The 9 Most Famous French Paintings to Know in 2026

These nine famous French paintings each come with a story. Together they cover more than a hundred years of French art, from Napoleon's crowning to the water lilies Monet gave to France after the First World War. They appear below from oldest to newest. If you only have time for one, start with Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. First comes a ranking by how many languages Wikipedia covers each one in, with where to find it in 2026.

The Mona Lisa is in Paris too, but Leonardo was Italian, so you will find her with our famous Italian paintings. Spain's great painters, like Velázquez and Goya, have a list of their own.

The 9 most famous French paintings, ranked

Ranked by how many language editions of Wikipedia have a page on each painting (checked October 2026).

Seven of the nine are in Paris, and you can see four of them in one day. Start at the Louvre for the first three, walk through the Tuileries garden to the Orangerie for the Water Lilies, and finish at the Marmottan with Impression, Sunrise.

Empire and Romanticism: 1805 to 1830

01The Coronation of Napoleon, David (1805 to 1807)

On December 2, 1804, Napoleon was crowned emperor in Notre-Dame in Paris. He put the crown on his own head, and that is the moment the painter Jacques-Louis David painted first. But in 1806 he painted over it. In its place he showed what happened next, when Napoleon lifted a second crown for his wife, Josephine, who kneels in front of him.

David changed other things too. Napoleon's mother is in the picture, even though she was in Rome that day, and the Louvre's record of the painting names three more people who weren't there either. When Napoleon saw the finished painting, he asked for only one change. That is why the pope's hand is raised in a blessing.

The Coronation of Napoleon is more than six meters tall, and it has about 190 people in it. Only one painting in the Louvre is bigger. You can follow the rest of David's life through his key paintings.

02The Raft of the Medusa, Géricault (1818 to 1819)

In July 1816 a French ship called the Méduse got stuck on a sandbank off the coast of West Africa. About 150 people were put on a raft made from pieces of the ship. The raft was tied to the ship's small boats, until someone cut the ropes. When another ship found the raft about two weeks later, only 15 people were still alive.

Two of the survivors wrote about what happened. Théodore Géricault read their story and went to talk to them both. Out of everything they told him, he chose a moment of false hope. The men are waving at a ship far away that hasn't seen them, and help is still two hours away.

The painting won a gold medal in 1819. But France didn't buy The Raft of the Medusa until after Géricault died. Today it hangs in the Louvre, usually in the same room as Liberty Leading the People. While you are there, fifteen more Louvre paintings are worth seeing.

03Liberty Leading the People, Delacroix (1830)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

You might guess this is the French Revolution of 1789, but it shows a later one. Delacroix painted the street fighting of July 28, 1830. That was the middle of three days when the people of Paris forced King Charles X off the throne. He started the painting that same autumn, and in a letter to his brother, he explained why:

“I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and if I have not won victory for my country, at least I shall paint for her.”

The people around Liberty come from every part of Paris. The Louvre sees a craftsman in the man with the top hat and a builder in the man on his knees. In the boy with a pistol in each hand, it sees the boy Victor Hugo would later write about in Les Misérables.

The government bought the painting in 1831. But it showed it for only a short time, and then it put it away. Years later it went back to Delacroix, who kept it at his aunt's house. It didn't reach the Louvre until 1874.

Since then, Liberty Leading the People has become a symbol of the French Republic. Artists, newspapers and ads have used it again and again. That long life as a symbol is why many people call it the most famous French painting, and Wikipedia covers it in more languages than any other painting here.

X-rays also show a change you can't see. Delacroix first painted Liberty looking straight at us. Only later did he turn her face to the side.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

Impressionism and after: 1872 to 1896

04Impression, Sunrise, Monet (1872)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Claude Monet painted this view of the harbor at Le Havre early one morning around November 1872. He was looking out of his hotel window, and he finished it in just a few hours. The orange sun and the little rowboats were the last things he added.

Two years later he showed it at his group's first exhibition, and he needed a title. It didn't look like a normal picture of Le Havre, so he called it Impression. A critic named Louis Leroy made fun of the whole show. He called it "The Exhibition of the Impressionists." But a few days later another critic used the same word as praise, and the name stuck.

Impression, Sunrise now belongs to the Marmottan Monet museum in Paris. You can read more about how Monet became the father of Impressionism.

05Bal du moulin de la Galette, Renoir (1876)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Renoir painted a Sunday afternoon dance in Montmartre, a hill in Paris. Sunlight comes through the trees in little patches, and it lands on hats, jackets and faces. Another painter, Gustave Caillebotte, soon bought Bal du moulin de la Galette. He later left it to France with the rest of his collection, so today it belongs to the Musée d'Orsay.

