Art · Curated list
Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and 37 more, ranked by how much of the world has written about each one.
Most written-about first. Each description summarises the artist's Wikipedia article, which its name links to.
1
Italian polymath (1452–1519)
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance: painter, draughtsman, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist and theorist. First famous for his painting, he is also known today for his notebooks, full of drawings and notes on many subjects, among them palaeontology, painting, cartography, botany, astronomy and anatomy.
Wikidata · Photo: Attributed to Francesco Melzi, Public domain
2
Dutch painter (1853–1890)
Vincent Willem van Gogh, a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, one of the most famous and influential figures of Western art. In little more than ten years he made about 2,100 works, some 860 of them oil paintings, most of these in his last two years.
Wikidata · Photo: Vincent van Gogh, CC BY-SA 4.0
3
Spanish painter and sculptor (1881–1973)
Pablo Ruiz Picasso, a Spanish sculptor and painter who lived in France for most of his adult years. One of the 20th century's most influential artists, he is known for co-founding Cubism, for inventing constructed sculpture and co-inventing collage, and for the great range of styles he helped develop and explore.
Wikidata · Photo: Argentina . Revista Vea y Lea, Public domain
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4
Italian artist and architect (1475–1564)
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, known simply as Michelangelo: an Italian poet, architect, painter and sculptor of the High Renaissance. Born in the Republic of Florence, he worked mostly in Rome from his 30s on.
Wikidata · Photo: Attributed to Daniele da Volterra, Public domain
5
Spanish surrealist artist (1904–1989)
The Spanish surrealist Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, Marquess of Dalí de Púbol, usually called Salvador Dalí, admired for his technique, the precision of his drawing, and the strange, striking pictures he made.
Wikidata · Photo: Van Vechten, Carl, 1880-1964., Public domain
6
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7
Mexican painter (1907–1954)
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón, a Mexican painter known for her many portraits and self-portraits and for works drawing on Mexico's nature and artefacts. Inspired by her country's popular culture, she used a naïve folk-art style to explore race, class, gender, postcolonialism and identity in Mexican society.
Wikidata · Photo: Guillermo Kahlo, Public domain
8
Italian painter and architect (1483–1520)
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, usually called Raphael in English, an Italian architect and painter of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clear forms, its easy composition, and the way it gives visual form to the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur.
9
German artist and theorist (1471–1528)
A German painter, printmaker and theorist of the German Renaissance, sometimes spelled Durer or Duerer in English. Born in Nuremberg, he won a Europe-wide reputation and influence in his twenties through the quality of his woodcut prints.
Wikidata · Photo: Albrecht Dürer, Public domain
10
Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, a Spanish printmaker and romantic painter. No Spanish artist of his time, the end of the 18th century and start of the 19th, is thought more important.
Wikidata · Photo: Vicente López Portaña, Public domain
11
French artist (1869–1954)
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse, a French visual artist known for his colour and for his fluid, original drawing. He was a sculptor, printmaker and draughtsman as well, but is known above all as a painter.
Wikidata · Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain
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12
American artist and filmmaker (1928–1987)
An American filmmaker and artist, widely seen as the most important artist of the later 20th century. His work ranged across various media: painting, film, photography, publishing and performance art.
Wikidata · Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, Public domain
13
Japanese artist (1760–1849)
Katsushika Hokusai, a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period who worked as a printmaker and painter. His series of woodblock prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji contains the iconic The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Wikidata · Photo: missing name, CC0
14
Flemish artist and diplomat (1577–1640)
Sir Peter Paul Rubens, a Flemish diplomat and artist, regarded as the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque.
Wikidata · Photo: Peter Paul Rubens, Public domain
15
Spanish painter (1599–1660)
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, a Spanish Baroque painter, the leading artist of the Spanish Golden Age and of the court of Philip IV, King of Spain and Portugal. He is generally counted among the greatest artists Western art has known.
Wikidata · Photo: Diego Velázquez, Public domain
16
English poet and artist (1757–1827)
An English printmaker, painter and poet. Little recognised while he lived, he has become a seminal figure in the visual art and poetry of the Romantic Age.
Wikidata · Photo: Thomas Phillips, Public domain
17
French painter (1840–1926)
Oscar-Claude Monet, a French painter who founded Impressionism and is seen as a key forerunner of modernism, above all in trying to paint nature as he saw it. Over a long career he practised Impressionism's aim of expressing one's own perceptions of nature more consistently and prolifically than anyone, especially in landscapes painted outdoors (plein air).
18
French painter (1839–1906)
A French Post-Impressionist painter whose new ways of representing influenced the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century and bridged the Impressionism of the late 19th century and the Cubism of the early 20th.
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown; Cézanne was born in 1839 and died in 1906, Public domain
19
French painter (1780–1867)
A French Neoclassical painter, deeply influenced by the artistic traditions of the past, who sought to defend academic orthodoxy against the rising Romantic style.
Wikidata · Photo: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Public domain
20
French artist (1848–1903)
Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin, a French painter and sculptor who also worked as a writer, a ceramist and a printmaker, and whose art is associated chiefly with Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. He was also an influential artist in woodcut and wood engraving.
