24 Famous Artworks in Paris and Where to See Them

01 /24

Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci · 1503–1519

Her 1911 theft kept the portrait missing for more than two years and helped turn a famous painting into a worldwide obsession.

The portrait’s most dramatic episode happened when there was nothing to see. In 1911, a former Louvre worker stole the Mona Lisa; she remained missing for more than two years. The theft and recovery helped turn an already famous painting into a worldwide obsession. In front of the original, the quieter achievement takes over: folded hands, a smile whose edges almost disappear, and a watery landscape receding behind the sitter. Leonardo began the portrait of Lisa Gherardini in Florence and returned to it over many years. That slow attention is worth answering with a little of your own.

02 /24

The Wedding Feast at Cana

Paolo Veronese · 1562–1563

The Louvre’s largest painting was made for a Venetian monastery’s dining room. Its biblical banquet contains around 130 figures.

The Mona Lisa has an extraordinary neighbour. Veronese’s vast wedding banquet was made for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, where a biblical miracle became a feast of sumptuous fabrics, musicians and guests. Napoleon’s forces seized the canvas and brought it to Paris. After the Empire fell, concern about transporting such a large painting helped keep it in France in exchange for another work. Its presence here carries that history of conquest and negotiation. Give the crowded scene time to separate into individual encounters; the painting rewards far more than a glance over your shoulder.

03 /24

The Lacemaker

Johannes Vermeer · 1669–1670

It is only about 24 by 21 centimetres. The loose foreground threads dissolve into blur while the woman’s work stays sharply focused.

From Veronese’s enormous banquet, change scale completely. Vermeer’s lacemaker is a young woman absorbed in something so small that we can barely follow her work. The red and white threads nearest us dissolve into soft, almost shapeless colour, while the area around her hands feels precise. Even the light is unusual for Vermeer, arriving from the right. The Louvre interprets her as a well-to-do woman practising a domestic accomplishment rather than a professional earning her living. In a museum full of rulers, battles and gods, this little painting gives concentrated, private activity an astonishing presence.

04 /24

The Seated Scribe

Unknown Egyptian sculptor · Old Kingdom, 4th Dynasty

His startling eyes are inlaid with stone and rock crystal, edged with copper. The watchful expression has survived more than four millennia.

The eyes tend to find you first. Egyptian alabaster, rock crystal and copper give the Seated Scribe a gaze of extraordinary clarity; the papyrus across his lap and his attentive posture make him seem ready to take down the next word. Discovered at Saqqara in 1850, he is a useful corrective to the pale, colourless version of antiquity many museum rooms have taught us to expect. His painted surface still matters as much as his sculpted form. After the Louvre’s grand public images, this small figure can feel unusually direct: someone working, listening and waiting.

05 /24

Winged Victory of Samothrace

Unknown Greek sculptor · Early 2nd century BCE

The marble base is the prow of a warship. She was designed to be seen from her left, where the wind seems to catch her clothes.

Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, lands on the prow of a ship with the wind still pressing through her clothes. The contrast is the wonder: fabric clings to her body in one place and billows away in another, making invisible air feel almost solid. The monument originally stood in a sanctuary on Samothrace associated with protection at sea. Its scattered fragments drew little attention when they first reached Paris; the reconstruction of the wings and boat changed that. A small shift towards the statue’s left helps the flying drapery make sense as a moving body rather than a familiar silhouette.

06 /24

Venus de Milo

Unknown Greek sculptor · 2nd century BCE

Her missing arms also mean missing clues: the objects she once held could have settled exactly which goddess she represents.

Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre in 1821, a year after her discovery on the Greek island of Milos. Her missing arms have become so familiar that it is easy to stop seeing the rest of the figure. The torso turns away from the hips; heavy drapery hangs low, giving the marble an impression of momentary balance. Even the name is less settled than it sounds. The usual identification is Aphrodite, the goddess the Romans called Venus, although the Louvre also considers a connection with the sea goddess Amphitrite. The uncertainty leaves room for looking rather than solving.

