Mona Lisa
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci · Year: c. 1503–1519 · Location: Louvre Museum (Paris, France). Widely regarded as the most famous painting in the world, known for its mysterious smile that seems to shift depending on the viewing angle, and for "sfumato," a technique that softens outlines into hazy transitions.
The Last Supper
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci · Year: 1495–1498 · Location: Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie (Milan, Italy). A mural capturing the stir among Jesus's disciples at the moment he announces that one of them will betray him during their final meal together. Painted directly onto the refectory wall of the convent.
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Artist: Johannes Vermeer · Year: c. 1665 · Location: Mauritshuis (The Hague, Netherlands). A striking work showing a girl turning to glance back over her shoulder at the viewer, sometimes nicknamed "the Mona Lisa of the North" for its enigmatic mood.
The Birth of Venus
Artist: Sandro Botticelli · Year: c. 1485 · Location: Uffizi Gallery (Florence, Italy). Depicts the moment Venus, goddess of love and beauty, is born from the sea atop a large shell — considered one of the defining paintings of the Renaissance.
The Starry Night
Artist: Vincent van Gogh · Year: 1889 · Location: Museum of Modern Art, MoMA (New York, USA). Painted during Van Gogh's stay at a mental health asylum, depicting the night sky visible from his window in swirling brushstrokes, marked by intense color and dynamic brushwork.
Water Lilies Series
Artist: Claude Monet · Years: 1890s–1920s · Location: Musée de l'Orangerie and various museums worldwide (France and elsewhere). A series of roughly 250 paintings Monet made over 30-plus years, repeatedly depicting the pond in his own garden — representative of the Impressionist pursuit of capturing shifting light and color.
The Scream
Artist: Edvard Munch · Year: 1893 · Location: National Museum of Norway and Munch Museum (Oslo, Norway). Depicts a figure screaming with hands pressed to its face beneath a blood-red sky, widely known as a symbol of modern anxiety and isolation.
The Angelus
Artist: Jean-François Millet · Years: 1857–1859 · Location: Musée d'Orsay (Paris, France). Depicts a farming couple pausing their fieldwork at dusk for evening prayer, conveying reverence toward simple rural life.
Guernica
Artist: Pablo Picasso · Year: 1937 · Location: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain). A large-scale work depicting, in a Cubist style, the horror of the bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War — regarded as a symbol of anti-war art condemning the brutality of war.
The Persistence of Memory
Artist: Salvador Dalí · Year: 1931 · Location: Museum of Modern Art, MoMA (New York, USA). A defining Surrealist work showing melting clocks set within a dreamlike landscape, regarded as expressing the relativity of time and the world of the unconscious.
American Gothic
Artist: Grant Wood · Year: 1930 · Location: Art Institute of Chicago (USA). Depicts a farmer holding a pitchfork alongside his daughter in front of a Gothic-style farmhouse, widely known as a symbol of the diligence and conservative values of America's rural Midwest.
Campbell's Soup Cans
Artist: Andy Warhol · Year: 1962 · Location: Museum of Modern Art, MoMA (New York, USA). Depicts 32 varieties of Campbell's soup cans lined up side by side — a defining work of Pop Art, which took mass-produced consumer goods as its subject matter.