20 Most Famous Landscape Paintings in the World

Here are the 20 famous landscape paintings you have most likely seen already, on a poster or a banknote, without knowing the story behind each one. The list keeps only views of land, sea, sky or city, allows at most two works per painter, and runs from the picture almost everyone recognizes to the ones museum regulars know.

What is the most famous landscape painting?

The Starry Night. It is the most reproduced landscape in the world and the one most likely to turn up on any list of the 100 most famous paintings of all time. It has hung at the Museum of Modern Art since 1941. Runner-up depends on your country: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog or The Hay Wain.

Landscape is one genre among many. Five of the twenty below also place in the 100 most famous paintings in the world, a ranking that covers every genre and puts The Starry Night second overall.

The 20 famous landscape paintings, in the order you will recognize them

1. The Starry Night, Vincent van Gogh, 1889

A night sky that moves: swirls of blue and white, a moon and stars burning inside their own halos. A black cypress shoots up the left edge like a flame, and a quiet village with a church spire sits below.

Vincent van Gogh painted it in June 1889 from the window of his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, about a month after checking himself in. The sky is what he saw before sunrise. The village at the bottom is invented, added from sketches; it never stood outside that window.

The moon is not astronomically right either, and the cypress is far bigger than in his other pictures of them. None of that matters once you are in front of it. For the real places, see the places that inspired Van Gogh's most famous landscape paintings.

Where: Museum of Modern Art, New York.

2. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

A man in a long coat stands on a spur of rock with his back to you, walking stick in hand, staring into a valley full of fog. Ridges and a few far peaks poke through the white. You have seen it on book covers, if nowhere else.

The figure seen from behind, the Rückenfigur, was Friedrich's trademark, and this is the most famous one in art. Look closely and the overcoat is dark green, and his hair is caught in a wind. Nobody made much of the picture when it was new.

Among Caspar David Friedrich's oil paintings it only became the famous one in the 20th century, and nobody knows where it hung for more than a century. It turned up in a Berlin gallery by 1939, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle bought it in 1970.

Where: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

3. Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet, 1899

An arched footbridge crosses a pond so thick with lily pads that you can barely see the water, and greenery closes in on every side until there is hardly any sky left. This is the water-lily picture you have seen on a thousand posters.

The pond was real and so was the bridge. The bridge is Japanese in design and stood in Monet's own garden at Giverny. He did not have to travel for this view; it was outside his door.

Among Claude Monet's oil paintings this is the one that made the garden itself famous. Note the format: the canvas is upright, taller than it is wide, which is easy to forget if you only know it cropped on a poster.

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

4. Impression, Sunrise, Claude Monet, 1872

A small orange sun hangs in gray-blue mist over a harbor at dawn. A couple of dark rowboats sit on the water in front, and behind them masts fade into the haze. It looks unfinished, which is the point.

The harbor is Le Havre, Monet's hometown, and this is one of a set of views of the port he painted at different hours. It was first shown in Paris in April 1874, and its title gave a critic the word he needed to mock the whole group. The name stuck, and the group has been the Impressionists ever since.

It is small, under half a meter tall. It was stolen in 1985 and back on the wall in 1991. If this mood is what you like, the seascape oil paintings of the same decades are where to look next.

Where: Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.

5. Wheatfield with Crows, Vincent van Gogh, 1890

A long, low canvas, twice as wide as it is tall. Yellow wheat churns under a dark blue sky. Black crows scatter across it, and a rust-colored path cuts into the field and stops. The path in the middle leads nowhere, and the crows could be flying toward you or away.

Everyone "knows" this was the last thing Van Gogh painted. The idea comes mostly from the 1956 film Lust for Life, which shows him finishing it just before he shoots himself. His letters say otherwise: it was done around 10 July 1890, and his real last picture was Tree Roots. It was still painted in the last weeks of his life, and that is hard to unsee.

For the rest of his big pictures, start with the top 10 most famous paintings of Vincent van Gogh.

Where: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.

6. The Hay Wain, John Constable, 1821

A wooden cart with three horses stands in a shallow river, a cottage on the left, big trees behind and a wide sky full of English cloud. A dog watches from the bank. This is the picture people mean when they say "the English countryside".

The river is the Stour near Flatford Mill, which Constable's father owned, and it doubles as the county line: Suffolk on the left bank, Essex on the right. The cottage belonged to Willy Lott. It is still standing, and it still looks like this.

Constable first showed it as Landscape: Noon, one of his "six-footers", the big canvases he made for the Royal Academy's summer shows. Of all John Constable's paintings, this is the one that fixed how the English picture their own fields.

