Famous Paintings, Ranked

The most visited painting on Earth, drawing millions to the Louvre yearly; its fame exploded after being stolen in 1911. It holds the Guinness record for the highest insurance valuation ever assessed for a painting.

Painted from van Gogh's asylum room at Saint-Rémy and now held by MoMA in New York. Its swirling night sky is among the most reproduced images in art history.

A monumental grayscale response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. It became the 20th century's defining anti-war painting.

Rembrandt's massive militia group portrait broke convention by capturing figures mid-action rather than posed. It dominates the Rijksmuseum's Hall of Honour in Amsterdam.

Dubbed the 'Mona Lisa of the North,' Vermeer's troni captivates with its luminous glance and single glowing pearl. It anchors the Mauritshuis collection in The Hague.

A woodblock print produced in thousands of impressions that shaped Western Japonisme and Impressionism. Its cresting wave is one of the most recognizable images in the world.

A dizzying meditation on perspective in which the painter paints himself and the viewer stands in the king's place. It is the crown jewel of Madrid's Museo del Prado.

An icon of existential dread that Munch rendered in several versions; a pastel sold for nearly $120 million in 2012. Its painted versions have twice been stolen from Norwegian museums.

The near-touching hands of God and Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling form one of history's most parodied images. Michelangelo painted the ceiling lying on scaffolding across roughly four years.

An early large-scale mythological nude of the Renaissance, showing Venus arriving on a shell. It hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Dalí's melting pocket watches became shorthand for Surrealism itself. The small canvas has been in MoMA's collection since 1934.

Wood's stern farmer and his pitchfork became an emblem of Depression-era rural America and endless parody. It won a bronze medal and a $300 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago the year it was painted.

Hopper's late-night diner distilled American urban isolation into a single glowing window. The Art Institute of Chicago acquired it within months of completion.

A three-panel triptych overflowing with surreal, fantastical detail centuries before Surrealism existed. It remains one of the Prado's most studied works.

Thirty-two canvases of soup varieties helped launch American Pop Art and blur fine art with commercial imagery. MoMA holds the full set.

Formally titled 'Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1,' it became an unlikely icon of motherhood. It is one of the few major American works held in the Musée d'Orsay.

Sold for $450 million in 2017, making it the most expensive painting ever auctioned, yet its Leonardo attribution remains hotly disputed. It has not been publicly exhibited since the sale.

A commissioned series of cigar advertisements that became the go-to symbol of kitsch. Beloved as decor, it is dismissed by critics as the opposite of high art.

An amateur's disastrous 'restoration' of an early-20th-century fresco in Borja, Spain, turned Christ's face into a blur nicknamed 'Monkey Christ.' The fiasco went viral worldwide as a byword for ruined art.