The Saddest Paintings in Art History
The saddest paintings in art history are the ones where real grief is hiding in the paint. These are not just gloomy pictures. Behind most of them is an actual death, a lost love or a private despair the artist lived through.
Here are ten, and the true stories that make them ache.
Read them in order or jump around. Each one hurts for a different reason.
If this is your kind of art history
If you like knowing what is actually going on inside a picture, start with these three:
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The Last Supper, detail by detail, the detail hiding at that table
Six women, one monster, what Picasso did to the women who loved him
1. At Eternity's Gate, Vincent van Gogh, 1890
An old man sits by a fire, head buried in his fists. Van Gogh painted it in the asylum at Saint Remy, weeks before he shot himself.
It is grief painted by a man running out of time. His final days are told in the last day of Vincent van Gogh, and his whole life in the complete story of Van Gogh.
He copied the pose from a drawing he had made eight years earlier, a figure of despair he could never shake.
2. The Old Guitarist, Pablo Picasso, 1903
A blind, starving musician folds around his guitar, painted in cold blue. Picasso made it during his Blue Period, in deep poverty, soon after his close friend Carlos Casagemas shot himself over a broken love. The sadness in it is real and recent.
An X ray later found a hidden woman and child under the guitarist, an earlier picture he painted over to save canvas.
3. Camille on Her Deathbed, Claude Monet, 1879
Monet painted his wife Camille as she lay dying at 32. He later confessed he caught himself studying the shifting colors of her face, and was horrified at his own reflex.
Love and the painter's eye, fighting in the same room. See more in the complete story of Monet.
They married in 1870 against his father's wishes, and knew years of poverty before her death in 1879.
4. The Sick Child, Edvard Munch, 1885
A pale girl props up in bed beside a grieving woman. Munch's sister Sophie died of tuberculosis at 15, when he was 14. He returned to this scene again and again across his life, unable to leave it. It is a cornerstone of Expressionism.
He painted six versions across forty years, scraping and reworking the surface until it looked scarred.
5. Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851
Shakespeare's heroine floats, singing, as she drowns. To paint her, the model Elizabeth Siddal lay in a bath for hours. The lamps warming the water went out, she caught a serious chill, and her father sent Millais the doctor's bill.
His model, Elizabeth Siddal, posed in a bath warmed by lamps. During a winter sitting in 1852 the lamps went out, she caught a bad chill, and her father sent Millais the doctor's bill.
6. Death and the Maiden, Egon Schiele, 1915
A man and a woman cling together while something tears them apart. Schiele painted it as he left his lover Wally Neuzil to marry another woman. Within three years both Schiele and his new wife were dead of the flu.
Schiele painted it as he left his lover Wally Neuzil to marry another woman. The clinging figure is Wally, holding on as he pulls away. He married Edith Harms in 1915, and Wally, who had served as a war nurse, died of scarlet fever in 1917.
7. The Dog, Francisco Goya, around 1820
A tiny dog's head pokes above a vast slope of empty color, sinking or drowning, we cannot tell. Goya painted it straight onto the wall of his own house, deaf and alone. It may be the loneliest image ever made.
Goya painted it straight onto the wall of his own house outside Madrid, one of the Black Paintings he never meant anyone to see. It was cut from the plaster and moved to canvas fifty years later.
8. The Tragedy, Pablo Picasso, 1903
A barefoot family huddles on a cold shore, heads bowed, blue with hunger and sorrow. Another Blue Period work, it turns poverty itself into a quiet, frozen ache.
It is a Blue Period work from 1903. Picasso painted it on a reused wood panel, and X rays show earlier pictures underneath.
9. Hope, George Frederic Watts, 1886
A blindfolded woman sits on a globe and bends over a lyre with a single string left. The title says Hope, but it shows hope worn down to almost nothing. It belongs to the dreamy world of Symbolism.
Watts painted two versions of Hope in 1886. A sermon on this painting later gave Barack Obama the phrase the audacity of hope.
10. Sorrow, Vincent van Gogh, 1882
A naked, pregnant woman folds forward in despair. She was Sien Hoornik, a destitute model Van Gogh tried to save and was forced to leave. He wrote a single word beneath the drawing: Sorrow.
He drew it in The Hague in 1882 and called it the best figure he had ever done. Under one version he wrote, how can there be on earth a woman alone.
Where these paintings live
Several hang in Paris at the Musee d'Orsay, and Millais's Ophelia is at Tate in London.
If these paintings moved you, keep going:
Sad paintings, the questions readers send
What is the saddest painting ever made? There is no single answer, but Van Gogh's At Eternity's Gate and Goya's The Dog are common choices.
Why did Monet paint his dying wife? Grief and instinct mixed. He painted Camille as she died and was disturbed to find himself studying the colors.
Is The Old Guitarist based on real life? It came from Picasso's own poverty and the suicide of his friend Casagemas.
Where can I see these paintings? Mostly in major museums like the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and Tate in London.
The saddest paintings are rarely about sadness in general. They are about one real loss, held still so the rest of us can feel it too. That is why they still land, a century or more later.