The most famous paintings of women turn private lives into public arguments: a wife becomes a scandal, a mother becomes an icon, and an artist paints her own heartbreak. Others give imagined women the force of real presences. These 17 works connect what you can see in the paint with the human conflicts behind it, from stolen portraits to faces that shocked an exhibition.
In This Article
- 1. Mona Lisa
- 2. The Birth of Venus
- 3. Girl With a Pearl Earring
- 4. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
- 5. Whistler’s Mother
- 6. Woman With a Parasol
- 7. The Lady of Shalott
- 8. Madame X
- 9. Olympia
- 10. The Two Fridas
- 11. Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
- 12. Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat
- 13. American Gothic
- 14. Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne
- 15. Weeping Woman
- 16. La Maja Desnuda
- 17. Woman With a Hat
- Key Takeaways
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Look Beyond the Familiar Face
1. Mona Lisa
In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia stole Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre; recovery came in 1913, after two years of extraordinary publicity. The small, elusive face had become an international news story.
Painted c. 1503–1519 in oil on poplar, the Louvre portrait is generally identified as Lisa Gherardini, wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Soft transitions around her mouth keep her expression unsettled.
2. The Birth of Venus
Venus rides a vast shell toward shore, her hair streaming as winds push her across the water. Pale ripples surround a body whose elongated proportions follow the sweep of Botticelli’s line, not anatomical realism. This famous painting of woman as a mythological ideal makes arrival feel weightless.
Sandro Botticelli painted it c. 1484–1486 in tempera on canvas; it belongs to Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.
3. Girl With a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer’s girl turns toward us with parted lips, as though something has interrupted her. Light touches the earring against an almost empty darkness. No confirmed name explains the encounter.
The Mauritshuis in The Hague holds this oil on canvas, dated c. 1665. Its classification as a tronie leaves that anonymity intact: the face matters without a biography attached.
4. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I
Maria Altmann sought the return of her aunt Adele’s portrait after the Nazis looted it. In 2006, restitution to Altmann and fellow heirs ended Austria’s possession of the painting.
That struggle changed the meaning of Gustav Klimt’s glittering surface. Adele’s face and clasped hands emerge from oil, gold, and silver on canvas, painted in 1907. The portrait now belongs to New York’s Neue Galerie.
5. Whistler’s Mother
“What can or ought the public to care about the identity of the portrait?” James McNeill Whistler asked. His title, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1, insisted on the picture’s structure; viewers preferred his mother.
Anna McNeill Whistler sits in profile, her dark dress balanced against a gray wall. The 1871 oil on canvas belongs to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. The nickname won.
6. Woman With a Parasol
Camille Monet stands high on the slope, her skirt swelling and veil tugging across her face. Below her, little Jean barely clears the grass. Claude Monet places us downhill, looking upward into moving air.
His Woman with a Parasol—Madame Monet and Her Son (1875) makes a family outing feel momentary. The oil on canvas belongs to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
7. The Lady of Shalott
Tennyson’s heroine is cursed: looking directly toward Camelot seals her fate. John William Waterhouse paints the aftermath, as she leaves her tower by boat and travels toward death.
Her woven tapestry trails over the boat’s side, carrying the work of her confinement into the open. Candles burn beside her; her mouth is open. Waterhouse’s 1888 oil on canvas belongs to Tate Britain, London.
8. Madame X
A slipping shoulder strap helped turn Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau’s portrait into a scandal at the 1884 Paris Salon. John Singer Sargent later painted the strap upright, but the reception had already damaged his prospects in France.
Her pale skin against the black gown remains startling without it. Painted in 1883–1884, the oil on canvas belongs to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
9. Olympia
Victorine Meurent meets the viewer’s eyes while Laure, modeling the attendant, brings flowers. Édouard Manet gives the reclining woman no goddess’s name to excuse her nakedness.
Painted in 1863, Olympia belongs to the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and is oil on canvas. At its 1865 Salon exhibition, audiences confronted an unmistakably contemporary courtesan: a sex worker who returned their scrutiny without shame.
10. The Two Fridas
One Frida holds the other’s hand. Above their joined hands, a blood vessel links two exposed hearts; blood stains the white dress of one figure. Their clothes differ, but neither can separate cleanly from the other.
Frida Kahlo painted this double self-portrait during her 1939 divorce from Diego Rivera. The oil on canvas belongs to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City.
11. Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird
A dead hummingbird hangs at Kahlo’s throat. A monkey crowds one shoulder, a black cat the other; behind them, leaves close off any escape into distance.
Her 1940 oil on canvas belongs to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. At the center of this crowded company, thorns press into her neck and draw blood.
12. Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun faces the viewer with brushes and palette in hand: she is the maker, not merely the subject. Painted in 1782, a year before her admission to France’s Royal Academy, the portrait makes her professional claim visible.
Daylight filters beneath the broad brim, following Rubens’s portrait known as The Straw Hat. This oil on canvas belongs to London’s National Gallery.
13. American Gothic
Grant Wood recruited his sister Nan and dentist Byron McKeeby for this severe pairing outside a house in Eldon, Iowa. Nan objected to being mistaken for the older man’s wife.
The pitchfork and stiff poses echo the house’s vertical lines, making the pair look almost as constructed as the building. Painted in 1930 in oil on Beaver Board, American Gothic belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.
14. Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne
Jeanne Hébuterne was Amedeo Modigliani’s partner and a fellow artist. In this 1919 portrait, her tilted head and elongated neck give her a quiet, inward bearing.
Their relationship ended catastrophically: in 1920, pregnant Hébuterne died by suicide two days after Modigliani’s death. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, holds this oil on canvas, one of his many portraits of her.
15. Weeping Woman
Dora Maar photographed Picasso at work on Guernica, documenting its development in his studio. In Weeping Woman (1937), he turned her features into another image of anguish connected with that painting.
Angular tears cut across her face; a handkerchief seems crushed into it. Tate, London, holds the oil on canvas. Behind this fractured likeness stood a photographer and painter who had recorded his own process.
16. La Maja Desnuda
Francisco Goya faced questioning by the Spanish Inquisition in 1815 over his maja paintings. The danger surrounding this famous painting of a woman extended beyond its naked body to the authorities policing such images.
La Maja Desnuda, or The Naked Maja (c. 1797–1800), belonged to Manuel Godoy’s collection. Now at the Prado, Madrid, the oil on canvas presents an unidentified woman looking outward without mythological cover.
17. Woman With a Hat
Green and orange strokes disrupt Amélie Matisse’s face instead of flattering her complexion. At the 1905 Salon d’Automne, such aggressive color helped earn the painters the name “Fauves”: wild beasts.
Henri Matisse’s portrait of his wife made color itself a public provocation. The 1905 oil on canvas belongs to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Key Takeaways
- Paintings of women can be portraits, invented characters, or acts of self-representation.
- A sitter’s own life may complicate the role a painter assigns her.
- Scandal and ownership can shape a painting’s reputation as strongly as its appearance.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does a tronie differ from a portrait of a named sitter?
A tronie explores an expression, character type, or costume instead of chiefly recording someone’s identity. A real person could model for one without becoming its named subject.
Why do reproductions of Madame X sometimes show different shoulder-strap positions?
Reproductions can record different stages of Sargent’s composition, before or after his revision. Preparatory studies and historical photographs preserve evidence that the finished portrait no longer shows.
Is the woman in American Gothic meant to be the farmer’s wife?
Wood intended a father and his unmarried daughter, not a married couple. The unrelated models played fictional family roles.
Why are there several paintings titled Portrait of Jeanne Hébuterne?
Modigliani painted Hébuterne repeatedly, and descriptive titles recur across those works. Their dates and collections distinguish the canvases, whose poses and settings differ.
How does La Maja Desnuda differ from its clothed companion?
La Maja Vestida presents a clothed woman in essentially the same reclining pose. Both paintings belong to the Prado; their precise original display arrangement remains uncertain.
Were Dora Maar and Jeanne Hébuterne artists themselves?
Both women made art themselves. Maar’s work included Surrealist photography and painting; Hébuterne studied art and made paintings and drawings. Their appearances in famous female portraits represent only part of their creative lives.
Look Beyond the Familiar Face
Famous portraits of women offer different kinds of intimacy. For an encounter with an artist speaking for herself, choose Kahlo or Vigée Le Brun; for a portrait whose public life changed its meaning, choose Adele Bloch-Bauer. The palette in Vigée Le Brun’s hand makes a claim that the gold surrounding Adele cannot: this woman made the picture you are seeing.
The larger history comes down to who gets to shape a woman’s image, and who controls what happens to it afterward. A sitter, painter, collector, or audience can each pull that story in a different direction. Familiarity with a face is only one small part of knowing its story.