Wikidata · Photo: Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel, Public domain
21
French sculptor (1840–1917)
François Auguste René Rodin, a French sculptor widely regarded as the founder of modern sculpture. Trained in the traditional way, he approached his work like a craftsman.
22
French painter (1798–1863)
Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix, a French Romantic artist regarded as the leader of the Romantic school in France.
Wikidata · Photo: Eugène Delacroix, Public domain
23
Norwegian painter (1863–1944)
A Norwegian painter whose The Scream, from 1893, is now among the most admired and iconic images anywhere in Western art.
Wikidata · Photo: Anders Beer Wilse, Public domain
24
American painter (1912–1956)
Paul Jackson Pollock, an American painter and a major figure of abstract expressionism. He was known for his "drip technique": laying the canvas flat and pouring or flicking ordinary liquid house paint onto it, so that he could see and paint it from every side.
Wikidata · Photo: Hans Namuth, Public domain
25
Dutch painter (1632–1675)
A Dutch painter who specialised in scenes of middle-class life indoors at home, and who is regarded as one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age.
Wikidata · Photo: Johannes Vermeer, Public domain
26
Greek painter of the Spanish Renaissance (1541–1614)
Doménikos Theotokópoulos, best known as El Greco: a painter, architect and sculptor, Greek by birth, of the Spanish Renaissance, ranked among the finest artists of any age. El Greco was a nickname; on his paintings he usually wrote out, in Greek script, the full name he was born with, often followed by Κρής, Ancient Greek for "Cretan".
27
Italian painter (1571–1610)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known simply as Caravaggio, an Italian painter who worked in Rome for much of his career. He began his apprenticeship in Milan in 1584, and in his last four years moved between Sicily, Malta and Naples.
Wikidata · Photo: Ottavio Leoni, Public domain
28
French painter and sculptor (1841–1919)
A leading French Impressionist. For the way he painted feminine beauty he has been called "the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."
Wikidata · Photo: Unknown Unknown Musée d'Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt, Public domain
29
Italian Renaissance painter (1445–1510)
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli or just Botticelli, an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. His reputation after death declined until the late 19th century, when the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him and prompted a fresh look at his work.
Wikidata · Photo: Sandro Botticelli, Public domain
30
French Impressionist artist (1834–1917)
A French Impressionist artist famous for his oil paintings and his drawings in pastel.
Wikidata · Photo: Edgar Degas, Public domain
31
French painter (1832–1883)
A French modernist painter, among the first artists of the 19th century to paint modern life, and a key figure in the shift from Realism to Impressionism.
Wikidata · Photo: Nadar / Adam Cuerden, Public domain
32
33
Italian Renaissance sculptor (c. 1386–1466)
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi, called simply Donatello, a Florentine sculptor of the Renaissance, who studied the sculpture of antiquity and drew on it to create an Early Renaissance style.
Wikidata · Photo: Original uploader was Frieda ( dillo a Ubi ) at it.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
34
Austrian symbolist painter (1862–1918)
An Austrian symbolist painter who helped found the Vienna Secession, and whose work helped to define Art Nouveau in Europe.
Wikidata · Photo: Josef Anton Trčka, Public domain
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35
Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist (1893–1983)
Joan Miró i Ferrà, a Catalan ceramicist, sculptor and painter from Spain.
Wikidata · Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain
36
Russian and French artist (1887–1985)
A Russian and French artist of Jewish descent. An early modernist linked with the École de Paris and with several major styles, he worked in many formats: painting, drawing, book illustration, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestry and fine art prints.
Wikidata · Photo: Pierre Choumoff, Public domain
37
Russian painter and art theorist (1866–1944)
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky, a Russian painter and theorist of art who worked in Germany in the late Belle Époque and between the wars. He is usually credited as one of the first to take Western art into abstraction.
38
Italian painter and architect (c. 1267–1337)
Giotto di Bondone, known simply as Giotto, an Italian architect and painter from Florence in the Late Middle Ages, who worked in the Gothic and Proto-Renaissance period.
Wikidata · Photo: Original uploader was Frieda at it.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0
39
Japanese artist and activist (born 1933)
A retired Japanese artist, musician and peace activist, whose work also includes film-making and performance art.
Wikidata · Photo: Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México, CC BY-SA 2.0
40
American inventor and painter (1791–1872)
Samuel Finley Breese Morse, an American painter and inventor. Having made his name as a portrait painter, in middle age he helped invent a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs.
Wikidata · Photo: Mathew Benjamin Brady, Public domain
Every Wikidata item that is a person whose occupation is painter or sculptor, and whose one-line description on Wikidata names painting, sculpture or art first — so that the poets and writers who also painted are left to their own lists, and that has its own English Wikipedia article, ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about it — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought it worth describing, and nobody can buy a place on it. The top 40 are shown.
Wikidata files these under this list's query, but they are not what the list is about:
These belong on the list but Wikidata does not file them where the query looks:
Fetched from Wikidata on 2026-09-25. Each description is this site's summary of the entry's Wikipedia article, which its name links to: the wording is ours, the facts are Wikipedia's, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. To correct an entry, correct it there; the next refresh carries the change.
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