07 /24

Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss

Antonio Canova · 1787–1793

Psyche’s raised arms make a delicate frame around the two faces. Walk around it and the embrace changes from every angle.

Canova’s lovers meet in the narrow space between waking and an embrace. Psyche has opened a forbidden vessel and fallen into a deathlike sleep; Cupid has come to revive her. The myth’s complications are concentrated into two faces approaching and two arms rising around them. Wings, legs and hands cross in a composition that changes as you move around it. Beside the Louvre’s damaged ancient marbles, the polished surface can initially seem almost too complete. Then the apparent weight of the stone gives way to the delicacy of the moment: a body being supported, a head being lifted, a kiss about to happen.

08 /24

La Grande Odalisque

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1814

Her impossibly long back is part of the design. Ingres stretched the body to serve the flowing line rather than anatomical accuracy.

The elongated back is the point. Ingres stretches the figure into a long, uninterrupted curve that leads to the turned head and its cool glance. Anatomical plausibility gives way to the shape he wants the painting to make. Commissioned by Caroline Murat, Napoleon’s sister and queen of Naples, the work surrounds its reclining woman with a fan, rich fabrics and an imagined Ottoman setting. These belong to a European fantasy of the harem. Keeping that fantasy in view makes the picture more revealing: its luxurious strangeness comes from decisions made in the artist’s imagination, not from a transparent record of another culture.

09 /24

The Coronation of Napoleon

Jacques-Louis David · 1805–1807

The coronation happened in 1804, but David worked on this vast, carefully staged record for nearly two years afterwards.

Napoleon commissioned a picture of power and David delivered it on an almost ten-metre scale. The emperor raises a crown over the kneeling Joséphine, with Notre-Dame transformed into a stage for the ceremony. David and his assistants painted the work in a former chapel near the Sorbonne, assembling a spectacle of satin, ermine and carefully studied faces. The central gesture is only part of its effect. The surrounding people, fabrics and architecture make authority seem tangible and overwhelming. Keep this image of public ceremony in mind for the very different uses of monumental painting that follow in Géricault and Delacroix.

10 /24

The Raft of the Medusa

Théodore Géricault · 1818–1819

These monumental figures are the survivors of a recent shipwreck, painted on the grand scale usually reserved for ancient heroes.

A ship is visible on the horizon, so small that you might miss it. Everything depends on whether it will see the people on the raft. Géricault took the aftermath of a real 1816 shipwreck, already a political scandal, and gave its abandoned survivors the scale usually reserved for public heroes. The canvas rises from lifeless bodies and exhaustion towards the figures waving for rescue. Its enormous size does not make the people seem safe or powerful; it makes their predicament harder to put at a distance. Beside the Louvre’s images of rulers and triumphs, the choice of subject remains startling.

11 /24

Liberty Leading the People

Eugène Delacroix · 1830

This is the Paris uprising of July 1830. Look for the flag’s red, white and blue repeated in the clothes below it.

This is the July Revolution of 1830, not the uprising of 1789. Delacroix puts Liberty herself on a barricade among recognisable Parisians, turning recent street fighting against Charles X into an image with a much longer public life. The tricolour does more than identify a cause: its blue, white and red reappear through the crowd, holding together the smoke, movement and disorder. Beneath the raised flag lie bodies and rubble. Coming after David’s imperial ceremony and Géricault’s abandoned survivors, the painting offers another answer to the question of who deserves the grand scale of history painting.

12 /24

The Gleaners

Jean-François Millet · 1857

The three women repeat the stages of one exhausting movement: bend down, gather a fallen ear of grain, straighten up.

The harvest is abundant in the distance. In the foreground, three women bend for what remains. Gleaning allowed people to gather crops left behind by the harvesters, and Millet makes that small, repeated movement the structure of his painting. A mounted figure farther back suggests the landowner’s supervision. The evening light is warm, the arrangement measured, but the difference between plenty and scraps keeps the scene from settling into a simple rural idyll. It is a useful beginning at Orsay: everyday work will become a major subject here, even when the people doing it once seemed an unlikely choice for ambitious art.

