Famous Paintings of Women to Celebrate the Female Principle

The female body is one of the oldest and most commonly depicted motifs in visual arts. Famous paintings of women had a profound influence on the world of art and popular culture that graced them with remarkable fame and an audience spanning far beyond the museum-going elite.

In the following article, we’ve examined ten of the most popular paintings of women to see what makes them so extraordinary and appealing for people of various backgrounds and time periods.

In the mid-1480s Sandro Botticelli revolutionized the art world by painting the first non-religious nude since the ancient times. His famous Birth of Venus painting represents the true return to the ideals of antiquities as the artist borrowed both the narrative and the elements of the composition from ancient Greece. The story about Venus’s ride on the shell was taken from the celebrated poet Homer while the main subject’s intricate pose is reminiscent of the Greek statue entitled Capitoline Venus.

Several centuries later, an image of Mona Lisa represented a step further in the development of female portraiture. By using oil paint, which was a novelty at the time, and his exquisite technique of shadowing (sfumato), Leonardo da Vinci achieved a new level of realism that influenced many Italian renaissance artists that followed. Thanks to this innovative technique, Mona Lisa’s skin looks smooth, her eyes highly expressive and her vivid smile so intense that it continues to captivate viewers and artists for centuries.

The 1871 painting Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 or Whistler’s mother as it is commonly known, was noted both for its original title as well as its unusual composition. By this time its author, James McNeill Whistler, has adopted a musical way of titling his pieces and named them by their dominant color while the intentionally pared down composition helped achieve the type of psychological depth that stimulates people to see different emotional undertone each time they observe the artwork.

In early 20th century, two Viennese painters Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt took the female form to a new level and created some of the most famous paintings of women ever. By surrounding his subjects with gold, Gustav Klimt introduced Egyptian art to Europe and was one of the pioneers of Art Nouveau movement. His slightly distorted poses and erotic depictions of the female form were quickly inherited by his pupil Egon Schiele who added his own emotionally intense and often disturbing style to his famous paintings of women.

Primitive self-portraits by Frida Kahlo infuse elements of naive and folk art but also feminists approach visible in her uncompromising depiction of female body and mind.

Finally, Andy Warhol used to portray the society’s obsession with celebrities that can be as disturbing and brutal as any other unhealthy obsession.

Scroll through our list of famous paintings of women and follow the evolution of the female form through centuries