitions.
The scope is deliberately bounded. It is not a universal canon or a complete history of painting, and many traditions remain outside this particular route. Use the dates to move chronologically, or compare works by artist, movement and subject. Each title opens a fuller discussion of the painting, while each linked artist name leads into the wider body of work.
Paintings across time
The four date bands describe this directory’s verified range. Choose a band, or combine it with the movement, artist and subject filters.
Before 1600: new kinds of presence
European painting changed decisively between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Oil paint made minute surfaces and gradual tonal transitions possible in the north, while Italian painters renewed large-scale myth, sacred narrative and intellectual allegory. These six works also show that “Renaissance painting” was never a single look.
The Arnolfini Portrait
The Arnolfini Portrait rewards slow looking. A couple stands in a furnished room where polished beads, fruit, textiles, a small dog and a convex mirror are rendered with extraordinary precision. The mirror widens the scene by reflecting figures beyond the pair, while van Eyck’s signature gives the room the force of witnessed presence. The National Gallery’s current title—Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife—keeps the sitters and occasion appropriately open; the familiar “wedding” interpretation is not treated as settled fact.[1]
The Birth of Venus
In The Birth of Venus, the goddess arrives at shore on a shell as wind drives flowers and drapery across the surface. Botticelli builds the scene from long contours, pale flesh, rippling hair and a landscape that feels more poetic than naturalistic. Its scale and mythological subject distinguish it from the devotional images often associated with fifteenth-century Florence. The Uffizi dates the canvas to about 1485 and identifies it under inventory number 1890 no. 878.[2]
The Last Supper
The Last Supper turns a long dining wall into a charged dramatic space. Christ forms the still centre while the apostles break into distinct groups, gestures and reactions. The converging architecture draws attention towards him, yet the human exchange across the table keeps the scene alive. Leonardo worked on a dry wall rather than painting in true fresco, a technically important distinction that helps explain the work’s fragile material history. The official museum dates the mural to 1495–1498 and records its imposing 460-by-880-centimetre scale.[3]
Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa sets a half-length sitter before roads, water and distant rock. Her turned body, joined hands and elusive expression create an encounter that appears stable and changeable at once. Soft transitions suppress hard outlines, allowing face, veil and atmospheric landscape to meet through tone rather than sharp edges. The Louvre identifies the sitter as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo, and dates Leonardo’s work across the long span 1503–1519. That extended making is part of the painting’s identity, not a single-year certainty.[4]
The School of Athens
The School of Athens imagines ancient philosophy as a monumental gathering. Plato and Aristotle advance at the centre beneath a sequence of arches, while thinkers read, debate, calculate and withdraw into contemplation around them. The architecture orders a crowd without making it static: gestures and sightlines create smaller conversations inside the whole. Raphael painted the fresco for the Room of the Segnatura in the Apostolic Palace, where it participates in a larger programme devoted to branches of knowledge. This entry refers to the Vatican mural, not the surviving preparatory cartoon in Milan.[5]
The Harvesters
The Harvesters gives agricultural labour the breadth of a world. Reapers cut wheat in the middle distance, while others eat or rest beneath a tree. Beyond them, paths, fields, houses and water carry the eye towards a hazy horizon. The painting belonged to a series devoted to times of year, but it avoids turning work into a simple emblem: effort, hunger, weather and leisure coexist. The Met dates the oak panel to 1565 and identifies it as accession 19.164.[6]
1600–1799: drama, observation and everyday life
Seventeenth-century painters could make public spectacle feel immediate and private experience feel momentous. These four works move from civic performance and royal self-scrutiny to two quieter studies of attention.
The Night Watch
Rembrandt’s The Night Watch refuses the stillness expected of a large group portrait. Captain Frans Banninck Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch step forward as weapons, lances and bodies create a shifting field behind them. Light selects faces, costume and the mysterious young girl, while other figures recede into shadow. The familiar title is later and misleading—the scene was darkened over time—but it has become inseparable from the painting’s public identity. The Rijksmuseum’s object SK-C-5 dates from 1642.[7]
Las Meninas
In Las Meninas, the Infanta Margarita stands among attendants while Velázquez appears at a towering canvas. A mirror at the back contains the king and queen, and a court official pauses in a bright doorway. These competing looks make the viewer’s position uncertain: are we seeing the royal couple’s viewpoint, a painted reflection, or a moment organised for them? Rather than resolving the puzzle, the painting turns representation itself into its subject. The Prado dates object P001174 to 1656.[8]
The Milkmaid
The Milkmaid concentrates on one ordinary action. A woman pours milk beside bread, pottery and a basket, framed by a bare wall whose stains, nail holes and cool daylight remain visible. The stream of liquid provides the quiet centre of a scene built from weighted colour: blue apron, yellow bodice, white cap and earthen vessels. Vermeer gives domestic work gravity without theatrical gesture. The Rijksmuseum dates object SK-A-2344 to about 1660.[9]
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring is not documented as a commissioned portrait of a named sitter. It is better understood as a tronie: a study of a face, expression and striking costume. The figure turns against darkness, mouth slightly open, while blue and yellow fabric frames the head. A few bright touches make the earring appear lustrous without describing every edge. That economy gives the encounter its immediacy. The Mauritshuis dates object 670 to about 1665.[10]
1800–1879: revolution, memory and modern light
The nineteenth century expanded what a major public painting could do. Political uprising became allegory, a veteran warship became an image of technological succession, and a harbour at sunrise helped give a new movement its name.
