Top 100 Most Famous Painters and the Masterpieces That Defined Them

Leonardo da Vinci

The ultimate Renaissance polymath, da Vinci treated painting as a form of scientific inquiry into light, anatomy and motion. Fewer than twenty paintings survive, yet two of them, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, remain among the most recognized images ever made.

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Vincent van Gogh

A largely self-taught painter who produced nearly 900 works in under a decade, van Gogh turned intense feeling into equally intense color and brushwork. His paintings went almost unsold in his lifetime; today they define Post-Impressionism.

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Michelangelo Buonarroti

Though he considered himself first a sculptor, Michelangelo’s ceiling for the Sistine Chapel redefined what painting could achieve, merging anatomical precision with theological ambition on a scale no one had attempted before.

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Claude Monet

The founder of Impressionism painted not objects but the fleeting effect of light upon them, returning to the same haystack, cathedral or water-lily pond at different hours to capture how a subject changes with the day.

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Caravaggio

Caravaggio dragged religious painting out of idealized grace and into the tavern, using raw models and violent contrasts of light and shadow, a technique now known as tenebrism, to make sacred scenes feel physically present.

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William Blake

Poet, printmaker and visionary, Blake invented his own mythology and illustrated it in blazing watercolour and relief etching, and was dismissed in his lifetime as an eccentric. Works such as Newton and The Ancient of Days turned private visions into some of the most arresting images of English Romanticism.

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Gustav Klimt

A founding figure of the Vienna Secession, Klimt fused gold leaf, ornament and eroticism into a style entirely his own, most famously in The Kiss, a defining image of turn-of-the-century Vienna.

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Rembrandt van Rijn

The dominant painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt mastered dramatic light and psychological depth, producing some of the most searching portraits and history paintings in Western art, including nearly 100 self-portraits.

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Raphael

Raphael completed the High Renaissance trio with Leonardo and Michelangelo, and his harmony and clarity became the ideal that academies taught for centuries. He died at 37, yet his Vatican frescoes, above all The School of Athens, set the standard for classical composition.

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Francisco Goya

Court painter to the Spanish crown, Goya spent his later years painting what no court wanted to see: war, madness and superstition. The Third of May 1808 and the private Black Paintings, including Saturn Devouring His Son, carry him from the Old Masters straight into modern art.

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Hieronymus Bosch

Working in the Brabant town of ’s-Hertogenbosch, Bosch filled his panels with hybrid monsters, burning hellscapes and moral warnings that still defy full explanation. The Garden of Earthly Delights remains one of the strangest and most studied paintings ever made.

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Paul Gauguin

A stockbroker turned painter, Gauguin left Paris for Brittany and then Tahiti in search of something he felt Europe had lost. His flat planes of unnatural colour and simplified forms, from The Yellow Christ to his Tahitian scenes, opened the way to Symbolism and Fauvism.

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Edvard Munch

Munch painted states of mind rather than scenes: anxiety, jealousy, grief and desire, drawn from a childhood marked by illness and loss. The Scream, which he made in several versions, has become the universal image of modern anxiety and a founding work of Expressionism.

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J. M. W. Turner

Turner began as a precise topographical watercolourist and ended by dissolving ships, storms and sunsets into pure light and atmosphere. Critics called his late work unfinished; today he is seen as a forerunner of Impressionism and abstraction, and Britain’s most celebrated painter.

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Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Born into an aristocratic family and left with stunted legs after two childhood fractures, Lautrec made Montmartre’s cabarets and dance halls his subject. His paintings and posters of the Moulin Rouge fixed the image of Belle Époque nightlife and turned the poster into an art form.

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Hokusai

Hokusai produced tens of thousands of works over a seventy-year career and changed his artist name more than thirty times. His series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, which includes The Great Wave off Kanagawa, became the most famous Japanese imagery in the world and a direct influence on Monet and Van Gogh.

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Johannes Vermeer

A quiet master of the Dutch Golden Age, Vermeer left behind roughly 34 known paintings, most of them intimate domestic scenes built from an unmatched control of natural light falling through a window.

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Wassily Kandinsky

A lawyer who gave up an academic career at thirty to study painting, Kandinsky became one of the first artists to abandon recognisable subject matter altogether. He treated colour like music, and his numbered Compositions are among the founding works of abstract art.

