Painting

Painters and the works that define them.

People in Painting

119 profiles

Artist

Leonardo da Vinci

Painting the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper.

Painter

Frida Kahlo

Painting self-portraits about identity, pain and Mexican life.

Painter

Vincent van Gogh

Painting The Starry Night and Sunflowers.

Artist

Pablo Picasso

Co-developing Cubism and painting Guernica.

Painter

Georgia O'Keeffe

Painting enlarged flowers and the landscapes of New Mexico.

Artist

Salvador Dalí

Painting the melting clocks in The Persistence of Memory.

Painter

Édouard Manet

Painting Olympia and helping bring modern life into French painting.

Painter

Jackson Pollock

Making large abstract paintings by pouring and dripping paint.

Painter

Piet Mondrian

Creating abstract grids of black lines and primary colours.

Artist

Joan Miró

Creating a vivid visual language of floating shapes, stars and dreamlike figures.

Painter

Artemisia Gentileschi

Painting forceful Baroque heroines such as Judith.

Painter

Gustav Klimt

Painting The Kiss in a richly patterned field of gold.

Painter

Rembrandt

Painting The Night Watch and searching, lifelong self-portraits.

Artist

Edgar Degas

Depicting ballet dancers at work and rest.

Painter

Bob Ross

Teaching relaxed landscape painting on television through The Joy of Painting.

Painter

Diego Rivera

Painting monumental murals that put workers and Mexican history on public walls.

Painter

Henri Matisse

Transforming modern art through bold colour, simplified forms and late paper cut-outs.

Artist

Katsushika Hokusai

Creating The Great Wave off Kanagawa and Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Artist

Andy Warhol

Making soup cans, celebrities and mass-produced images central subjects of Pop art.

Painter

Amrita Sher-Gil

Helping shape modern Indian painting through portraits and scenes of everyday life.

Artist

Michelangelo

Creating David, the Pietà and the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Artist

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Combining text, anatomy, history and street imagery in influential 1980s paintings.

Artist

Yayoi Kusama

Creating immersive Infinity Mirror Rooms and an unmistakable language of dots and repetition.

Artist

Wifredo Lam

Painting The Jungle and bringing Afro-Cuban imagery into modern art.

Painter

Tarsila do Amaral

Creating Abaporu and helping define Brazilian modernism.

Painter

Albert Namatjira

Bringing Central Australian landscapes to a wide audience through watercolour.

Painter

Raja Ravi Varma

Giving Indian mythological figures widely circulated painted and printed forms.

Painter

Ben Enwonwu

Shaping modern Nigerian art through paintings and sculpture.

Painter

Claude Monet

Helping establish Impressionism and painting the changing effects of light.

Artist

Utagawa Hiroshige

Creating woodblock landscapes that made travel, weather and everyday scenery memorable.

Artist

Jacob Lawrence

Painting the Great Migration as a sixty-panel visual narrative.

Artist

M. F. Husain

Helping define Indian modernist painting through bold narrative images.

Artist

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Painting intimate scenes and biblical works that gained international recognition.

Artist

Fernando Botero

Creating the rounded, exaggerated figures known as Boterismo.

Artist

Rufino Tamayo

Combining Mexican imagery with modern colour and form.

Artist

Oswaldo Guayasamín

Painting human suffering and inequality in a distinctive expressionist style.

Painter

Raphael

Painting The School of Athens and the Vatican frescoes that became defining images of the High Renaissance.

Painter

Titian

Transforming Venetian painting through rich colour, expressive brushwork and portraits of Europe's rulers.

Painter

Sandro Botticelli

Painting The Birth of Venus and Primavera, two of the most recognisable images of the Italian Renaissance.

Painter

Johannes Vermeer

Painting Girl with a Pearl Earring and quiet Dutch interiors shaped by extraordinary attention to light.

Painter

Paul Cézanne

Reworking landscapes and still lifes into structures of colour that helped prepare the way for Cubism.

Painter

Loïs Mailou Jones

Connecting African, Caribbean and American visual traditions in a long career as a painter and teacher.

Artist

Faith Ringgold

Creating story quilts that combine painting, fabric and written narratives about Black American lives.

Painter

Hilma af Klint

Creating large abstract paintings from 1906, before many of modernism's best-known abstract pioneers.

Painter

Berthe Morisot

Helping establish Impressionism through lively paintings of women, children and everyday life.

Painter

Mary Cassatt

Bringing an American voice to Impressionism through paintings and prints of women and children.

Artist

Sonia Delaunay

Taking abstract colour beyond painting into clothes, textiles, books and everyday design.

Painter

Caravaggio

Making biblical scenes feel immediate through dramatic light and ordinary human faces.

Painter

Hieronymus Bosch

Painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and extraordinary visions of temptation and judgment.

Painter

Jan van Eyck

Bringing extraordinary detail and luminous colour to early Netherlandish oil painting.

Painter

Francisco Goya

Painting The Third of May 1808 and exposing violence, superstition and power through art.

Painter

Peter Paul Rubens

Creating dynamic Baroque paintings filled with movement, colour and human energy.

Painter

John Constable

Painting The Hay Wain and making the Suffolk landscape an enduring subject of art.

Painter

John Singer Sargent

Painting Madame X and some of the most recognizable portraits of his era.

Painter

Winslow Homer

Painting American life and the sea with striking realism and force.

Painter

Edward Hopper

Painting Nighthawks and scenes of American life charged with stillness and isolation.

Painter

Wassily Kandinsky

Pioneering abstract painting through colour, form and ideas drawn from music.

Painter

Kazimir Malevich

Creating Black Square and founding Suprematism, an art of pure geometric forms.

Artist

Lyubov Popova

Moving abstract art into theatre sets, textiles and everyday design.