Where: National Gallery, London.

7. The Fighting Temeraire, J. M. W. Turner, 1839

A tall sailing ship, pale and almost see-through, pulled along a flat river by a squat black tug under a blazing orange sunset. The old ship is painted pale as a ghost, the tug black and solid, and that contrast is the whole story.

The ship is HMS Temeraire, a 98-gun warship that fought at Trafalgar. In 1838 she was towed up the Thames to Rotherhithe to be scrapped, and Turner made her last trip a funeral for the age of sail. Nobody knows if he actually watched the tow; his first audience got the point at once.

Turner left it to the nation in 1851. In a 2005 BBC Radio 4 poll it was voted Britain's favorite painting, and in 2020 it went onto the £20 note. Among oil paintings of seascapes with boats and ships, this is the one with a plot.

Where: National Gallery, London.

8. The Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1565

Three hunters and their dogs trudge away from you down a snowy hill, past bare black trees, toward a village where tiny figures move on the ice, with jagged mountains behind. It is the snow scene on every Christmas card.

The picture is one of a set showing the months of the year, painted on wood in 1565, and five of the set survive. The hunt was a failure: one man carries a single scrawny fox, and the dogs look as worn out as the men. In front of them run the tracks of a hare they missed.

On the left, people singe a pig over a fire outside an inn whose sign is hanging loose, about to fall. Nobody had painted winter like this before, and it set the pattern for every snow scene among landscape oil paintings since.

Where: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

9. View of Delft, Johannes Vermeer, 1661

A whole town seen across still water: brick gates and towers, red roofs, and over it all a sky that takes up more than half the picture. A few small figures wait on the near bank, and everything doubles in the reflection.

The town is Delft, where Vermeer lived, and this is his only cityscape, painted from an upper floor to the southeast. On the right is the Rotterdam Gate with herring boats moored in front; in the middle is the Schiedam Gate, and the bridge between the two gates has a clock on its roof. The figures on the bank are waiting for a horse-drawn passenger barge.

Proust called it the most beautiful painting in the world. It has hung in The Hague since 1822, and among Johannes Vermeer's oil paintings it is one of only two outdoor views, and the famous one.

Where: Mauritshuis, The Hague.

10. Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway, J. M. W. Turner, 1843

A black locomotive comes straight at you across a bridge out of a smear of gold and gray rain, and everything else, river and sky included, has half dissolved. You can feel the speed, which is a strange thing to say about a still picture.

Turner painted the railway when almost no serious artist would touch it, and treated the machine as something as grand and frightening as a storm. The bridge is Brunel's Maidenhead Railway Bridge over the Thames, and you are looking east toward London.

The bridge was finished in 1839; the picture was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1844. Next to The Fighting Temeraire, three items up, it reads as the other half of one thought: the old world towed away, the new one racing in. It belongs on any list of the 100 most famous paintings of all time.

Where: National Gallery, London.

11. The Ninth Wave, Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850

You see a mountainous swell lit from behind by a rising sun, and a few people hanging on to the wreckage of a ship. The title comes from an old sailors' saying: after a run of waves that each grow bigger than the last comes the ninth, the monster.

Aivazovsky shows the morning after a night storm, and the odd thing is how hopeful it feels. The light is warm, almost sweet, and you half believe these people will make it. At 221 by 332 cm the canvas swallows you.

Look for the wreckage the survivors cling to, which forms a cross, usually read as a hint of salvation. Of all the Ivan Aivazovsky oil paintings this is the one people know, and among seascape oil paintings it has few rivals for scale.

Where: Russian Museum.

12. View of Toledo, El Greco, 1596

A hill town of grey towers and green slopes under a sky that looks about to split open. This is one of only two landscapes by El Greco that survive, which makes sense: landscape was a rare subject in Spanish painting of the period, and nobody was asking for it.

Nobody agrees on the date either. The historian Harold Wethey put it between 1595 and 1600 because the handling matches the background of his Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, and that same stormy touch turns up behind the saints in other El Greco paintings.

Look for the lightning-white clouds piled over the city, which have earned this canvas a place next to The Starry Night among the great skies of Western art. Standing in front of it, you would swear it was painted centuries later.

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

13. Paris Street; Rainy Day, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877

A couple share an umbrella on wet cobbles, with the pale apartment blocks of Haussmann's rebuilt Paris rising behind them. The spot is today's Place de Dublin, and the canvas holds 24 pedestrians, though the foreground pair take all your attention, staring at something outside the frame.