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John Singer Sargent

Born in Florence to American parents, Sargent became the most sought-after portrait painter of his generation, famed for dazzling, fluid brushwork. The scandal over Madame X at the 1884 Paris Salon sent him to London, and he later poured his energy into watercolours and murals.

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Peter Paul Rubens

Painter, diplomat and scholar, Rubens ran the busiest studio in Europe from Antwerp, supplying altarpieces, ceiling cycles and mythologies to kings and churches. His energetic compositions and luminous, full-bodied figures define the Flemish Baroque.

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Albrecht Dürer

The first Northern European artist to absorb the Italian Renaissance, Dürer was also the first to become famous across Europe through his prints. His engravings, woodcuts and meticulous nature studies such as A Young Hare, together with his striking self-portraits, made Nuremberg a centre of art.

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Artemisia Gentileschi

Trained by her father in the manner of Caravaggio, Gentileschi became the first woman admitted to Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. Her powerful biblical heroines, painted with dramatic light and unflinching realism, have made her one of the most celebrated painters of the Baroque.

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Paul Cézanne

Cezanne broke the world down into planes of color and geometric form, returning obsessively to Mont Sainte-Victoire and simple still lifes. His structural approach to painting became the direct bridge to Cubism.

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Pierre-Auguste Renoir

A core figure of Impressionism, Renoir painted pleasure itself: sunlit gatherings, dancers and portraits rendered in warm, luminous color that celebrated everyday joy over grand subject matter.

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Sandro Botticelli

Botticelli worked for the Medici circle in Florence, where he brought classical mythology back to monumental painting with an unmistakable grace of line. Forgotten for centuries, The Birth of Venus and Primavera were rediscovered in the nineteenth century and are now icons of the Renaissance.

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Amedeo Modigliani

An Italian in Montparnasse, Modigliani developed an unmistakable style of elongated faces, almond eyes and swan necks, shaped by African and Cycladic sculpture. He died at 35, poor and barely recognised; his portraits and nudes now rank among the most valuable paintings in the world.

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Edgar Degas

Degas exhibited with the Impressionists but called himself a realist, preferring the studio, the theatre and the racetrack to open-air landscape. More than half his work depicts dancers, observed at rehearsal and backstage from unusual angles inspired by photography and Japanese prints.

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Nicknamed “Peasant Bruegel”, he turned village life, proverbs and the changing seasons into subjects worthy of great painting. His panoramic scenes, from The Hunters in the Snow to The Tower of Babel, are crowded with human detail and mark the high point of Flemish Renaissance art.

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Titian

The leading painter of sixteenth-century Venice, Titian built his pictures from colour rather than line, and served popes, emperors and kings over a career of nearly seventy years. His Venus of Urbino set a pattern for the reclining nude that painters followed for centuries.

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Édouard Manet

Manet never exhibited with the Impressionists, yet his flat, frank treatment of modern Parisian life made him their hero. Olympia and The Luncheon on the Grass scandalised Paris in the 1860s, and A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, finished the year before his death, is his final masterpiece.

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Alphonse Mucha

Mucha became famous almost overnight with an 1895 poster for Sarah Bernhardt, and his women framed by flowers, halos and flowing hair came to define Art Nouveau. He later devoted nearly twenty years to The Slav Epic, twenty monumental canvases on the history of the Slavic peoples.

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Jacques-Louis David

The leading painter of French Neoclassicism, David turned austere Roman virtue into political statement, then served the Revolution and later Napoleon as his official painter. The Death of Marat and Napoleon Crossing the Alps show how completely he fused art with propaganda.

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Diego Velázquez

Court painter to Philip IV for almost four decades, Velázquez painted kings, jesters and servants with the same penetrating realism. Las Meninas, with its mirror, open doorway and the painter himself at work, is one of the most analysed paintings in Western art.

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Georges Seurat

Seurat applied colour theory with scientific rigour, building his pictures from small dots of pure pigment that blend in the viewer’s eye, a method known as pointillism. He died at 31, leaving only a handful of large canvases, led by A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

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El Greco

Born Doménikos Theotokópoulos on Crete, El Greco trained as an icon painter, passed through Venice and Rome and settled in Toledo. His elongated figures, flickering light and acid colours were long thought eccentric, until the early modernists hailed him as a forerunner.

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Jan van Eyck

Van Eyck brought oil painting to a level of detail and luminosity that astonished his contemporaries, rendering fur, metal, glass and skin with near-microscopic precision. The Ghent Altarpiece and The Arnolfini Portrait are cornerstones of Northern Renaissance art.

