QuizSome paintings are so widely reproduced — on posters, mugs, phone cases — that it's easy to forget each one is a single physical object hanging in a specific museum. Here are ten of the most recognizable, with the stories that make them more than just wallpaper.
- Mona Lisa — Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503-1519, Louvre (Paris) — the world's most-visited single artwork, and arguably owes part of its fame to a 1911 theft: an Italian handyman stole it off the wall, and the two-year manhunt turned a respected but not-yet-superstar painting into a global icon.
- The Starry Night — Vincent van Gogh, 1889, MoMA (New York) — painted largely from memory and imagination, depicting the view from his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in southern France, where he'd admitted himself the previous year.
- The Scream — Edvard Munch, 1893, National Museum (Oslo) — Munch made four versions; the 1895 pastel one sold at auction for $119.9 million in 2012, at the time one of the highest prices ever paid for a work of art.
- Girl with a Pearl Earring — Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665, Mauritshuis (The Hague) — often called the "Mona Lisa of the North," but it isn't a portrait of a known person at all — it's a "tronie," a study of an imagined face and expression rather than a specific sitter.
- The Birth of Venus — Sandro Botticelli, c. 1485, Uffizi Gallery (Florence) — one of the first large-scale non-religious nude figures in Western painting since antiquity, at a time when nearly all commissioned art was still religious.
- American Gothic — Grant Wood, 1930, Art Institute of Chicago — the stern couple isn't married at all: Wood's models were his sister and his dentist, posed as a farmer and his daughter.
- The Great Wave off Kanagawa — Katsushika Hokusai, c. 1831 — technically a woodblock print, not a painting, and part of a series called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji — that's Fuji small in the background, dwarfed by the wave in front of it.
- Guernica — Pablo Picasso, 1937, Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid) — a mural-sized, deliberately colorless painting made in weeks as a direct response to the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
- The Persistence of Memory — Salvador Dalí, 1931, MoMA (New York) — the melting clocks are one of art's most-parodied images, yet the actual canvas is tiny, only about 24 by 33 centimeters (roughly the size of a piece of paper).
- The Night Watch — Rembrandt, 1642, Rijksmuseum (Amsterdam) — despite the nickname, it's a daytime scene; centuries of darkened varnish made it look nocturnal until a 20th-century cleaning revealed the original daylight setting underneath.
Worth remembering for trivia night: several "paintings" on lists like this one aren't paintings in the strict sense — The Great Wave is a woodblock print, and it still gets grouped with oil-on-canvas icons because visually, nobody draws that distinction.
Think your crew can tell a Vermeer from a Van Gogh? Our Picture Round: Famous Paintings category shows the artwork and asks you to name the artist or the title — alternating between the two so you can't just memorize one pattern.