Most famous paintings are familiar long before you know anything about them. The stories behind them are often stranger, sadder or funnier than the images suggest — and in a couple of cases the most interesting thing about the painting is something that happened to it long after it was finished.
Here are thirteen, and what is actually known about each.
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889)
Van Gogh painted it from a room in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he had admitted himself after the breakdown in Arles. The view is not a literal one. There was a window, and there were hills, but the village below is invented and the sky is nothing anyone saw.
He was dismissive of it. In a letter to his brother Theo he wrote it off as a failure, and it is now probably the most reproduced painting of the nineteenth century. The Great Wave earned that position for reasons worth understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa (begun around 1503)
For a long time the sitter's identity was genuinely open, and all sorts of theories filled the gap — including one that the painting is a disguised self-portrait. That question is now largely settled. In 2005 a scholar at Heidelberg University found a note scribbled in the margin of a book by Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine official, dated October 1503, recording that Leonardo was at work on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo. She was the wife of a silk merchant, Francesco del Giocondo, which is why Italians call the painting La Gioconda.
Its overwhelming fame is more recent than most people assume. It was well regarded but not a phenomenon until it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by a museum employee, and the two years of newspaper coverage that followed made it the most famous painting in the world.
Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (1495 to 1498)
Leonardo painted it on a dry wall in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, using an experimental technique instead of true fresco so that he could work slowly and revise. It let him get the detail he wanted, and it meant the paint began flaking within his own lifetime. What survives has been restored repeatedly.
The composition is doing something specific: it catches the instant after Christ says one of those at the table will betray him, and every figure is reacting. That choice of moment, rather than a static arrangement, is why it still reads as drama rather than as a group portrait.
Johannes Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring (around 1665)
It is usually called a portrait, but it is more likely a tronie — a Dutch genre of study head, painted as a type or an exercise in expression rather than as a likeness of a particular person. Nobody knows who sat for it, or whether anyone did.
The earring is worth a second look too. Conservators have pointed out that it is far too large to be a natural pearl of that period, and that Vermeer rendered it with two strokes of paint and a highlight. It may be polished glass or tin, or simply invented.
Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893)
Munch described the moment behind it in his diary: walking at sunset near Oslo with two friends, feeling suddenly exhausted and anxious, and seeing the sky turn blood red. He wrote that he sensed an infinite scream passing through nature. The figure in the painting is not screaming — it is covering its ears against the scream.
There is no single version. Munch made two paintings, a pastel and a lithograph, and two of them have been stolen and recovered.
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)
Painted within months of the July Revolution that removed Charles X. Delacroix put a real allegorical figure into a real crowd, which was unusual: Liberty is a personification, but the men beside her are recognizable Parisian types, and there are bodies in the foreground.
The new government bought it and then kept it out of public view for years, judging it too likely to encourage the next uprising.
Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)
The two figures are a farmer and his daughter, not a married couple, which is the detail most often got wrong. The models were Wood's sister Nan and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. The house behind them is a real one in Eldon, Iowa, and Wood painted it after seeing it and imagining the sort of people who might live there.
Iowans were not pleased. Many read it as mockery of rural people, and one farm wife reportedly threatened to bite his ear off. Wood denied satire throughout his life and said he admired the people he was painting.
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633)
Rembrandt's only known seascape, and the most interesting thing about it is where it is not. In March 1990, two men dressed as police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and left with thirteen works, this among them. It has never been recovered, the case is unsolved, and the museum still displays the empty frame where it hung.
Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
Leutze painted it in Düsseldorf, using the Rhine as a stand-in for the Delaware and American tourists as models. It is inaccurate in almost every particular — the flag design did not exist yet, the boat is the wrong type, and nobody stands up in a boat crossing an icy river at night.
None of that has dented it. It hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and remains one of the most recognized images in American history painting.
Leonardo da Vinci, Portrait of Ginevra de' Benci (around 1474)
The juniper bush behind her is a pun. The Italian for juniper is ginepro, close enough to Ginevra to work as a visual signature, and juniper also carried associations of chastity.
The panel has been cut down at the bottom, probably because of damage, so her hands are missing. It is the only painting by Leonardo in the Americas, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888)
Painted in oil in Arles, in the yellow house, while van Gogh was waiting for Paul Gauguin to come and live with him. The sunflower canvases were decoration for the room Gauguin would sleep in — an act of straightforward hospitality that is easy to forget given how the arrangement ended.
There are several versions. One hangs in the National Gallery in London, others in Amsterdam, Munich, Tokyo and Philadelphia.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory (1931)
The melting watches are usually explained as a comment on relativity. Dalí said otherwise: the idea came to him from a wheel of Camembert softening in the sun. The cliffs in the background are the coast at Cap de Creus in Catalonia, near where he grew up, and they appear across his work.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise (1872)
The painting names the movement, but not in the way it is usually told. Monet titled it himself — he later said he was asked for a title for the catalogue, and since it could not pass as a view of Le Havre, he said to put down Impression.
The insult came afterward. Reviewing the 1874 exhibition, the critic Louis Leroy wrote a mocking piece built around the word, and the name stuck to the whole group. They eventually adopted it.
If this makes you want to paint
Reading about paintings tends to do that, and the gap between admiring one and making something yourself is smaller than it looks. A paint by numbers kit is a reasonable way in: the composition and the color decisions are already made, so what you are practicing is brush control and patience, which are the parts that transfer.
Ledgebay's designs are licensed artwork — Americana scenes, wildlife, cabins and florals rather than gallery reproductions. You can see them in the shop, or turn a photograph of your own into a custom paint by numbers canvas. The customer gallery shows how they come out.