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Gian Lorenzo Bernini

The dominant artist of Baroque Rome, Bernini is celebrated above all for his sculpture and architecture, from The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa to the colonnade of Saint Peter’s Square. He also painted, mostly in private, and his rare canvases, especially his self-portraits, share the same psychological intensity.

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Hans Holbein the Younger

Born in Augsburg and trained in Basel, Holbein became court painter to Henry VIII, and his portraits still shape how we picture Tudor England. The Ambassadors, with its famous distorted skull, is one of the most intriguing portraits ever painted.

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Paul Klee

A trained violinist and later a teacher at the Bauhaus, Klee produced nearly 10,000 works that blend line, colour and wit with a childlike freedom. Pictures such as The Twittering Machine and Fish Magic move easily between Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.

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John William Waterhouse

Working a generation after the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Waterhouse carried its love of Arthurian legend and classical myth into the twentieth century with a softer, more painterly touch. His Lady of Shalott is one of the best-loved paintings at Tate Britain.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Poet as well as painter, Rossetti co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 and later led its most sensual strand. His late half-length portraits of women, often modelled by Jane Morris as in Proserpine, helped shape the Aesthetic Movement.

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Caspar David Friedrich

The central painter of German Romanticism, Friedrich placed small, often back-turned figures before vast seas, mountains and moonlit ruins to evoke the sublime and the spiritual. His Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has become the emblem of the Romantic era.

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John Everett Millais

A child prodigy who entered the Royal Academy Schools at eleven, Millais co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and painted its most famous image, Ophelia. He went on to become the most commercially successful painter in Victorian Britain and President of the Royal Academy.

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Eugène Delacroix

The leader of French Romanticism, Delacroix championed colour and movement against the cool line of Neoclassicism. A journey to Morocco in 1832 transformed his palette, and Liberty Leading the People became a symbol of France itself.

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Camille Pissarro

Born on the Caribbean island of St Thomas, Pissarro was the only artist to show at all eight Impressionist exhibitions and a patient mentor to Cézanne and Gauguin. He painted villages, fields and peasants and, late in life, the boulevards of Paris seen from hotel windows.

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Gustave Courbet

Courbet declared he would paint only what he could see, and his vast canvases of ordinary rural life shocked a Salon used to gods and heroes. The leader of the Realist movement, he spent his last years in exile in Switzerland after the Paris Commune.

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Ilya Repin

The most celebrated Russian painter of the nineteenth century, Repin portrayed his country from barge haulers and religious processions to tsars and writers. Barge Haulers on the Volga made his name, and his portraits of Tolstoy and Mussorgsky became the defining images of both men.

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Giotto

Giotto broke with the flat, stylised Byzantine tradition and gave painted figures weight, emotion and a believable space to stand in. Praised by Dante and later by Vasari, he painted the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes in Padua, often seen as the first step toward the Renaissance.

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William-Adolphe Bouguereau

The most successful academic painter of his day, Bouguereau dominated the Paris Salon for half a century with mythological and genre scenes of flawless finish. Long dismissed by the modernists, his work has regained wide admiration for its technical mastery.

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John Martin

Martin specialised in cataclysm: biblical floods, fallen cities and the Last Judgement, painted on a vast scale with tiny figures dwarfed by apocalyptic landscapes. Hugely popular in his day, he also drew up engineering plans for London’s water supply and sewers.

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William Hogarth

Painter, engraver and satirist, Hogarth invented the modern moral series, telling stories of greed and folly across sequences of pictures such as Marriage A-la-Mode. His prints were pirated so widely that he campaigned for the Engraving Copyright Act of 1735, still known as Hogarth’s Act.

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Mary Cassatt

An American in Paris, Cassatt was invited by Degas to exhibit with the Impressionists and became one of the movement’s great women painters. She is best known for tender, unsentimental scenes of women and children, and helped build major American collections of Impressionist art.

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John Constable

Constable painted the Suffolk countryside of his childhood with an honesty and freshness new to English art, making hundreds of oil sketches of clouds and weather outdoors. The Hay Wain won a gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1824 and inspired a generation of French painters.

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Berthe Morisot

A founding member of the Impressionist group, Morisot showed in seven of its eight exhibitions and was the only woman in the first, in 1874. Her quick, feathery brushwork captured domestic life, gardens and the women and children around her.