It was shown at the Third Impressionist Exhibition in April 1877 and praised for its near-photographic precision, which is exactly why it looks nothing like a Monet. Then it sat with the family for decades. The purchase by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1964 set off the revival of interest in Gustave Caillebotte oil paintings.

Look for the size of it in person: at 212 by 276 cm you feel you could step onto the wet pavement. It hangs in Gallery 201.

Where: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

14. Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, Paul Cézanne, 1887

A blue-grey mountain sits at the end of a valley of ochre fields, framed by the branches of a pine that reaches across the top of the canvas.

Cézanne painted this mountain over and over, and the series probably started with a train ride. In a letter to Zola on 14 April 1878 he called the view of Mont Sainte-Victoire from the Aix to Marseille line "What a beautiful motif," and the railway had opened only about six months before. This view is from Montbriand, outside Aix-en-Provence.

Look for the railway bridge at the center right, a small bridge over the Arc valley that ties the scene to the modern world. The fields are already breaking into flat patches of color, which is why this canvas connects the tradition of landscape oil paintings straight to Cubism.

Where: Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House.

15. The Sea of Ice, Caspar David Friedrich, 1823

Slabs of ice heaped into a jagged pyramid under a cold sky, with nothing alive anywhere. Then you notice the stern of a ship, crushed on the right, and the picture turns from geology into disaster.

Friedrich worked from ice floes on the Elbe and, most likely, from accounts of Parry's search for the Northwest Passage in 1820 and 1821. Johann Gottlob von Quandt commissioned it as one of a pair on northern and southern nature. Shown in Prague in 1824, it baffled viewers, and it was still unsold when Friedrich died in 1840.

Look for the ship's stern half buried under the ice, easy to miss. Some connect the bleakness to the death of his brother, who fell through thin ice in childhood. It is the harshest of the Caspar David Friedrich oil paintings, and to my eye the best.

Where: Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

16. The Oxbow, Thomas Cole, 1836

A river loops back on itself in a huge horseshoe far below you, with a thunderstorm clearing off to the left and sunlit farmland on the right. The full title is View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, which tells you where to stand.

Cole painted it as a break. He was bogged down in The Course of Empire, a five-picture series for his patron Luman Reed, and Reed, seeing him low, suggested something more in his element for the National Academy of Design exhibition in April 1836. The result founded American landscape painting.

Look for the split down the middle: wild forest still dripping from the storm on one side, tidy fields on the other, usually read as wilderness meeting civilization. Start here for Thomas Cole oil paintings and the Hudson River School he founded.

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

17. Morning in a Pine Forest, Ivan Shishkin, 1889

A family of bears clambers over a fallen pine in a misty forest at dawn, so familiar in Russia that it turns up on candy wrappers.

The bears are the odd part. Shishkin doubted his hand with animals, so his friend Konstantin Savitsky painted them, and both men signed the canvas. Then the collector Pavel Tretyakov bought it, disliked the second name, and had it wiped off with turpentine. Savitsky found out on a visit to the gallery, and the picture is still credited to Shishkin alone.

Look for the mist rising between the trunks behind the bears; that morning light is the part Shishkin did himself, from pines on Gorodomlya Island in Lake Seliger. One poll ranks it the second most popular painting in Russia, and it is the place to start with Ivan Shishkin oil paintings.

Where: Tretyakov Gallery.

18. The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede, Jacob van Ruisdael, 1670

A round windmill stands on a riverbank with its sails set, under clouds that fill most of the picture. That is the Dutch landscape formula in one image: a low horizon and a sky taking up two thirds of the canvas.

Ruisdael dated almost nothing after 1653, so 1670 is an educated guess. The accuracy is not. The historian Seymour Slive notes that the set of the sails and the pattern of the waves hold up to expert scrutiny. The mill itself is gone, though its foundations survive, and a neighboring mill often gets mistaken for it.

Look for the sails against the bank of cloud, where light meets shadow. It belongs to the Amsterdam Museum and has hung on loan at the Rijksmuseum since 1885, where card sales rank it third behind The Night Watch and View of Delft, the one to know among Jacob van Ruisdael oil paintings.

19. Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, James McNeill Whistler, 1875

A dark smear of night over water, with a scatter of gold sparks drifting down through smoke. It takes a moment to see fireworks over the Thames at Cremorne Gardens, a London pleasure resort, and that moment is the point.

First shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, it prompted John Ruskin to write that Whistler had flung a pot of paint in the public's face, and Whistler sued him for libel. The trial is the story everyone tells, and the picture became the banner of art for art's sake.

