Painters, Ranked

Painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, the two most famous paintings in the world, and pioneered sfumato to blur tone and outline. His surviving output is tiny yet each work rewrote Renaissance technique.

Frescoed the Sistine Chapel ceiling and Last Judgment over years of solo labor while also sculpting David and the Pietà. He defined the muscular, monumental figure for centuries of Western art.

The defining painter of the Dutch Golden Age, his chiaroscuro and psychological portraiture set the standard for oil painting. The Night Watch and some 40 painted self-portraits (nearly 100 across all media) anchor his legend.

Produced around 2,100 works in about a decade, including The Starry Night and the Sunflowers series, in thick expressive impasto. Nearly unsold while alive, he became the archetype of the modern artist and a founder of Post-Impressionism.

Co-founded Cubism with Braque and painted Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the anti-war epic Guernica. Astonishingly prolific across a career that reinvented itself through Blue, Rose, and Cubist periods.

His 1872 canvas Impression, Sunrise gave Impressionism its name, and his Water Lilies and haystack series obsessively chased changing light. He led the movement that broke painting away from academic realism.

A Dutch master of light and quiet interiors, painting Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid with luminous precision. Only about 34 paintings survive, making each one a treasure.

The third giant of the High Renaissance, his School of Athens fresco in the Vatican is a benchmark of balanced composition. His serene Madonnas defined ideal grace for generations of academic painters.

Revolutionized painting with dramatic tenebrism, spotlighting figures against deep shadow in works like The Calling of St Matthew. His gritty realism and brawling life influenced Baroque art across Europe.

Spain's supreme court painter, whose Las Meninas is endlessly analyzed for its play of viewer, mirror, and canvas. His loose, confident brushwork was centuries ahead of its time and revered by Manet and Picasso.

The showman of Surrealism, his The Persistence of Memory with its drooping clocks is instantly recognizable. A dazzling technician, though his self-promotion sometimes overshadowed the work.

Turned physical suffering and Mexican identity into unflinching self-portraits like The Two Fridas. A feminist and cultural icon whose reputation has only grown since her death.

Leader of Fauvism and a master of bold, flat color, later inventing his cut-out technique in works like The Snail. Widely regarded alongside Picasso as a defining figure of 20th-century modernism.

Spanish court painter turned dark visionary, whose The Third of May 1808 and haunting Black Paintings bridge Old Masters and modern art. A fearless chronicler of war and human cruelty.

Pop Art's figurehead, silkscreening Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Monroe to blur art and mass production. Culturally massive, though critics debate how much was craft versus concept and factory output.

Austrian Symbolist whose gold-leaf The Kiss is one of the most reproduced paintings ever. Decorative and sensuous, beloved by the public if sometimes dismissed as merely ornamental.

His The Scream is a universal shorthand for modern anxiety and one of art's most parodied images. A proto-Expressionist whose fame rests heavily on a single motif.

Pioneered drip painting and Abstract Expressionism, laying canvases on the floor to fling and pour paint. Genuinely influential, yet the eternal 'my kid could do that' argument keeps him divisive.

A commercial juggernaut whose glowing cottages hung in millions of homes via mass-produced prints. Almost universally panned by critics as sentimental kitsch with little artistic ambition.

As a young man he was rejected twice from the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and scraped by selling stiff, lifeless cityscapes and postcards. A footnote of mediocre talent attached to history's most notorious name.