13 /24

The Floor Scrapers

Gustave Caillebotte · 1875

The Salon rejected these city workers in 1875. Caillebotte showed them with the Impressionists the following year.

Caillebotte brings us indoors, down to the level of bent backs, tools and curls of wood. Light slides across the floorboards, whose strong perspective makes the room seem to continue into the gallery. The workers’ effort is as carefully constructed as the space around them. The official Salon rejected the picture in 1875; Caillebotte showed it at the second Impressionist exhibition the following year. Urban manual labour was still an unusual subject for a painting with these ambitions. Set it beside Millet’s gleaners in your mind: different settings, equally sustained attention to people whose work often passed unnoticed.

14 /24

Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe

Édouard Manet · 1863

The central group borrows a pose from a Renaissance engraving, yet the Salon jury rejected the painting as a provocation in 1863.

The setting looks casual, but Manet’s references are learned. The central group borrows its arrangement from an engraving after Raphael, while the subject recalls a painting by Titian. The disturbance comes from carrying that old-master language into modern life: a nude woman sits beside clothed men, with no mythological explanation to make the encounter comfortable. Rejected by the official Salon in 1863, the painting became a major attraction at the Salon des Refusés. Knowing the quotations changes the story. Manet understood the conventions he was disturbing, which makes the bluntness of the modern scene feel all the more deliberate.

15 /24

Olympia

Édouard Manet · 1863

Manet borrowed the reclining pose of an old-master Venus, then gave his modern subject a direct gaze that unsettled the Salon audience.

Two years after Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe appeared at the Salon des Refusés, Olympia caused a scandal at the official Salon. Once again Manet adapted a prestigious tradition, the reclining nude, to a woman who seemed unmistakably contemporary. Her direct gaze and the abrupt contrasts of paint refuse to let the viewer drift into an idealised scene. The painting’s later history is a striking measure of how reputations change: Claude Monet organised the public subscription that brought it into the French national collection in 1890. The work that had provoked outrage was being secured for the nation by a fellow artist.

16 /24

The Dance Class

Edgar Degas · 1873–1876

Look beyond the poised dancer: the other pupils stretch, scratch and adjust their clothes as the lesson winds down.

Ballet here is made of waiting, adjusting and repeating. Degas catches dancers stretching, fidgeting and attending to their costumes around the ballet master Jules Perrot and his staff. The room belongs to the old Opéra on the rue Le Peletier, rather than today’s Palais Garnier. A small watering can supplies a particularly good backstage detail: the boards were dampened to make them less slippery. Follow those boards into the room and the apparently casual gathering begins to reveal its careful construction. After the labour of Caillebotte’s floor scrapers, even the dance studio looks like a workplace.

17 /24

The Cradle

Berthe Morisot · 1872

The mother is Morisot’s sister Edma, watching her daughter Blanche. Their bent arms quietly echo each other across the veil.

Edma, Morisot’s sister, watches her baby daughter Blanche through the soft net curtain of a cradle. The mother’s bent arm echoes the child’s, linking the two without a grand gesture. Morisot showed this private scene at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, but it found no buyer. It stayed in the family until the Louvre purchased it in 1930. That long delay is worth remembering in front of a painting that now seems so assured a part of the Impressionist story. Its attention is intimate and exact, built around a relation between two people rather than a display of public life.

18 /24

Bal du moulin de la Galette

Pierre-Auguste Renoir · 1876

The scattered patches of sunlight stitch this Montmartre dance together, catching faces, shoulders and hats in the same moving light.

Renoir’s Montmartre dance is organised by light as much as by people. Patches of brightness pass across faces, clothes and the crowded ground, making a large gathering feel continuously in motion. Friends appear among the drinkers and dancers, but no single encounter controls the whole painting. It was shown at the Impressionist exhibition of 1877 and later entered the national collection through Caillebotte’s bequest. After the rehearsals and private rooms elsewhere at Orsay, this is an expansive picture of sociability. Follow one pair into the crowd and another emerges, holding the scene together without stopping the dance.