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Kazimir Malevich

Malevich moved through Impressionism, peasant primitivism and Cubo-Futurism before arriving in 1915 at Suprematism, pure geometric forms on a white ground epitomised by his Black Square. Early canvases such as The Knife Grinder show that radical journey in progress.

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Henri Rousseau

A Paris customs clerk who taught himself to paint, Rousseau was ridiculed for years before Picasso and the avant-garde embraced his work. His dreamlike jungles, which he never saw in person, and The Sleeping Gypsy made him the most famous of all naïve painters.

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Jean-Léon Gérôme

A celebrated teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts, Gérôme painted antiquity, history and the Near East with photographic precision and theatrical staging. His gladiators and Orientalist scenes were reproduced worldwide and later influenced the look of Hollywood epics.

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Fra Angelico

A Dominican friar whose luminous colour and serene devotion earned him the name “Angelic Brother”, Fra Angelico painted the cells of the convent of San Marco in Florence with frescoes for private meditation. He was beatified in 1982 and named patron of Catholic artists.

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Thomas Gainsborough

Gainsborough earned his living as a society portraitist in Bath and London, yet always said he would rather be painting landscapes. His feathery brushwork and elegant sitters set against idyllic countryside made him the great rival of Joshua Reynolds.

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Anthony van Dyck

Rubens’s most gifted assistant, van Dyck became principal painter to Charles I of England and created the king’s elegant, melancholy image almost single-handedly. His relaxed aristocratic portraits set the model for British portraiture for the next 150 years.

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Lucas Cranach the Elder

Court painter to the Electors of Saxony in Wittenberg for nearly fifty years, Cranach was a close friend of Martin Luther and painted the portraits that spread the reformer’s face across Europe. His slender, stylised nudes of Venus and Lucretia are just as recognisable.

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Ivan Aivazovsky

Born to an Armenian family in the Crimean port of Feodosia, Aivazovsky painted some 6,000 works, most of them seascapes and many from memory rather than on the spot. The Ninth Wave, with survivors clinging to a mast after a storm, is one of Russia’s best-loved paintings.

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John Trumbull

Known as the “Painter of the Revolution”, Trumbull served as an aide to George Washington before training in London under Benjamin West. His great scenes of American independence, including the Declaration of Independence on the back of the two-dollar bill, hang in the Rotunda of the US Capitol.

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Alexandre Cabanel

A pillar of the French Academy, Cabanel won the Prix de Rome, taught generations of students and sat on the Salon juries that rejected the Impressionists. His Birth of Venus was bought by Napoleon III at the 1863 Salon, the same year Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass was refused.

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Thomas Cole

English-born Cole founded the Hudson River School, the first American art movement, painting the Catskills and untamed wilderness as a national treasure. His five-part series The Course of Empire, which ends with Desolation, warned of the rise and fall of civilisations.

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Gustave Caillebotte

A wealthy engineer and collector as well as a painter, Caillebotte funded Impressionist exhibitions and bequeathed his collection to the French state. His own work observed Haussmann’s new Paris through dramatic perspectives, as in Paris Street; Rainy Day.

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Albert Bierstadt

German-born Bierstadt travelled west with survey expeditions and brought back immense, luminous canvases of the Rocky Mountains and Yosemite. His theatrical views of the American West fed the enthusiasm that led to the national parks.

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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres

A pupil of David, Ingres defended the primacy of drawing against the colour of Delacroix and the Romantics. His porcelain-smooth portraits and nudes, with deliberate anatomical liberties as in the Grande Odalisque, later fascinated Degas, Picasso and Matisse.

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Hiroshige

The last great master of the ukiyo-e landscape print, Hiroshige captured Japan’s roads, rivers and seasons in series such as The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. Van Gogh copied two of his prints in oil, and his views of rain, snow and mist shaped Western Japonisme.

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Giorgio Vasari

Painter and architect to the Medici, Vasari designed the Uffizi and decorated Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio, but his greatest legacy is a book. His Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550) created the idea of the Renaissance and founded art history.

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Joshua Reynolds

The first President of the Royal Academy, Reynolds raised portraiture to the dignity of history painting by borrowing poses from classical sculpture and the Old Masters. His Discourses on Art shaped British art education for more than a century.

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Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Fragonard painted the pleasures of the French aristocracy with rapid, feathery brushwork, turning flirtation, gardens and love letters into masterpieces of the Rococo. The Swing sums up the playful spirit of an age that ended with the Revolution, which left him almost forgotten.

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