Some paintings become so famous that they end up defining an artist’s entire legacy. As a result, hundreds of other works, often just as technically impressive or historically fascinating, remain largely overlooked. Looking beyond the masterpieces offers a different perspective, revealing unexpected subjects, experimental ideas, and lesser-known moments in the careers of some of history’s greatest painters.
Originally shared by Sheehan Quirke, better known as The Cultural Tutor, this collection highlights some of the remarkable paintings that deserve far more attention.
Scroll down to discover a different side of some of art history’s most celebrated names.
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#1 Smoking Skull By Vincent Van Gogh (1886)
At first glance, Smoking Skull seems surprisingly dark and humorous for an artist best known for vibrant landscapes and expressive sunflowers. Vincent van Gogh painted the work while studying anatomy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, where students were required to draw human skeletons. Rather than producing a conventional academic study, Van Gogh added a lit cigarette to the skull’s mouth, creating what many art historians see as a playful satire of rigid academic training, or perhaps an ironic comment on the fleeting nature of life. Although small in size, the painting has become one of Van Gogh’s most recognizable early works, offering a glimpse of the wit and unconventional thinking that would later define his artistic career. Today, it is part of the Van Gogh Museum collection in Amsterdam.
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#2 Starry Night By Edvard Munch (1922–1924)
Starry Night is one of Edvard Munch’s most poetic landscapes. Unlike Vincent van Gogh’s famous work of the same name, Munch’s painting captures a quiet winter night in Åsgårdstrand, a Norwegian coastal town that inspired many of his works. The deep blue sky, shimmering stars, and snow-covered landscape create a sense of stillness, reflecting Munch’s growing interest in nature as a source of contemplation later in life. While he is best known for emotionally charged works like The Scream, paintings such as Starry Night reveal a calmer, more lyrical side of his art, where atmosphere and memory take precedence over drama. Today, the painting is part of the Munch Museum collection in Oslo.
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#3 The Laughing Hannya By Hokusai (1830)
The Laughing Hannya showcases a lesser-known side of Katsushika Hokusai, the Japanese master best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa. The work depicts a Hannya, a horned female demon from Japanese Noh theatre, traditionally associated with jealousy, rage, and transformation, but with an unusually joyful expression. By portraying the fearsome figure laughing, Hokusai gave a fresh interpretation to one of Japanese folklore’s most recognizable masks, demonstrating both his wit and his fascination with mythological subjects. Although landscapes made him world-famous, Hokusai produced thousands of works over his career, ranging from ghost stories and legendary creatures to scenes from everyday life, revealing an extraordinary artistic range beyond his iconic prints.
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#4 Rue De La Bavole, Honfleur By Claude Monet (1864)
Rue de la Bavole, Honfleur captures one of the streets of Honfleur, the Normandy port town where Claude Monetspent much of his youth and first developed his passion for painting. Created several years before Impressionism officially emerged, the work reveals Monet experimenting with natural light and atmospheric effects while still working within a more traditional style. Honfleur played a pivotal role in his artistic development, as it was there that landscape painter Eugène Boudin encouraged the young Monet to paint outdoors (en plein air), an approach that would later become a defining feature of Impressionism. Today, the painting offers a fascinating glimpse into the early years of one of history’s most influential artists, before he revolutionized modern painting with works such as Impression, Sunrise.
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#5 Deluge By Leonardo Da Vinci (1518)
Deluge is one of a series of dramatic late drawings in which Leonardo da Vinci imagined the destructive forces of nature at their most powerful. Rather than documenting a real event, Leonardo filled the composition with swirling floodwaters, violent storms, and collapsing landscapes, creating a scene that feels strikingly modern in its energy and abstraction. Produced near the end of his life, these drawings reflect his lifelong fascination with geology, hydrodynamics, and the movement of water, subjects he studied as intensely as painting and anatomy. Many scholars believe the series was intended as both a scientific exploration and a symbolic meditation on nature’s overwhelming power. Today, Leonardo’s Deluge drawings are preserved in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle.
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#6 My Dress Hangs There By Frida Kahlo (1933)
Painted in 1933, My Dress Hangs There is one of Frida Kahlo’s most overtly political works and the only major painting she completed during her stay in the United States. Rather than painting a self-portrait, Kahlo represented herself through her empty Tehuana dress, suspended between towering New York skyscrapers while she herself is conspicuously absent. Surrounding the dress is a chaotic collage of factories, churches, stock market symbols, sports stadiums, and overflowing machinery, a pointed critique of American industrialization, consumerism, capitalism, and social inequality. Created while her husband Diego Rivera was working on commissions in New York, the painting reflects Kahlo’s profound sense of alienation and dissatisfaction with American society. Today, it is housed in the Museo Dolores Olmedo in Mexico City and is regarded as one of her most important social and political statements.
