Famous Paintings of Women

Women as a subject in art history

Portrait painting is a genre in painting where the intent is to represent a specific human subject, and the term also describes the painted portrait itself. Portraitists may work on commission, for public and private persons, or they may be inspired by admiration or affection for the subject. Portrait work often reads as an important state and family record, as well as remembrances. That is one reason a woman appears so often in the canon: as a sitter with a name, as a model in a studio, as a figure in a story from myth or scripture.

Not every painting of a woman is a portrait. Some are genre scenes of everyday life, some are mythological, and a few are landscape or interior work in which the figure carries the light. Johannes Vermeer, one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life, and his Girl with a Red Hat is seen as one of his tronies, depictions of models fancifully dressed that were not intended to be likenesses of specific, identifiable subjects. William-Adolphe Bouguereau, a French academic painter, used mythological themes in his realistic genre paintings, making modern interpretations of classical subjects with an emphasis on the female human body. He finished 822 known paintings. During his lifetime Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague, and he produced relatively few paintings, earning his living mainly as an art dealer; he was not wealthy, and at his death his wife was left in debt. Bouguereau had the opposite career and then the opposite fate. He enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors and received top prices for his work, and as the quintessential salon painter of his generation he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century he and his art had fallen out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes, and in the 1980s a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of both.

Famous paintings of women

Ask ten people to name a famous painting of a woman and you will hear the Mona Lisa, the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and then a longer silence. This is the short list buyers ask for most often, and every work on it can be ordered as a hand-painted oil reproduction.

• Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci was one of the founding figures of the High Renaissance and had an enormous influence on subsequent artists; the Mona Lisa is one of eight major works universally attributed to him.
• The Lady with an Ermine, dated to about 1489 to 1491 and worked in oils on a panel of walnut wood. Its subject is Cecilia Gallerani, a mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. It is the second of only four surviving portrait works of women made by Leonardo, the others being Ginevra de' Benci, La Belle Ferronniere and the Mona Lisa.
• The Girl with a Pearl Earring, dated about 1665. It went by various names over the centuries and acquired its present title towards the end of the 20th century. The work has been in the collection of the Mauritshuis in The Hague since 1902.
• Girl with the red hat, a small painting signed by Vermeer. Its attribution was long debated because it sits on a recycled wood panel rather than canvas, and curators at the National Gallery of Art have since established his authorship.
• The Milkmaid, sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, an oil on canvas of a domestic kitchen maid. It is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which regards it as one of the museum's finest attractions.
• Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi. The beheading of Holofernes by Judith is recounted in the deuterocanonical Book of Judith and is the subject of many paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
• Olympia by Edouard Manet, an 1863 oil painting. The French government acquired it in 1890 after a public subscription organized by Claude Monet, and it is now in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
• Ophelia by John Everett Millais, made in 1851 and 1852 and held by Tate Britain in London. It shows the young Danish noblewoman Ophelia from William Shakespeare's play Hamlet.
• The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot by John William Waterhouse. Waterhouse made three versions of this character, in 1888, 1894 and 1915, adopting much of the manner of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
• Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 by James McNeill Whistler, best known as Whistler's Mother. The subject is his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler, and it is one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States, described as an American icon and a Victorian Mona Lisa.
• The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet, completed in 1857 and held in the Musee d'Orsay.
• The Sleeping Gypsy by Henri Rousseau, an 1897 oil on canvas that shows a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. It hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, next to The Starry Night.
• The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, the best known picture of the Art Nouveau years in Vienna.

Women artists who painted women

Several of the artists gathered here were women, and the store treats women artists as part of the canon, not a footnote. Their work sits beside the men of the same rooms and the same salons. Artemisia Gentileschi took the Judith story and turned it into her own picture in the Baroque century. Roses by Berthe Morisot comes from the first Impressionist circle in Paris. The Blue Room by Suzanne Valadon and Bouquet and a Cat show a woman at rest in a modern interior. Flowers in a Glass Vase, with a Cricket in a Niche by Rachel Ruysch and Basket with Peaches and Grapes by Louise Moillon belong to the still life tradition. Sarah Bernhardt Hunting with Hounds by Louise Abbema is of the most famous actress of her time.

Portrait work, myth and everyday life

The subject splits into a few clear groups. The named sitter, where you know exactly who she was: Portrait of Gabrielle Cot and Portrait of Flora Harwood Gibb are both of that kind. The working woman, seen in Young Worker and The Flower Seller. The classical subject, as in The Abduction of Psyche and Inspiration. And the quiet interior or garden scene, such as A Stroll in the Park by William James Glackens. Self portraits and studies of a single head, like Head of an Italian girl with a laurel wreath, are the smallest form of the genre and often the most direct. Whatever the period, the reproduction arrives the same way: oil on canvas, by hand, for your wall at home.