Look for the ghostly spectators, barely more than shapes in the fog, and the signature at right, brushed in like a Japanese print. The whole thing runs on blue, green and yellow, and it is smaller than you expect at 60 by 46 cm. It is the boldest of the James McNeill Whistler oil paintings.

Where: Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit.

20. Heart of the Andes, Frederic Edwin Church, 1859

A whole continent in one frame: a snowy peak in the distance, a jungle and an open plain, in detail sharp enough for a magnifying glass.

Church stitched it together from two trips to Ecuador and Colombia, in 1853 and 1857, with Mount Chimborazo at the back and Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos in his head. Shown alone in New York in 1859, under special lighting and in a floor-standing frame, it drew about 12,000 people who paid 25 cents to stand in line for a single picture. Its sale to William Tilden Blodgett set a price record for a living American artist.

Look for the figures at a cross in the left foreground, the easiest human detail to find in nearly ten feet of wilderness. It is the grandest of the Frederic Edwin Church oil paintings.

Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Which of these are far bigger or smaller than you expect

Photographs give every painting the same size, so scale is what catches people out in the room.

• Smaller than you picture: The Starry Night is 73.7 x 92.1 cm. Impression, Sunrise, the picture that handed Impressionism its name, is 48 x 63 cm. Whistler's fireworks over the Thames are smaller again, 60.3 x 46.4 cm.
• Bigger than you picture: The Ninth Wave runs 221 x 332 cm, Paris Street; Rainy Day 212.2 x 276.2 cm, and Heart of the Andes 168 x 302.9 cm, which is why New York queued to see one canvas.

Planning a trip around them is easy. New York gives you five: Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, View of Toledo, The Oxbow and Heart of the Andes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, plus The Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art. London's National Gallery holds three, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle owns both Friedrichs. If your trip goes to Provence instead, 7 places that inspired Van Gogh's most famous landscape paintings is the better map.

Questions people ask

What are some famous landscape images?

The ones nearly everyone has seen: Van Gogh's swirling night sky over a sleeping village, Friedrich's walker looking out across fog, Constable's cart standing in a shallow river, Turner's old warship towed under a red sky, Aivazovsky's survivors clinging to a mast at dawn. Van Gogh's is the one people name first, and his other fields, orchards and night skies run right through the Vincent Van Gogh reproductions.

What are some classic landscape paintings?

Start with the old ones. Bruegel's The Hunters in the Snow, from 1565, is the first great winter scene in European painting. Vermeer's View of Delft and Ruisdael's windmill give you the Dutch Golden Age, low horizon and enormous sky. El Greco's View of Toledo, around 1596, is the outsider: a storm-lit city from a country that barely painted landscape.

What are some famous American landscape paintings?

Two carry most of the weight. Thomas Cole's The Oxbow (1836) splits the canvas between storm-lashed wilderness and tidy farmland. Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes (1859) drew crowds who paid 25 cents to see one picture. Both hang at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more of their work sits in the Thomas Cole oil painting reproductions and the Frederic Edwin Church oil painting reproductions.

Sources

• The Starry Night on Wikipedia
• The Starry Night at Museum of Modern Art
• Wanderer above the Sea of Fog on Wikipedia
• Impression, Sunrise on Wikipedia
• Impression, Sunrise at Musée Marmottan Monet
• Wheatfield with Crows on Wikipedia
• The Hay Wain on Wikipedia
• The Hay Wain at National Gallery
• The Fighting Temeraire on Wikipedia
• The Fighting Temeraire at National Gallery
• The Hunters in the Snow on Wikipedia
• View of Delft on Wikipedia
• Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway on Wikipedia
• The Ninth Wave on Wikipedia
• View of Toledo on Wikipedia
• Paris Street; Rainy Day on Wikipedia
• Paris Street; Rainy Day at Art Institute of Chicago
• Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine on Wikipedia
• The Sea of Ice on Wikipedia
• The Sea of Ice at Hamburger Kunsthalle
• The Oxbow on Wikipedia
• Morning in a Pine Forest on Wikipedia
• The Windmill at Wijk bij Duurstede on Wikipedia
• Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket on Wikipedia
• Heart of the Andes on Wikipedia

If you want one on your wall

A copy in oil behaves like the original: the paint has ridges, the varnish catches the lamp, and the color shifts as you cross the room. For the night sky, The Starry Night is the obvious choice; for weather and water, The Hay Wain and The Ninth Wave can hold a big wall on their own. Everything else from this list, and thousands of views beyond it, is in the landscapes oil painting reproductions, with the sea gathered separately in the seascapes oil painting reproductions.