Liberty Leading the People
Liberty Leading the People joins an event from recent history to an allegorical figure. Barefoot Liberty crosses the barricade with the French tricolour raised above fighters from different social worlds. Smoke compresses the background, while the forward rush and sharply tilted bodies make the scene feel unstable. Delacroix responded to the July Revolution of 1830 without presenting a literal report of one instant. The Louvre’s official title translates as 28 July 1830: Liberty Leading the People and identifies the work as RF 129.[11]
The Fighting Temeraire
Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire shows the veteran warship being towed towards its final berth by a compact steam tug. The pale vessel seems almost weightless beside the tug’s dark hull and smoking funnel. Across the sky, the lowering sun transforms the journey into an elegy, while steam power signals a new mechanical age. Turner exhibited the painting in 1839; its fuller title specifies that the ship is being tugged to be broken up. The National Gallery records it as NG524.[12]
Impression, Sunrise
In Impression, Sunrise, boats and industrial silhouettes emerge from blue-grey haze in the harbour of Le Havre. The orange sun is small, but its colour vibrates against the surrounding cool tones and repeats in the broken reflection below. Monet lets abbreviated brushwork register changing atmosphere instead of polishing every form into clarity. When the painting appeared in the 1874 group exhibition, its title helped provoke the label “Impressionism.” The Marmottan identifies the work as its 1872 inventory 4014.[13]
1880–1919: colour, perception and inner experience
By the late nineteenth century, painters were testing how colour and mark-making could carry structure, sensation and emotion. These five paintings range from Seurat’s planned optical field to the ornamental surface of Klimt’s embrace.
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 arranges Parisians along the Seine with a calm that is both social and strangely suspended. Seurat constructed the surface from small touches of contrasting colour rather than blending every tone on the palette. Repeated verticals, profiles and long shadows hold the crowd in a measured rhythm, even as boats, animals and strolling figures suggest recreation. The Art Institute records the principal campaign as 1884–1886 and the painted border as a later addition of 1888–1889; the accession number is 1926.224.[14]
The Starry Night
The Starry Night sets a dark cypress against a sky of rolling blue currents, radiant stars and a crescent moon. A village lies below, quieter and more angular, while hills echo the sky’s movement along the horizon. Van Gogh turns separate brush marks into a continuous visual pulse; observation and invention are difficult to separate. MoMA dates object 472.1941 to June 1889, during the artist’s period at Saint-Rémy.[15]
Irises
Irises brings the viewpoint close to a crowded garden bed. Curving green leaves lock together across the canvas, blue-violet flowers press towards its edges, and a single pale iris interrupts the dominant colour. The cropped arrangement makes the plants feel continuous beyond the frame, while each bloom retains an individual tilt or turn. Van Gogh painted the work at Saint-Rémy in 1889. The Getty identifies it as object 90.PA.20, also catalogued as 103JNH.[16]
The Scream
Several works by Munch bear the title The Scream. This entry is specifically the 1893 painted version owned by Norway’s National Museum, object NG.M.00939. Its central figure presses both hands to a skull-like face while the bridge drives sharply into depth. Behind it, water, hills and a red-orange sky bend into broad bands that seem to transmit rather than merely surround the cry. The exact identity matters: later painted and pastel versions, as well as the lithograph, are distinct objects.[17]
The Kiss (Lovers)
In The Kiss, two bodies meet inside a gold field that nearly dissolves the boundary between clothing and background. Rectangular motifs cover the standing figure’s robe; rounded forms and flowers gather around the kneeling figure. Faces, hands and feet remain carefully modelled, making their physical presence stand out from the patterned surface. The couple’s precarious position at the edge of a flowered ground keeps the image from becoming purely decorative. The Belvedere dates object 912 to about 1907–1909 and titles it The Kiss (Lovers).[18]
Ways to compare the paintings
Chronology reveals only one kind of relationship. Compare the two Leonardos to see how a crowded sacred drama and a private portrait organise attention differently. Set Vermeer’s quiet interiors against Rembrandt’s civic movement, or follow the changing role of landscape from Bruegel’s seasonal world to Monet’s harbour and van Gogh’s night sky. Delacroix and Turner both address historical change, but one sends bodies towards the viewer while the other lets a ship recede.
Subjects offer another route. Portraits ask how identity can be suggested without certainty; scenes of labour turn pouring milk or cutting wheat into sustained observation; myth and allegory give abstract ideas a human form. Across the later works, visible brushwork and separated colour become active structures rather than details to hide. None of these comparisons produces a single winner. Their value lies in showing how painters made different answers memorable.
References
- National Gallery, London, “Jan van Eyck, The Arnolfini Portrait”.
- Gallerie degli Uffizi, “The Birth of Venus”.
- Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, “The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci”.
- Musée du Louvre, “Portrait de Lisa Gherardini, épouse de Francesco del Giocondo”.
- Vatican Museums, “The School of Athens”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Harvesters”.
- Rijksmuseum, “The Night Watch”.
- Museo Nacional del Prado, “Las Meninas”.
- Rijksmuseum, “The Milkmaid”.
- Mauritshuis, “Girl with a Pearl Earring”.
- Musée du Louvre, “28 July 1830: Liberty Leading the People”.
- National Gallery, London, “Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire”.
- Musée Marmottan Monet, “Impression, soleil levant”.
- Art Institute of Chicago, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884”.
- Museum of Modern Art, “Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night”.
- J. Paul Getty Museum, “Irises”.
- National Museum, Norway, “The Scream”.
- Upper Belvedere, “The Kiss (Lovers)”.