Periods and styles in this collection

Nine centuries of art history sit on one page, so it helps to know which room you are in.

• Renaissance art emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about 1400 and took the art of classical antiquity as its foundation, transformed by contemporary scientific knowledge. For art historians it marks the transition of Europe from the medieval period to the Early Modern age. The Lady with an Ermine belongs here.
• Baroque painting is the painting associated with the Baroque cultural movement, often identified with the Counter Reformation and Catholic Revival, though important Baroque art was created in Protestant states across Western Europe too. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith belongs to it.
• Rococo emerged in France in the 1730s as a reaction against the Louis XIV style, with fluid curves, asymmetry and a smaller scale designed to foster intimacy, and it often blends white and pastel color with gilding. Aristocratic leisure and the pastoral are its prevalent themes, as in The Swing.
• Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, that originated in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect. Expressionist artists sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.
• Neoclassicism drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity, was born in Rome, and reached its peak in the early to mid 19th century. It competed with Romanticism.
• Romanticism originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and its purpose was to advocate for subjectivity, imagination and the appreciation of nature in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
• Realism is the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality or exaggeration. As an art historical movement it began in France after the revolution of 1848, with artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, and the realist painters rejected Romanticism. The Gleaners is of that world.
• Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open composition and an emphasis on the accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities, with ordinary subject matter and unusual visual angles. It originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s, which is where Berthe Morisot worked.
• Post-Impressionism developed roughly between 1886 and 1905 as a reaction against the Impressionists' concern for the naturalistic depiction of light and color, and its broad emphasis on abstract qualities or symbolic content takes in Symbolism and Neo-Impressionism.
• Art Nouveau was an international style of art and applied art, often inspired by natural forms such as the sinuous curves of plants and flowers, popular between 1890 and 1910 during the Belle Epoque. The Kiss is the picture most people name from those years.

How each reproduction is made

A studio artist works from the museum image and builds the piece in oil on canvas, layer by layer, the same way the original was made. There is no machine step: no print, no transfer, no digital pass. Because each of these pieces is made to order, you choose the size first, from seven options, and then decide whether you want the optional frame. Before anything ships you get a photo of the finished artwork for approval, so nothing leaves the studio that you have not seen. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply to every order, wherever your home is. It's the closest most people will come to living with a canvas that hangs in Paris or Amsterdam, and the surface behaves like paint because it is paint. Nothing is rushed and nothing is handed to a machine: the studio keeps one hand on each canvas from the first block-in to the final glaze, and the photo you approve shows the surface under raking light, so you can judge the brush marks before you commit to anything.

American painters and the modern face

A good part of the catalogue is American. Whistler's Mother is one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States, and American Gothic, a 1930 oil painting on beaverboard by the American Regionalist painter Grant Wood, shows a Midwestern farmer and his daughter in front of their Carpenter Gothic home. It is one of the most famous American paintings of the 20th century and gets read and re-read in popular culture all the time. Alongside them sit Eleanor in the Pines and A Stroll in the Park, two pictures of American light. Many of the works that define modern art in New York, such as The Sleeping Gypsy, arrived there by gift, in that case from Olga Guggenheim in 1939.

Choosing one for your wall

There is no single right answer, but a few questions make the choice faster. Start with the room: a dark Baroque figure holds a hallway, while a pale Impressionist study opens up a small bedroom. Then pick the size, because the same painting reads as a personal object at the smallest size and as an event at the largest. Use the frame option if the wall is plain and skip it if the wall already has moulding. Many buyers who come here for one self portrait or one head study end up with a pair, hung together, because two pieces at the same size make a small wall look composed. If you are unsure, a named sitter is easier to live with over time than a crowd scene, and a painter you already like is easier still. If two works feel equally right, choose the one whose light matches the light in the room where it will hang, because that is the thing you cannot change later.

Browse related collections

These pieces connect to the wider portrait and figure groups in the store.

• Portrait oil paintings, the parent group for every sitter.
• Paintings of children for the youngest subjects.
• Male portrait reproductions for the other half of the genre.
• The nude in Western art, a tradition that overlaps this one.
• The 100 most famous paintings for the canon in one list.

Frequently asked questions

Are these prints or real paintings? Each one is an original oil on canvas, painted by hand by a studio artist working from the museum image. Nothing here is a print, so you get real brushwork and real texture on the surface.

What is the difference between a portrait and a genre painting of a woman? A portrait sets out to represent a specific human subject, often as a state or family record, while a genre picture does not need a name at all. A genre painting shows everyday life, and the figure may be a model rather than a named sitter. Vermeer's tronies are a good example: models fancifully dressed, not intended as portraits of identifiable people.

Can I choose the size and the frame? Yes. Every work here comes in seven sizes with an optional frame, and you approve a photo of the finished canvas before it ships. Free worldwide shipping and 90-day returns apply.