Right now, though, it is in London. It hangs in Renoir and Love at the National Gallery until January 31, 2027, and it is the painting's first visit to the UK. The Orsay's other Impressionist paintings are still in Paris, and our Orsay guide takes you through them room by room.

06A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Seurat (1884 to 1886)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

In the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Cameron stares into this painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. You can do the same. When you stand close, the people on the riverbank turn into tiny dots and dashes of color. When you step back, they come together again.

Georges Seurat worked on A Sunday on La Grande Jatte for a long time. He started it in 1884, and two years later he came back to add more people. One is the monkey on a leash. Another is a man carrying a rolled-up newspaper, and he is so small and so far away that he is easy to miss.

07The Card Players, Cézanne (1890 to 1896)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

In the 1890s Paul Cézanne spent a lot of time on his father's country estate near Aix-en-Provence. He painted the men who worked there playing cards, and he did it five different times.

Paintings this big were usually saved for great moments in history and old myths. Cézanne used that size for workers sitting at a table. The biggest version, the Barnes Foundation's Card Players in Philadelphia, is almost two meters wide.

Over a century on, another of the five was called the most expensive painting in the world. The royal family of Qatar bought it for a reported $250 million.

Into the 20th century: 1909 to 1927

08Dance, Matisse (1909 to 1910)

Henri Matisse painted Dance for a staircase. In 1909 a Russian art collector named Sergei Shchukin asked him for two big paintings, Dance and Music. He wanted Dance on the landing of the stairs in his house.

Matisse first tried the idea at full size, and he painted it quickly. He used only four colors: blue for the sky, green for the hill, and black and pale pink for the five dancers. Some critics said the bodies looked clumsy. But Matisse felt they were full of "life and rhythm."

That first try is now at MoMA in New York. The finished painting, where the dancers are red, is in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

09Water Lilies, Monet (1899 to 1926)

Before Monet could paint his water lilies, he had to grow them. In 1893 he bought the land next to his house in Giverny. He made the pond bigger, filled it with new kinds of water lilies and built a curved bridge in the style of Japanese prints. Then he painted that garden about 250 times.

The Water-Lily Pond at the National Gallery in London is one of his views of the bridge. His Japanese bridge paintings show many more.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

In November 1918, the day after the fighting of the First World War stopped, Monet offered France two large paintings as a sign of peace. That gift grew into two oval rooms at the Orangerie in Paris. Light comes in from above, and eight huge water-lily paintings wrap around the walls for 91 meters. The rooms opened in May 1927, a few months after Monet died, so he never saw them open.

Ten French painters to know

Add Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas to the eight painters above, and you get ten names. Together they cover French painting from Napoleon to the 1920s. To see more famous French paintings, look at Manet's Olympia and Degas's ballet dancers. Also look at Paris Street; Rainy Day by Caillebotte, the same painter who bought Renoir's dance. You can meet thirteen Impressionists through one painting each.

From an emperor to a staircase

The first painting on this list was ordered by an emperor. The next few were made for the Salon, France's big official art show. By the end, painters were holding their own shows, selling through art dealers and painting for a collector's staircase. Several of these nine are among the famous paintings our artists copy by hand in oil.

Sources

• Louvre, Le Couronnement de l'empereur Napoléon Ier (collection record)
• Louvre, Le radeau de la Méduse (collection record)
• Britannica, The Raft of the Medusa
• Royal Museums Greenwich, The Raft of the Medusa (print record with the history of the wreck)
• Louvre, Le 28 juillet 1830. La Liberté guidant le peuple (collection record)
• Louvre, La Liberté guidant le peuple, teaching guide (PDF, in French)
• Musée Marmottan Monet, Impression, soleil levant
• Musée d'Orsay, Bal du moulin de la Galette
• National Gallery, London, Renoir and Love (press release, 3 October 2026 to 31 January 2027)
• Art Institute of Chicago, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884
• Barnes Foundation, The Card Players (Les Joueurs de cartes)
• Musée d'Orsay, Les Joueurs de cartes
• Hyperallergic, Qatar buys Cézanne's The Card Players (2012)
• Museum of Modern Art, Henri Matisse, Dance (I)
• National Gallery, London, Claude Monet, The Water-Lily Pond
• Musée de l'Orangerie, The Water Lilies by Claude Monet
• Musée de l'Orangerie, From the orangerie to the museum
• Art Institute of Chicago, Paris Street; Rainy Day