Famous Paintings of Women: Portraits, Goddesses and Heroines

The most famous paintings of women include Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, Millais's Ophelia, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Leighton's Flaming June and Picasso's portraits of Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar. Together they span five centuries and almost every way a painter can look at a woman: as a sitter, a goddess, a saint, a symbol, a lover or a victim.

Most of these pictures were painted by men, and the women in them were often real people whose names were forgotten while the paintings became famous. This list orders the works in the catalogue by fame and, in the essay below, brings back the women behind them, alongside the women artists, such as Artemisia Gentileschi, who painted from the other side of the easel.

How we chose these paintings

A painting of a woman becomes famous in several different ways. Some, like the Mona Lisa, are celebrated as portraits of one person. Some are images of goddesses or heroines from myth, literature and the Bible, in which a model stands in for an idea. Some turn a woman into a symbol of a nation or a cause. The list mixes all three, starting with the icons and moving toward works that repay a closer look.

The portrait: real women, named and unnamed

The Mona Lisa (begun c. 1503, Louvre) is a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine silk merchant Francesco del Giocondo, which is why it is also called La Gioconda. Leonardo never delivered it, and worked on it for more than a decade. Its fame grew slowly and then exploded after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 by Vincenzo Peruggia and recovered in Florence in 1913. What most viewers miss is the landscape: the horizon on the left is lower than the one on the right, which helps make her seem to shift as you look.

Other famous portraits have lost their sitters. The girl in Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring (c. 1665, Mauritshuis, The Hague) is not a portrait but a tronie, a study of a face in exotic costume, and her identity is unknown. Monet's paintings of Camille Doncieux, from Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress, 1866) to Woman with a Parasol (1875), record the woman who was his model, his wife and the mother of his sons, until her death at 32.

Goddesses and the nude

For centuries the most respectable way to paint a naked woman was to call her Venus. Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–86, Uffizi) revived the large-scale female nude; Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) brought her indoors onto a bed; and nineteenth-century Salon painters such as William-Adolphe Bouguereau made her porcelain-smooth. Édouard Manet's Olympia (1863, Musée d'Orsay) caused a scandal by painting a recognizable Parisian courtesan in Venus's pose, looking straight back at the viewer.

Frederic Leighton's Flaming June (1895, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico) shows a sleeping woman curled in translucent orange drapery. The pose comes from Michelangelo's sculptures for the Medici tombs. It fell so far out of fashion that in the early 1960s it failed to sell in London and was bought by the museum in Ponce, where it remains.

Heroines of literature

The Victorian painters loved tragic women from books. John Everett Millais's Ophelia (1851–52, Tate Britain) shows Shakespeare's heroine floating in a stream moments before she drowns, painted from Elizabeth Siddal posing in a bathtub in Millais's studio; she reportedly caught a severe cold when the lamps warming the water went out. John William Waterhouse's The Lady of Shalott (1888, Tate Britain) illustrates Tennyson's poem: the cursed lady drifts toward Camelot and death, candles guttering at the prow of her boat. Frank Dicksee's La Belle Dame sans Merci takes Keats's fairy temptress and turns her on a knight. In these pictures the woman is usually beautiful, doomed and silent, and she is almost always alone, which tells us as much about the Victorian imagination as about the poems.

Heroines of the Bible and history

Judith, the widow who saved her city by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes, was painted by Caravaggio, Cristofano Allori, Klimt and many others. The most powerful version is by a woman. Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Slaying Holofernes shows Judith and her maid pinning the general to the bed as they cut, their sleeves pushed up like butchers'. Artemisia had been raped by the painter Agostino Tassi in 1611 and endured a public trial in which she was tortured to test her testimony; many scholars read the painting in light of that experience, though she painted Judith throughout her long career.

Women also became symbols of the state. Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830, Louvre), painted to commemorate the July Revolution, shows Liberty as a bare-breasted woman of the people in a Phrygian cap, holding the tricolor flag over the barricades. She became Marianne, the emblem of the French Republic.

The Rococo and the pleasure of looking

Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing (1767, Wallace Collection, London) is the most famous Rococo painting of a woman. She flies upward on a swing pushed by an older man in the shadows, kicking off a pink slipper toward her young lover hidden in the bushes below, who looks straight up her skirts. A statue of Cupid holds a finger to his lips. The picture is a joke about watching and being watched, and every detail of the garden plays along.

The twentieth century: Picasso's women

Pablo Picasso painted the women in his life obsessively, and each became a style. Girl Before a Mirror (1932, Museum of Modern Art) and Le Rêve (1932) show Marie-Thérèse Walter in curving forms and bright colors, often read as images of desire and the divided self. The Weeping Woman (1937, Tate Modern), painted in the aftermath of Guernica, uses the face of the photographer Dora Maar to stand for all the grief of the Spanish Civil War. Maar was a major artist in her own right, a Surrealist photographer whose work was shown alongside Man Ray's, a fact the painting's fame long obscured.

Women behind the easel

For most of history women were excluded from academies and from life drawing, which made large figure painting almost impossible for them. A few broke through: Sofonisba Anguissola at the Spanish court, Artemisia Gentileschi, Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun in pre-revolutionary France, and later Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt among the Impressionists. In 1989 the activist artists known as the Guerrilla Girls pointed out that at the Metropolitan Museum fewer than five percent of the artists in the modern art sections were women, while most of the nudes were female. The gap between painting women and women painting remains one of the central questions of art history.

For more, see The Pre-Raphaelites.