The Saddest Paintings in Art History
The saddest paintings in art history were mostly painted from real loss. Millais froze a model half to death for Ophelia. Monet painted his wife on her deathbed. Schiele painted a family he never got to have. Here are the twelve that hit hardest.
Five things before you scroll
The list runs from 1435 to 1918, from a Flemish altarpiece to the Spanish flu.
Two painters on this list buried the person in the picture within months of painting them.
One canvas was attacked twice by visitors who could not stand what it shows.
The model for Ophelia nearly paid for the pose with her health, and her father sent the doctor’s bill.
One painting hides a confession its painter only admitted decades later.
1 | Ophelia, John Everett Millais (1852)
Elizabeth Siddal posed for Ophelia in a bathtub through the winter of 1851 to 1852, kept warm by oil lamps under the tub. During one session the lamps went out. Millais, lost in his work, never noticed. Siddal said nothing and lay in the freezing water.
She caught a severe cold, and her father threatened legal action until Millais paid the doctor’s bills. The painting now hangs at Tate Britain.
Shakespeare kills Ophelia offstage. Millais painted the moment no audience was ever meant to see, and that is exactly why you cannot look away.
2 | Chatterton, Henry Wallis (1856)
Thomas Chatterton, a teenage poet who forged medieval verse, died of arsenic poisoning in a London attic in August 1770. He was seventeen. Wallis painted the scene 86 years later and made him a martyr of unrecognized genius.
The myth needs correcting, and I think the painting built it: several modern scholars argue Chatterton was medicating himself and died of an accidental overdose, no farewell intended. The canvas is at Tate Britain.
The model was the young writer George Meredith. Two years later, Wallis ran off with Meredith’s wife. The man who posed as the dead poet lost his marriage to the painter.
3 | The Descent from the Cross, Rogier van der Weyden (about 1435)
Painted for the crossbowmen’s guild of Leuven, with tiny crossbows hidden in the corners of the panel. Mary collapses in a pose that mirrors her dead son’s body, grief made geometry.
Get close and look at the tears. Van der Weyden painted each one as a bead of glass with its own shadow. In 1435, that was the most advanced special effect in Europe. The panel is in the Prado in Madrid.
4 | The Death of Marat, Jacques Louis David (1793)
On 13 July 1793, Charlotte Corday stabbed Jean Paul Marat in his medicinal bath. David had visited his friend the evening before. Within months he delivered the murdered man as a secular saint, skin smoothed, wound discreet.
The letter in Marat’s hand is Corday’s own note asking to be received. David painted the killer’s words into the victim’s fingers. The painting is in Brussels, at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.
5 | Camille on Her Deathbed, Claude Monet (1879)
Camille Monet died on 5 September 1879. She was 32. Monet stood at her bed and painted her face disappearing under grey and violet light.
Decades later he confessed to Clemenceau that he had caught himself analyzing the colors of her dead face, the painter’s reflex overriding the husband’s grief. I tell the full story of that morning in why Monet painted his dying wife.
6 | The Sick Child, Edvard Munch (1886)
Munch’s sister Sophie died of tuberculosis at 15, when he was 13. He spent a year scraping and repainting this memory of her, and then repainted the whole picture six times across four decades.
He said everything he later made began in that room. I trace how that grief became The Scream More of it in Edvard Munch.
7 | Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan, Ilya Repin (1885)
In 1581 the tsar struck his son and heir in a rage. The blow killed him. Repin painted the second after: the father cradling the head, the eyes of a man who understands what he has just done.
A visitor slashed the canvas with a knife in 1913. In 2018 another smashed it with a metal pole in the Tretyakov Gallery. I unpack why Russia keeps trying to unsee this picture The full account is in Ilya Repin.
8 | The Family, Egon Schiele (1918)
Schiele painted a crouching man, a woman, a child: the family he was about to have. His wife Edith was six months pregnant when the Spanish flu took her on 28 October 1918.
Egon died three days later, at 28. The painting shows a family that never existed. It hangs in the Belvedere in Vienna, and I tell his whole short life I cover that in Egon Schiele.
9 | The First Mourning, William Adolphe Bouguereau (1888)
Adam and Eve discover the body of Abel: the first human beings to learn what death is. No halo, no angels, just two parents and a body.
Bouguereau knew the subject from the inside. By 1888 he had buried his wife and three of his children. The painting is in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires.
10 | Never Morning Wore to Evening, Walter Langley (1894)
A young fisherman’s widow cries on the harbour wall at Newlyn, an older woman’s hand on her shoulder. The sea, flat and calm behind them, gives nothing back.
The title comes from Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Langley painted the wait, the worst part of every loss at sea: no storm, no body, just a morning that wore to evening.
11 | At Eternity’s Gate, Vincent van Gogh (1890)
An old man in a chair, fists pressed into his eyes. Van Gogh painted it in the asylum at Saint Remy in May 1890, about ten weeks before his death, reviving a drawing he had made of a war veteran eight years earlier.
He gave the pose a title in English: Worn Out. I retrace his final weeks hour by hour in The Last Day of Vincent van Gogh.
12 | The Raft of the Medusa, Theodore Gericault (1819)
In 1816 the French frigate Medusa ran aground off Africa. Around 147 people were pushed onto a makeshift raft. Thirteen days later, 15 were alive.
Gericault interviewed survivors, built a scale model of the raft and studied remains from the morgue to get death right. The scandal the government tried to bury is in The Untold Story of the Raft of Horror.
The museums that hold them
Tate Britain in London has Ophelia and Chatterton a few rooms apart. The Prado has the Descent, the Louvre has the Raft, the Belvedere has The Family, and the Musee d’Orsay keeps Camille on her deathbed.
Repin’s Ivan is in the Tretyakov in Moscow, behind protective glass since the 2018 attack.
Two of these hang a few rooms apart at Tate Britain, and the Met holds a deep collection of mourning pictures online.
Sad paintings, answered quickly
What is the saddest painting ever made? There is no official ranking, but Ophelia, The Sick Child and Schiele’s The Family come up the most. My own pick is The Family, because the grief happened after the last brushstroke.
Is Picasso’s The Old Guitarist one of the saddest? Often cited, yes. Picasso painted it in 1903 and 1904, during the Blue Period that followed the suicide of his friend Carlos Casagemas.
Why did Monet paint his dead wife? He said he caught himself studying the colors of her face. The painter’s eye kept working while the husband was breaking.
Which sad painting has been attacked? Repin’s Ivan the Terrible, twice: a knife in 1913 and a metal pole in 2018, both in the Tretyakov Gallery.
Where is The Descent from the Cross today? Tate Britain, the Prado, the Louvre, the Belvedere, the Musee d’Orsay and the Tretyakov hold most of the twelve.
One last fact. When Schiele died on 31 October 1918, The Family was still in his studio, unfinished. The child at the bottom of the canvas was painted from imagination, because the child was never born.