The 10 Most Famous Paintings in the World (and Where to See Them)

A short list of paintings has slipped past the walls of art history and into everyday life — on mugs, posters, phone cases, and the backs of postcards in cities their makers never visited. Here are ten of the most famous paintings in the world, what makes each one stick, and where you can stand in front of it.

1. Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci

The most famous painting in the world hangs behind glass in the Louvre, drawing a daily crowd that mostly photographs it rather than looks. Leonardo da Vinci painted this modest-sized portrait in the early 1500s, but its global celebrity owes as much to a 1911 theft as to the brushwork — a story we tell in why the Mona Lisa is so famous.

2. The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh

A swirling night sky over a sleeping village, painted from an asylum window in 1889 and now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Vincent van Gogh worked partly from memory and feeling rather than fact, which is exactly why it reads as emotion first. More on its pull in why The Starry Night is so famous.

3. Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer

Often called the "Dutch Mona Lisa," this quiet head study by Johannes Vermeer lives at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. She is not a portrait of anyone in particular but a tronie — a study of a face and a costume. Look closer at what she is (and isn't) in the secret of Girl with a Pearl Earring.

4. The Scream — Edvard Munch

That open-mouthed figure on a bridge under a blood-orange sky has become shorthand for anxiety itself. Edvard Munch made several versions between 1893 and 1910, in paint and pastel, now split between museums in Oslo — so there is no single "the" Scream to visit, but a small family of them.

5. The Kiss — Gustav Klimt

Two lovers wrapped in shimmering gold, painted by Gustav Klimt around 1908 at the height of his "golden phase." It hangs at the Belvedere in Vienna, where the actual gold leaf does something no reproduction can quite carry.

6. The Great Wave off Kanagawa — Katsushika Hokusai

The most reproduced image in the world may not be a painting at all but a woodblock print. Katsushika Hokusai designed The Great Wave around 1831, and because it was printed in large editions, impressions live in museums across the globe, including the Met.

7. The Birth of Venus — Sandro Botticelli

Sandro Botticelli painted the goddess arriving on a shell around 1485, and she has been standing there ever since at the Uffizi in Florence. Its dreamy line and pale color made it a touchstone of the Italian Renaissance.

8. The Last Supper — Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo's mural of Christ and the apostles cannot travel — it is painted directly onto a refectory wall at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, where visitors book timed entries to see it. Fragile and much-restored, it remains one of the most recognized religious images ever made.

9. Las Meninas — Diego Velázquez

Diego Velázquez turned a royal portrait into a puzzle about who is looking at whom, placing himself, a princess, and a mirrored king inside one room. It hangs at the Prado in Madrid and rewards the slow, circling look it was built for.

10. Guernica — Pablo Picasso

Picasso's vast black-and-white response to the 1937 bombing of a Basque town is the century's most famous anti-war painting. It lives at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where its scale — over three metres tall — turns a familiar image back into a shock.

Where should you start?

These ten are famous for good reasons, but fame is only one map of the territory. The quieter pleasure is finding a picture almost no one has told you to love — start looking on DiscoverArt and see which one stops you.