Artist

László Moholy-Nagy

Bringing photography, light and industrial materials into modern art and design education.

Painter

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Painting the light, movement and sociability of modern life as a leading Impressionist.

Painter

Georges Seurat

Creating A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and developing pointillist painting.

Painter

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Making posters and paintings that defined the image of Parisian nightlife.

Painter

Egon Schiele

Creating intense Expressionist portraits and figure drawings with angular lines and exposed emotion.

Artist

Leonor Fini

Painting powerful women, sphinxes and dreamlike worlds outside the conventions of Surrealism.

Artist

Willem de Kooning

Painting Woman I and helping shape Abstract Expressionism in New York.

Artist

Lee Krasner

Creating constantly evolving abstract paintings, from Little Images to monumental canvases.

Artist

Jasper Johns

Turning flags, targets and numbers into paintings that questioned what art represents.

Artist

David Hockney

Painting vivid California swimming pools and exploring new ways of seeing through photography and digital drawing.

Artist

Nicolas Poussin

Giving classical stories a precise visual order in paintings such as The Shepherds of Arcadia.

Artist

Francis Bacon (artist)

Painting distorted human figures that became some of modern art’s most unsettling images.

Artist

Kehinde Wiley

The portrait painter who places Black subjects inside the visual language of traditional power.

Artist

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Layering painting and family photographs to explore life between Nigeria and America.

Artist

Roberto Matta

Painting expansive surrealist worlds that connect inner life and political tension.

Artist

Abanindranath Tagore

Helping shape the Bengal school of painting and modern Indian art.

Painter

Jamini Roy

Creating a modern Indian painting style from Bengali folk art and Kalighat traditions.

Painter

Tyeb Mehta

Creating stark modern paintings of falling figures, diagonals and mythological conflict.

Artist

Bhupen Khakhar

Painting ordinary Indian lives and openly exploring gay identity.

Artist

Nilima Sheikh

Creating narrative paintings and scrolls about memory, displacement and women’s lives.

Artist

Nalini Malani

Pioneering Indian video art and immersive works about memory and violence.

Painter

Zainul Abedin

His stark drawings of the 1943 Bengal famine and pioneering modern art education in Bangladesh.

Painter

S. M. Sultan

Painting Bengali peasants as monumental, muscular figures of labour and strength.

Artist

Abdur Rahman Chughtai

Developing a distinctive painting style inspired by Mughal and Persian art.

Artist

Xu Beihong

Reinvigorating Chinese painting through powerful ink horses and Western-trained observation.

Artist

Zhang Daqian

Developing luminous splashed-ink landscapes after mastering traditional Chinese painting.

Painter

Zao Wou-Ki

Creating expansive abstract paintings that connect Chinese ink traditions with European modernism.

Painter

Hasegawa Tōhaku

Painting Pine Trees, a celebrated pair of Japanese ink screens.

Artist

Ogata Kōrin

Painting gold-ground screens of irises and plum trees that became landmarks of Rinpa art.

Artist

Kawanabe Kyōsai

Painting lively scenes of folklore, animals and satire across Japan’s Edo and Meiji eras.

Artist

Taro Okamoto

Creating the Tower of the Sun and the mural Myth of Tomorrow.

Artist

Chun Kyung-ja

Painting vivid women, flowers and snakes in a distinctive colour-rich style.

Artist

Park Seo-bo

Creating the repeated marks and textured surfaces of Écriture.

Artist

Raden Saleh

Bringing European Romantic painting into dialogue with Java.

Artist

Georgette Chen

Helping shape Singapore’s Nanyang art through portraits and tropical still lifes.

Painter

Fernando Amorsolo

Painting luminous Philippine rural scenes and becoming the country’s first National Artist.

Painter

Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

Creating monumental Western Desert paintings, including Warlugulong.

Artist

Daphne Odjig

Helping establish Indigenous artists’ independent place in Canada’s art world.

Artist

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Transforming knowledge of Alhalker Country into expansive abstract paintings.

Artist

Remedios Varo

Painting dreamlike worlds where science and magic meet.

Artist

Agnes Martin

Creating restrained abstract paintings of grids and bands.

Artist

Richard Butler Bowdon

Exploring African identities and migration through portraiture and collage.

Artist

Lady Skollie

Exploring sexuality, consent and power through bold visual art.

Painter

Horiki Katsutomi

Creating abstract paintings inspired by Renaissance art and the Odyssey.

Painter

Felipe Santiago Gutiérrez

Painting portraits and helping build art education in Colombia.

Painter

José de Ibarra

Painting religious scenes and portraits in eighteenth-century New Spain.

Painter

Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Painting richly detailed scenes of classical antiquity.

Painter

Francisco Zenteno Bujáidar

Painting murals and co-founding Tepito Arte Acá.

Artist

Paul du Toit

Making brightly coloured paintings and mixed-media sculpture.

Artist

Myra Landau

Developing abstract works in her Rhythms series.

Artist

Keith Joubert

Southern African wildlife art

Artist

Atomi Kakei

Painting, calligraphy and founding the Atomi School

Artist

Vlady

Mexican murals exploring revolution and history.

Artist

Noguchi Shohin

Japanese landscape and bird-and-flower painting.

Painter

Tanomura Chikuden

Literati painting and scholarship in Edo-period Japan.

Artist

Peter Eastman

Making reflective paintings and atmospheric forest scenes.

Artist

Luke Hasegawa

Painting Catholic murals for the Church of the Holy Japanese Martyrs in Civitavecchia.

Artist

Cinga Samson

Figurative oil paintings with dark palettes and ceremonial poses.

Artist

Ayanda Mabulu

Political paintings challenging power and inequality.

Painter

Tosa Mitsunobu

Establishing the Tosa school of Japanese painting.