Famous painters in history

How these eight painters were chosen

Each painter here changed painting in a way you can point to: a new technique, a new subject, or a new audience. Each also left evidence beyond the pictures, such as letters, contracts or notebooks, so you can hear the artist as well as see the work. Vermeer is the exception, and his entry explains why that matters.

Four centuries of European painting dominate the list, from Florence to Giverny, with Raja Ravi Varma of Kerala, whose work shows that oil painting had a second great history in India. Each entry gives one work to look at closely, with the museum that holds it.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 to 1519): the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper

Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper on a wall of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan (about 1495 to 1498) and the Mona Lisa (begun about 1503, now in the Louvre). He blended tones so softly that outlines seem to dissolve, a technique called sfumato.

Most lists miss: fewer than twenty paintings are accepted as his, and several are unfinished. He never handed the Mona Lisa to the family that commissioned it and was still working on it years later. The Last Supper began flaking within his lifetime because he experimented with paint on dry plaster instead of true fresco. More: questions to ask Leonardo.

Michelangelo (1475 to 1564): the Sistine Chapel

Michelangelo thought of himself as a sculptor (the Pietà, David), yet he painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling for Pope Julius II between 1508 and 1512, and later the Last Judgement on its altar wall (1536 to 1541).

Most lists miss: he did not lie on his back. He stood on a scaffold of his own design, painting overhead with his head bent back, and wrote a comic sonnet to a friend about his neck, his dripping beard and his aching body, ending with the claim that he was not a painter. See Leonardo vs Michelangelo.

Raphael (1483 to 1520): The School of Athens

Raphael of Urbino became the leading painter of papal Rome while still in his twenties. The School of Athens (1509 to 1511), in the Vatican, gathers ancient philosophers around Plato and Aristotle in a grand classical hall. He died in April 1520, aged 37, and is buried in the Pantheon.

Most lists miss: near the end of his life, as superintendent of antiquities, he helped write a letter to Pope Leo X (about 1519, with Baldassare Castiglione) complaining that ancient Roman buildings were being burned for lime and asking for them to be protected and surveyed. It is one of the earliest arguments for preserving historic monuments.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 to 1669): The Night Watch

Rembrandt worked in Amsterdam, painting group portraits, Bible scenes and about eighty self-portraits that track his face from youth to old age. His control of light and shadow is the thing to look for. The Night Watch (1642) is in the Rijksmuseum.

Most lists miss: The Night Watch is a daytime scene. It looked dark because of old varnish and dirt, and the nickname came later. The painting was also cut down on all sides in 1715 to fit a wall in Amsterdam’s town hall. Rembrandt went bankrupt in 1656, and the inventory of his house lists his whole art collection.

Johannes Vermeer (1632 to 1675): Girl with a Pearl Earring

Johannes Vermeer of Delft painted quiet rooms lit from a window: The Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum), Girl with a Pearl Earring (Mauritshuis, The Hague) and View of Delft. He worked slowly, and only about thirty-five paintings by him are known.

Most lists miss: no letter, notebook or statement by Vermeer survives, so every claim about his methods, including the popular idea that he used a camera obscura, is an inference from the paintings. He died in debt; his widow blamed the collapse of the art market after the French invasion of 1672. He was largely forgotten until a French critic championed him in the 1860s.

Claude Monet (1840 to 1926): Impression, Sunrise and the Water Lilies

Claude Monet painted outdoors to catch changing light. His Impression, Sunrise (1872), shown in the 1874 exhibition, gave a mocking critic the word “Impressionists”. Later he painted series of haystacks, poplars and Rouen Cathedral, and his water garden at Giverny.

Most lists miss: on 12 November 1918, the day after the armistice, he wrote to Prime Minister Clemenceau offering paintings to the state to mark the victory. The gift became the huge Water Lilies cycle installed at the Orangerie in Paris in 1927. He painted much of it with failing eyesight, before cataract surgery in 1923.

Vincent van Gogh (1853 to 1890): Sunflowers and The Starry Night

Vincent van Gogh painted for only about ten years and produced more than 800 paintings, among them The Potato Eaters (1885), Sunflowers (1888) and The Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York). His brother Theo, an art dealer, supported him throughout.

Most lists miss: we know his thinking in unusual detail because more than 800 of his letters survive, most to Theo, and they are all online at the Van Gogh Museum’s letters site. See did Van Gogh cut off his ear and famous letters in history.

Raja Ravi Varma (1848 to 1906): the Indian epics in oil

Raja Ravi Varma, from the Kilimanoor family in Travancore, mastered European oil painting and used it for portraits and for scenes from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranas, such as Shakuntala and Damayanti, with gods and heroines shown as recognisable people in Indian dress.

Most lists miss: his biggest impact came through printing. In 1894 he set up a lithographic press in Bombay, so that cheap colour prints of his gods and heroines could hang in ordinary homes. Those prints shaped how millions of people pictured Hindu deities and influenced calendar art and early Indian cinema.

Summary table: painters, key works and where to see them

Project ideas using famous painters

• Look closely: choose one key work, view it in a museum’s high-resolution online image, and write ten things you notice before you read anything about it.
• Light study: compare the window light in Vermeer with the outdoor light in Monet. Sketch where the light comes from in each.
• Letters into a talk: build a two-minute first-person talk for Van Gogh using only lines from his letters. The wax museum project guide has a template.
• Ask the artist: practise interview questions by voice with Leonardo da Vinci or Vincent van Gogh on Yuga, where the AI recreations draw on their writings and the record. They are not the real artists and can be wrong, so cite letters and museum catalogues, not the app.

For the age that produced three of these painters, see Renaissance key figures.