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#7 The Temptation Of Saint Anthony By Michelangelo (1488)
The Temptation of Saint Anthony is widely considered the earliest known surviving painting by Michelangelo, created when he was only about 12 or 13 years old. The work was inspired by an engraving by the German artist Martin Schongauer, but Michelangelo went far beyond simply copying it, adding more fantastical demons and giving them richer textures and lifelike expressions. According to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, the young artist even studied real fish at the market to accurately depict the scales, fins, and other details of the monstrous creatures tormenting the saint. The painting offers a remarkable glimpse of Michelangelo’s extraordinary talent long before he created masterpieces such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling and David. Today, it is housed at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
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#8 Corpus Hypercubus By Salvador Dalí (1954)
Painted in 1954 (not the 1952 often cited in early references), Corpus Hypercubus is one of Salvador Dalí’s most intellectually ambitious works. It depicts the crucifixion of Christ, but instead of a traditional wooden cross, Jesus is suspended from the unfolded form of a tesseract, or four-dimensional hypercube, a geometric shape that cannot exist in ordinary three-dimensional space. Fascinated by mathematics, physics, and mysticism during the 1950s, Dalí combined religious symbolism with modern science in what he called his “nuclear mysticism” period. The painting also features his wife and lifelong muse, Gala, portrayed as a serene witness at the foot of the cross. Today, Corpus Hypercubus is housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and is widely regarded as one of Dalí’s most innovative explorations of the intersection between faith, geometry, and surrealism.
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#9 Sunrise With Sea Monsters By Jmw Turner (1845)
Painted around 1845, Sunrise With Sea Monsters is one of J. M. W. Turner’s most mysterious and imaginative works. Unlike his better-known landscapes and seascapes, this unfinished watercolor drifts into the realm of fantasy, depicting strange, serpentine creatures emerging from the sea beneath a glowing sunrise. Art historians have long debated what Turner intended the monsters to represent, some interpret them as whales or sea serpents, while others see them as symbolic embodiments of nature’s untamed power. The painting reflects Turner’s lifelong fascination with light, atmosphere, and the sublime, where emotion often took precedence over realism. Left unfinished at the time of his death in 1851, the work offers a rare glimpse into the artist’s creative process, with loose brushstrokes and open areas revealing how one of Britain’s greatest painters developed his ideas on paper. Today, it is part of the Tate Britain collection in London.
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#10 Inferno By Sandro Botticelli (1490s)
Created in the 1490s, Inferno is one of Sandro Botticelli’s most extraordinary, and least familiar, works. Rather than a traditional painting, it is an intricate illustration inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, depicting Hell as a vast, funnel-shaped abyss divided into nine descending circles, each reserved for different sins. Botticelli spent years illustrating Dante’s epic poem, producing nearly 100 drawings, but the ambitious project was never completed. Infernostands out for its astonishing level of detail, with hundreds of tiny figures portraying the punishments described in Dante’s text. Today, it is regarded as one of the finest visual interpretations of The Divine Comedy and is housed at the Vatican Apostolic Library.
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#11 Pear Tree By Gustav Klimt (1903)
Pear Tree belongs to Gustav Klimt’s early landscape period, a body of work that contrasts sharply with the gilded portraits for which he is best known. Rather than focusing on symbolism or the human figure, Klimt devoted increasing attention to nature, depicting orchards, forests, and gardens with remarkable precision. In Pear Tree, the dense foliage is built from hundreds of small, mosaic-like brushstrokes that flatten the perspective, creating a richly decorative surface reminiscent of a tapestry. Klimt often painted these landscapes during his summer holidays in the Austrian countryside, describing them as a welcome escape from the demands of portrait commissions. Today, the painting is part of the Belvedere Museum collection in Vienna.
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#12 First Communion By Pablo Picasso (1896)
First Communion is Pablo Picasso’s first large-scale oil painting and one of the earliest works to demonstrate his extraordinary talent. Created when he was just 14 years old, the painting depicts his sister Lola kneeling in prayer during her First Communion, while their parents served as models for the other figures. Executed in a polished academic style, it bears little resemblance to the bold Cubist experiments that would later make Picasso famous. The work received considerable praise when it was exhibited in Barcelona in 1896, helping establish the teenage artist’s reputation. Today, it remains one of Picasso’s most important early paintings and is housed at the Museu Picasso in Barcelona.
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#13 The Last Judgment By Hieronymus Bosch (1482)
Painted around 1482–1505 (the exact date remains uncertain), The Last Judgment is one of Hieronymus Bosch’s most astonishing visions of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Unlike traditional depictions of the biblical Last Judgment, Bosch filled his panels with bizarre hybrid creatures, grotesque demons, surreal architecture, and elaborate scenes of punishment that continue to fascinate, and puzzle, viewers more than five centuries later. His extraordinary imagination has led many to describe him as one of history’s earliest surrealists, although his imagery was deeply rooted in the religious beliefs and moral symbolism of the late Middle Ages. Every section of the painting is packed with tiny details and hidden narratives, rewarding close inspection. Today, the best-known version of The Last Judgment is housed at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
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#14 Midnight Ride Of Paul Revere By Grant Wood (1931)
Unlike many depictions of Paul Revere’s legendary ride, Grant Wood wasn’t interested in historical accuracy. Instead, he created a highly stylized, almost storybook version of colonial America inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’sfamous 1863 poem Paul Revere’s Ride, which helped turn Revere into a national hero. The painting’s elevated, bird’s-eye perspective makes the town resemble a handcrafted miniature model, while the sharply lit church steeple, glowing windows, and winding roads create a dreamlike atmosphere. Revere himself appears as a tiny, fast-moving figure on horseback, emphasizing both the urgency of his mission and the scale of the sleeping town around him. Today, the painting is housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and is considered one of Grant Wood’s most inventive works outside his iconic American Gothic.
Image source: The Cultural Tutor
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