Quick Reference: Painting, Artist, Movement and Museum

Museum holdings reflect permanent collections as of September 2026. Works go out on loan and galleries get rehung, so check the museum’s website before you travel.

1. The Birth of Venus (Sandro Botticelli, c. 1484–86)

The Birth of Venus is one of the first large-scale Renaissance paintings to take a nude goddess from classical myth, not scripture, as its main subject. Botticelli painted Venus arriving on a scallop shell, pushed to shore by the wind god Zephyr, with a figure usually identified as the Hora of Spring waiting to cover her.

Get the printBirth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. You can also browse more of the Sandro Botticelli collection.

2. Lady with an Ermine (Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1489–91)

Lady with an Ermine is one of only four surviving portraits of women by Leonardo. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, a well-educated young woman at the Milan court of Ludovico Sforza. Her body and the animal’s twist in the same direction, which gave the portrait a sense of movement that most 15th-century profile portraits lacked.

Get the printLady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci

3. Mona Lisa (Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1503–19)

The Mona Lisa is the most visited painting in the world. It is widely identified as Lisa Gherardini, the wife of the Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo worked on it for years and used sfumato, soft transitions between light and shadow without hard outlines. That technique is why her expression seems to change depending on where you look.

The painting’s fame grew sharply after it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and recovered in 1913. Today the crowds are a planning problem in their own right. In January 2025, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a Louvre renovation that will give the Mona Lisa a dedicated room of its own, with 2031 as the target date (CNN, January 28, 2025). Reporting on the plan put the painting’s traffic at as many as 25,000 visitors a day (Forbes, January 30, 2025).

Get the printThe Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. Browse the full Leonardo da Vinci collection.

4. Judith and Her Maidservant (Artemisia Gentileschi, c. 1613–14)

Artemisia Gentileschi was one of the most accomplished painters of the Italian Baroque. In 1616 she became the first woman admitted to Florence’s Accademia delle Arti del Disegno. She painted the biblical heroine Judith several times. This version doesn’t show the killing of Holofernes. It shows the tense moment after it, as Judith and her maid Abra freeze and look toward a sound outside the frame.

The strong light and dark background come from Caravaggio. Unlike many male painters of the story, Gentileschi portrays the two women as partners.

Get the printJudith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes. Gentileschi’s later Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting is also available.

5. Girl with a Pearl Earring (Johannes Vermeer, c. 1665)

Often called the “Mona Lisa of the North,” Girl with a Pearl Earring is not a portrait of a known person. It’s a tronie, a Dutch genre of imagined heads that let a painter study expression, costume and light. Vermeer set a single figure against a dark background and caught her mid-turn. The result feels personal even though no one knows who she was.

Get the printGirl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer. If you prefer Vermeer’s scenes of everyday life, The Milkmaid (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) is a good companion piece.

6. Self-Portrait in a Straw Hat (Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, after 1782)

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was the official portraitist of Queen Marie Antoinette and one of the most successful artists of 18th-century Europe. She painted this self-portrait as a response to Rubens’s Le Chapeau de Paille, which she saw in Flanders in 1782. She kept his outdoor light and wide-brimmed hat and added the palette and brushes that identify her as a working painter. The following year she was admitted to France’s Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

Get the printSelf-Portrait in a Straw Hat by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. See also her Marie Antoinette in a Park and the full Vigée Le Brun collection.

7. Liberty Leading the People (Eugène Delacroix, 1830)

Delacroix painted the three-day July Revolution of 1830 in Paris and put an allegorical woman at its center. Liberty is part goddess and part street fighter, barefoot and carrying a bayonetted musket. She went on to shape Marianne, the national symbol of France.

The painting looks noticeably different today than it did a few years ago. Conservators removed layers of yellowed varnish between October 2023 and April 2024, bringing back the gray of Liberty’s dress and the brightness of the flag, and the canvas went back on view on May 2, 2024 (Smithsonian Magazine, 2024).

Get the printLiberty Leading the People (1830) by Eugène Delacroix

8. Olympia (Édouard Manet, 1863)

Olympia reworks Titian’s Venus of Urbino, but Manet removed the mythological cover. His model, Victorine Meurent, is clearly a contemporary Parisian courtesan. She looks straight at the viewer, and the flat, harsh lighting makes no attempt to idealize her. It caused a scandal at the 1865 Salon, and it’s now seen as one of the paintings that started modern art.

Get the printOlympia by Édouard Manet. You can also see Manet’s portraits of fellow painter Berthe Morisot in the Édouard Manet collection.

9. Whistler’s Mother (James McNeill Whistler, 1871)

Whistler’s official title was Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1. He wanted it judged as a composition of tones, not as a sentimental picture of his mother, Anna McNeill Whistler. The public ignored that. It became one of the best-known American paintings in the world and a common symbol of motherhood. The French state bought it in 1891.