On loan to the National Gallery in London for Renoir and Love, 3 October 2026–31 January 2027.

19 /24

Starry Night over the Rhône

Vincent van Gogh · 1888

The long orange reflections come from gas lamps along the river. Two tiny lovers bring the immense night sky back to human scale.

For a quieter ending at Orsay, come down from the stars to the couple beside the river. They are easy to overlook, yet they make Van Gogh’s night feel inhabited and close. Painted in Arles in September 1888, the scene sets varied blues against the orange reflections of riverside gas lamps. Van Gogh had spent months considering how to paint the night; here, darkness becomes a field of colour rather than the absence of it. This is Starry Night over the Rhône, distinct from the later swirling sky at MoMA. Its drama lies in the meeting of water, artificial light and two small human figures.

20 /24

Water Lilies

Claude Monet · 1916–1926

Monet offered the cycle to France just after the 1918 Armistice. Eight compositions wrap around two rooms shaped for them.

After the individual frames at the Louvre and Orsay, Monet’s Water Lilies ask for a different kind of attention. Eight vast compositions extend around curved walls, surrounding you with water, clouds, reflections and willows. There is no single horizon to settle the view. Monet offered the project to France after the Armistice in November 1918; the rooms opened in 1927, a few months after his death. The architecture is part of the work’s effect, letting the eye travel from one passage of paint into another. Take a seat if you can. This is one of the few entries here that is best approached without immediately trying to take it all in.

21 /24

Impression, Sunrise

Claude Monet · 1872

This small harbour scene gave Impressionism its name. The orange sun is the startlingly simple centre of a whole artistic upheaval.

The painting that helped give Impressionism its name is modest in scale: a harbour, a few boats and an orange sun emerging through haze. Its title became attached to a movement after the first Impressionist exhibition, a large consequence for such a spare arrangement of marks. The picture entered the Marmottan in 1940, helping reshape the identity of the museum. Seen alongside the much later Water Lilies, it makes an especially rewarding comparison. The early harbour has recognisable boats and a horizon; the later rooms carry the investigation of light and water towards something that can surround the viewer entirely.

22 /24

The Lady and the Unicorn

Unknown designers and weavers · Around 1500

Five tapestries evoke the senses. The sixth, À mon seul désir, leaves the meaning of its lady and jewel box tantalisingly open.

Six tapestries open into a red world so crowded with flowers and animals that the main figures are only the beginning. A lady appears with a lion and a unicorn; five of the scenes are generally understood through the senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. The sixth remains more elusive. Its uncertainty is part of what keeps the series absorbing, alongside the extraordinary variety of small creatures scattered through the backgrounds. Cluny bought the tapestries in 1882 after their years at the château of Boussac. Once you have followed the central action, let your attention wander into the woven margins.

23 /24

The Thinker

Auguste Rodin · Conceived 1880; enlarged 1903; Paris bronze cast 1904

He began as Dante looking down over The Gates of Hell. The familiar freestanding giant grew from a figure only about 70 centimetres high.

Thought has weight in Rodin’s sculpture. The toes tense, the body folds and the muscles brace, making contemplation seem like an effort involving the whole figure. Rodin first conceived him for The Gates of Hell as Dante considering the world of his poem. Shown alone and later enlarged, he acquired a life far beyond that original setting. The bronze in the Paris garden was cast in 1904 and stood outside the Panthéon before moving to the Musée Rodin in 1922. Its familiar pose becomes more interesting when you follow the strain through the body rather than stopping at the head resting on a hand.

24 /24

The Kiss

Auguste Rodin · 1888–1898; conceived c. 1882

Two lovers turn towards one another in a marble embrace.

Rodin first conceived the lovers for The Gates of Hell, drawing on Paolo and Francesca from Dante. Their happiness and sensuality seemed out of place among the damned, and he made the group an independent work.

The French state commissioned this enlarged marble in 1888. Carved over the following decade, it turns a tragic story into a meeting of bodies: smooth skin, bent limbs and a rough base that still suggests the stone from which they emerged.

The museum notes that works may be away on loan.