Which paintings deserve a place on a list of the most beautiful ever made? There is no single answer, and auction prices are a poor guide, because the most expensive pictures are rarely the ones people queue to see. The ten works below were chosen because each changed how artists painted or how viewers felt about a subject, and each still draws crowds today.
They run in date order across more than four centuries, from a small Flemish panel painted around 1500 to a Mexican self-portrait from 1944. Some are beautiful in the usual sense: gold leaf, night skies, glowing light. Others are beautiful the way a hard truth can be, showing violence, fear or pain with complete honesty. For each painting you will find who made it, when and why, what to look for, and where you can see the original. If you are planning a trip, note that four of the ten hang in just two museums: the Prado in Madrid and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Late medieval and Baroque masters
1. Ship of Fools by Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1490–1500)
Bosch's small panel in the Louvre shows a boat drifting nowhere, crewed by a monk, a nun and a crowd of revellers who sing, drink and snap at a dangling pancake instead of steering. Tree-ring dating places the wood around 1491, and the picture was once one wing of a larger altarpiece about the deadly sins, here gluttony. Its lower third is now at Yale as Allegory of Gluttony, and the other wing, Death and the Miser, is in Washington. Sebastian Brant's satirical book Das Narrenschiff (1494) made the "ship of fools" idea popular, and the painting may answer it directly.
2. The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist by Caravaggio (1608)
Caravaggio painted this enormous canvas, about 3.7 by 5.2 metres, for the Knights of Malta, and it still hangs where it was meant to be, in the Oratory of St John's Co-Cathedral in Valletta. A jailer points, the executioner reaches for his knife, a servant holds out a golden platter and an older woman covers her face. It is the only work Caravaggio ever signed, writing "f. Michelang.o" in the saint's spilled blood; the "f" stood for fra, brother of the order. Months later he was expelled from that same order, in front of this painting, after escaping from prison in Malta.
3. Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1656)
Velázquez's masterpiece in the Prado shows the five-year-old Infanta Margarita Teresa surrounded by her maids of honour (the meninas), two court dwarfs, a dog, a chaperone and a guard, while the painter himself stands at a huge canvas. A mirror at the back reflects King Philip IV and Queen Mariana, which raises the puzzle that has kept critics busy for centuries: are we standing where the royal couple stands? Aposentador José Nieto pauses in the bright doorway behind. Picasso later painted 58 variations on this one picture.
Romantic darkness and the birth of modern feeling
4. Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya (1819–1823)
Goya painted this image straight onto the plaster of his farmhouse outside Madrid, the Quinta del Sordo, as one of the fourteen so-called Black Paintings. It shows the Titan Cronus, Saturn to the Romans, who ate his children for fear one would overthrow him. Goya had been deaf since a serious illness in the early 1790s, and these late works were made in old age, amid political turmoil in Spain; he never gave them titles or meant them for display. The murals were transferred to canvas in the 1870s and are now in the Prado.
5. Café Terrace at Night by Vincent van Gogh (1888)
Van Gogh painted this outdoor café on the Place du Forum in Arles in September 1888, working on the spot after dark. It was the first painting in which he used a starry sky, and he proudly told his sister that he had painted night without any black, only blue, violet and green. The yellow awning and cobbles glow against that deep blue. The original is in the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, and a café on the same square still trades on the connection.
6. The Scream by Edvard Munch (1893)
The Scream is not one work but a family: Munch made two painted versions, two pastels and a lithograph between 1893 and 1910. He based it on a real evening walk near Oslo when the sunset turned blood red and he felt, in his own words, an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure is not screaming so much as hearing the scream. The 1893 painted version is in Norway's National Museum, and a 1895 pastel sold in 2012 for nearly 120 million dollars.
Twentieth-century breakthroughs
7. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon by Pablo Picasso (1907)
Picasso's large canvas shows five nude women in a brothel on Carrer d'Avinyó in Barcelona, their bodies broken into sharp, flat planes and some faces drawn from ancient Iberian sculpture and African masks. Even close friends were shocked when they saw it, and it was not exhibited until 1916. It is best described as the doorway to Cubism rather than a fully Cubist work, which Picasso and Braque developed over the next few years. It has been at the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1939.
8. The Kiss by Gustav Klimt (1907–1908)
The high point of Klimt's "golden period", this square canvas, 180 by 180 centimetres, uses real gold leaf to wrap two lovers in one shimmering cloak on a flowered cliff edge. The man's robe is filled with black and white rectangles and the woman's with round, flower-like shapes, a play of contrast that runs through Klimt's work. The Austrian state bought it in 1908, even before it was finished. It is the star of the Belvedere in Vienna.
9. The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí (1931)
Many visitors are surprised by how small this painting is, roughly 24 by 33 centimetres. Dalí set his limp pocket watches against the rocky coast of Cap de Creus near his Catalan home, and said the idea came from watching a Camembert melt in the heat. Ants crawl over the one closed watch, a sign of decay he used often, and the odd soft creature in the centre is usually read as a distorted self-portrait. It has belonged to MoMA in New York since 1934.
10. The Broken Column by Frida Kahlo (1944)
At 18, Kahlo was badly injured when the bus she was riding collided with a streetcar in Mexico City, and she lived with pain and repeated operations for the rest of her life. She painted this small oil on masonite soon after spinal surgery in 1944. Her torso is split open to show a crumbling Ionic column in place of a spine, a steel brace holds her together, nails pierce her skin and tears run down a steady face. It belongs to the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City.
Where to see these paintings
- Musée du Louvre, Paris: Ship of Fools
- St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta: The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist
- Museo del Prado, Madrid: Las Meninas and Saturn Devouring His Son
- Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo: Café Terrace at Night
- National Museum, Oslo: The Scream (1893 painting)
- Museum of Modern Art, New York: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and The Persistence of Memory
- Belvedere, Vienna: The Kiss
- Museo Dolores Olmedo, Mexico City: The Broken Column
What these ten paintings have in common
Put side by side, these works show that beauty in art is rarely about prettiness alone. Bosch and Goya hold up a mirror to human folly and fear, Caravaggio and Kahlo make suffering impossible to look away from, and Velázquez and Picasso question the act of looking itself. Van Gogh and Klimt, by contrast, show how colour and pattern can lift an ordinary scene into something close to joy.
A good way to enjoy any of them, in a museum or on a screen, is to look slowly. Start with the whole picture, then move to the edges, the hands, the light source and the smallest details. Ask what the artist chose to leave out. Some of the best discoveries, like a signature hidden in blood or a king glimpsed in a mirror, are waiting for the viewer who stays a minute longer.
Sources: Ship of Fools (painting), Wikipedia; The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Caravaggio), Wikipedia; The Broken Column, Wikipedia; Museo del Prado; Museum of Modern Art; Belvedere, Vienna; Kröller-Müller Museum. Images are reproductions of the works by the artists named.
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