Get the printPortrait of the Artist’s Mother by James McNeill Whistler

10. Woman with a Parasol (Claude Monet, 1875)

Monet painted his wife Camille and their son Jean outdoors at Argenteuil in quick brushstrokes. Instead of a formal likeness, the painting records a passing moment of wind, cloud and sunlight. That focus is what Impressionism is about: the woman is part of the weather.

Get the printWoman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son. The Claude Monet collection also includes Camille (The Woman in the Green Dress).

11. Madame X (John Singer Sargent, 1883–84)

Sargent’s portrait of the Parisian socialite Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau was meant to make his name. It nearly ruined his career instead. At the 1884 Salon, one jeweled strap was shown slipping off her shoulder, and critics called the portrait indecent. Sargent repainted the strap, moved to London, and kept the canvas for more than 30 years before selling it to the Metropolitan Museum in 1916.

Get the printMadame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau) by John Singer Sargent. Browse the John Singer Sargent collection.

12. The Child’s Bath (Mary Cassatt, 1893)

Mary Cassatt was the only American formally invited to show with the French Impressionists. She made the private world of women and children her main subject. In The Child’s Bath, the high viewpoint, cropped edges and flat patterned fabrics show the influence of the Japanese woodblock prints Cassatt studied in Paris in 1890. The painting treats ordinary care as a subject worth serious attention.

Get the printThe Child’s Bath by Mary Cassatt. More in the Mary Cassatt collection.

13. Flaming June (Frederic Leighton, 1895)

Flaming June shows a sleeping woman in a see-through orange gown, curled into a pose Leighton based on Michelangelo’s figures in the Medici Chapel. Victorian taste later fell out of fashion, and the painting struggled to find a buyer in the 20th century. The Museo de Arte de Ponce acquired it in 1963. It is now one of the best-known images of the Aesthetic Movement.

Get the printFlaming June by Frederic Leighton

14. Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (Gustav Klimt, 1907)

Often called “The Woman in Gold,” this is the high point of Klimt’s golden phase. Adele Bloch-Bauer’s face and hands appear through a surface of gold and silver leaf and Byzantine-style patterns. The Nazis seized the painting from the Bloch-Bauer family. After a long legal fight, Austria returned it in 2006 to Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, and it was later acquired for the Neue Galerie in New York.

Get the printPortrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt. The Gustav Klimt collection also includes Judith and The Kiss.

15. American Gothic (Grant Wood, 1930)

Most viewers think the pair in American Gothic is a husband and wife. Grant Wood said the woman is the farmer’s daughter. His models were his sister, Nan Wood Graham, and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. The Art Institute of Chicago bought the painting in 1930, the year it was painted. It has since become one of the most parodied images in American culture.

Get the printAmerican Gothic by Grant Wood

How Did Paintings of Women Change Across Art Movements?

Seen in order, these 15 paintings show women moving from symbols to people:

• Renaissance (1400s–1500s): Women are goddesses (Venus) or idealized court sitters (Mona Lisa, Lady with an Ermine). Beauty stands for virtue and divine order.
• Baroque and Dutch Golden Age (1600s): Drama and light take over. Gentileschi gives her heroines agency, while Vermeer brings attention to quiet, private moments.
• 18th century: Female artists such as Vigée Le Brun build careers in portraiture and claim professional standing.
• 19th century: Realism and Impressionism bring in real, named, modern women: a courtesan (Olympia), a mother (Whistler’s Mother), a wife outdoors (Woman with a Parasol), a socialite (Madame X). Seven of the 15 works on this list come from this century.
• 20th century: Decoration and national identity lead. Klimt turns a portrait into a gold icon, and Wood makes a Midwestern woman into an American archetype.

Bring These Masterpieces Home

Every painting on this list is available as a museum-quality wall art print from Artwork Culture, starting at $19, in sizes from small desk prints to large statement pieces. The whole range is in the full Artwork Culture catalog. A gallery wall that runs from the Renaissance to Regionalism makes a good conversation piece and a quick art history lesson.

Frequently Asked Questions

Conclusion

The most famous paintings of women trace how artists, and the people who paid them, understood women over 450 years:

• Renaissance painters idealized women as goddesses and court beauties.
• Baroque and 18th-century women artists like Gentileschi and Vigée Le Brun painted women with agency and professional standing.
• 19th-century Realists and Impressionists painted real, modern women, and several of those paintings caused scandals.
• 20th-century artists turned women into icons of decoration and national identity.

Start with the paintings that interest you most, see them in person where you can, and explore the Leonardo da Vinci, Mary Cassatt and Gustav Klimt collections to bring the ones you love home.