Do You Recognize These Famous Works of Art?

“The Weeping Woman” is considered to be a continuation of Pablo Picasso’s famed piece “Guernica.” It comes from a series of paintings, drawings, and prints the artist made in protest of the Spanish Civil War. The model for this painting was Dora Maar, a professional photographer Picasso met in 1936. Maar was the only person allowed to photograph Picasso during his creation of “Guernica.”

Widely considered to be Renaissance artist Raphael’s greatest work of art, “The School of Athens” was painted on the wall of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. Raphael completed the fresco between 1508 and 1511, around the same time that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel. It depicts some of the most prominent ancient philosophers in history, including Plato, at the center with his finger pointed, and Aristotle, walking alongside him.

Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is known for her bold self-portraits. This one, “The Two Fridas,” was painted in 1939 after her divorce from painter Diego Rivera. It signified Kahlo’s two personalities: one broken-hearted and the other independent and strong. The artist later explained that the scene represented her sadness and loneliness after her divorce.

One of the most famous paintings in history, Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” depicts the moon and Venus illuminating the sky over Saint-Rémy in southern France. Van Gogh painted this masterpiece in mid-June 1889, using the view from his window at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole psychiatric institution as his inspiration. Today, the painting can be found in New York City’s Museum of Modern Art.

Painted on a panel of walnut wood, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady With an Ermine” was created in the late 15th century. But it wasn’t until centuries later that French scientist Pascal Cotte discovered that da Vinci had painted over the work in three different stages. The first version had no ermine, the second had a small gray ermine, and in the third and final stage, da Vinci transformed the animal into the large white ermine we see today.

“The Thinker” (“Le Penseur” in French) was conceived in the late 19th century by artist Auguste Rodin, originally as part of a larger project depicting scenes and characters from Dante's "Inferno." Many versions of the sculpture have been cast since, but the most famous one sits in the gardens of the Rodin Museum in Paris, where it greets museum-goers with a pensive gaze.

This dramatic scene was painted by Emanuel Leutze in 1851. One of the most famous depictions of George Washington, it shows the United States' first President as an army general leading his troops across the Delaware River during the small but pivotal Battle of Trenton during the American Revolutionary War.

Italian artist Sandro Botticelli painted “The Birth of Venus” in 1485 for the home of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, a member of the wealthy Medici family of Florence. Like other artists at the time, Boticelli used mythological figures in his secular paintings to illustrate different aspects of love. “The Birth of Venus,” for example, shows the Roman goddess of love and beauty arriving to shore on the winds of Zephyr, the Greek god of west wind.

Painted by famed French impressionist Claude Monet, “Water Lilies” is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings inspired by the artist's garden at home in Giverny, beginning in 1899. This particular painting’s alternate name is “The Agapanthus Triptych,” because it's part of a set of three panels that were painted together. This panel is on display at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

“The Kiss” was painted between 1908 and 1909, during Austrian painter Gustav Klimt’s “Gold Period.” Seen in person, the artwork literally gleams — Klimt used gold leaf throughout the piece. It's also rumored that the painting could be a self-portrait of Klimt and his lover Emile Floge. The image is so popular in the artist’s home country that in 2016, it was selected to be minted onto an Austrian coin in his honor.

Created between 1501 and 1504, Michelangelo's David is a 17-foot-tall marble statue of the biblical hero, a popular muse during the High Renaissance in Italy. The statue was unveiled in the heart of Florence at the Piazza della Signoria, where it remained until 1873, when it was moved to the Galleria dell'Accademia.