The Hidden Stories Behind 6 of the World’s Most Famous Paintings

Here’s the part that surprises people: for most of her life, Leonardo’s little portrait was admired by art lovers but hardly a household name. What made her the most famous painting on Earth was a crime.

In 1911 a Louvre handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia simply walked out with her under his coat. For two years she was missing, her empty spot on the wall drawing bigger crowds than the painting ever had. By the time she was recovered, she was a worldwide celebrity.

That swirling night sky wasn’t painted on a peaceful evening under the stars. Vincent van Gogh painted it in 1889 from his room in an asylum in southern France, where he had checked himself in after a breakdown. The view is roughly what he could see from his window, plus a village he added from memory.

He sold almost nothing in his lifetime and died believing he was a failure. Today it’s one of the most beloved paintings in the world — a reminder that recognition sometimes arrives far too late.

Leonardo was an experimenter, and for The Last Supper he tried a new technique — painting onto dry plaster instead of wet. It let him work slowly and in fine detail, but it didn’t bond to the wall. The paint began flaking away within a few years of it being finished.

Over the centuries it’s been damaged, restored, and even had a doorway cut through the bottom of it. A wartime bomb destroyed much of the building around it in 1943, yet the wall survived behind sandbags. What we see today is a much-repaired ghost of the original — which makes its survival all the more moving.

The stern pair in front of the farmhouse are almost always assumed to be husband and wife. Grant Wood said they were a father and his unmarried daughter — a farmer and the woman who keeps his house.

The models weren’t a farm couple at all. The woman was Wood’s own sister, Nan, and the man was his dentist, a Dr. McKeeby. People read the painting as everything from a tribute to plain-spoken values to a gentle joke, and Wood rather enjoyed keeping them guessing.

She’s often called “the Dutch Mona Lisa,” but she probably isn’t a portrait of anyone in particular. In Vermeer’s day this kind of picture was called a tronie — a study of a face and an exotic costume, not a specific person sitting for her likeness.

And that famous earring? Some experts doubt a pearl that large and perfect could have been real. It may be glass or polished tin, painted with a couple of quick, brilliant strokes of light. We don’t even know her name — only her look.

Edvard Munch made several versions of that howling figure. Hidden in one of them, in tiny pencil, is a line that reads: “Could only have been painted by a madman.” For years no one was sure who wrote it — the vandal or the artist. Recent study suggests it was Munch himself.

The paintings have been irresistible to thieves, too. Versions of The Scream were stolen in dramatic robberies in 1994 and again in 2004. Both times they were eventually recovered — the figure still screaming, no worse for its adventures.