The most famous yellow paintings run from a vase of sunflowers and a woman trying on a pearl necklace to a warship towed away to be broken up and a princess turned entirely to gold leaf.
Yellow was the color of both sunlight and sickness for most of art history, and these twelve pictures show painters pulling it in every direction at once.
Yellow pigment used to come from crushed minerals, arsenic, and lead, which is partly why it took so long for painters to trust it. I have picked twelve paintings where yellow carries the whole picture, from a Venetian banquet to a Wyoming canyon.
Why yellow is the most dangerous color in art history:
The poison. Two of the most reliable yellow pigments, Naples yellow and chrome yellow, contained lead and were toxic to handle.
The smell. A rare 19th century pigment called Indian yellow was long linked to cattle fed on mango leaves, though historians still debate how widespread that practice really was.
The symbol. Yellow has stood for both holiness and betrayal depending on the century, worn by saints and by outcasts in the same period of European painting.
The obsession. Van Gogh bought so much chrome yellow paint that some of his sunflowers have darkened as the pigment reacted with other colors over time.
1. Vincent van Gogh, Sunflowers (1888)
Van Gogh painted several versions of sunflowers in a vase to decorate the room where he expected Paul Gauguin to stay in Arles. He wanted an entire yellow room, and he told his brother Theo the flowers were his own idea, unlike almost anything else he painted.
He used a newly available pigment called chrome yellow because it was cheap and intensely bright, not realizing it would react chemically with other pigments over the following century. Conservators today can watch some Sunflowers versions slowly turning a duller, browner shade in real time.
2. Johannes Vermeer, Woman with a Pearl Necklace (about 1662 to 1665)
A young woman in a yellow fur trimmed jacket checks her reflection in a mirror we cannot see, tying a ribbon around her neck. Vermeer painted the same yellow jacket in at least three other pictures, which tells us it likely belonged to his own household.
The jacket turns up again in Vermeer's estate inventory, drawn up by his widow after his death in 1675, which lists a yellow satin garment among his possessions. It is one of the few props in his paintings historians can tie to a real, documented object.
3. J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Temeraire (1839)
Turner painted a decorated warship that had fought at Trafalgar being towed up the Thames by a small steam tug, on its way to being broken apart for scrap. He set the whole scene against a yellow and orange sunset.
Turner refused every offer to buy the picture during his lifetime and left it to the British nation instead. In a 2005 BBC poll it was voted the greatest painting in any British gallery.
4. Claude Monet, Wheatstacks, End of Summer (1891)
Monet painted the same two haystacks near his house in Giverny at different hours and seasons, chasing how the changing light rewrote their color from gold to pink to blue. This version catches them at their most purely yellow, late in the day.
He worked on several canvases at once, switching between them every twenty minutes or so as the light shifted, then reworked all of them later in his studio from memory.
5. Paul Gauguin, The Yellow Christ (1889)
Gauguin painted a wooden crucifix from a Breton chapel with the figure of Christ rendered entirely in yellow, set against a French countryside where local women pray beneath it in traditional dress.
Gauguin later called this his best work up to that point in his life, and painted himself standing beside the same crucifix in a self portrait the following year, as if measuring himself against it.
6. William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd (1851)
A shepherd flirts with a young woman in a golden wheat field while his sheep wander unsupervised into a patch that could sicken them. Hunt painted the wheat outdoors, strand by strand, over an entire summer near Ewell in Surrey.
Hunt intended the picture as a quiet warning about clergy who neglect their congregations, a message almost nobody who saw the glowing yellow field actually noticed at the time.
7. Gustav Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907)
Klimt covered Adele Bloch-Bauer almost entirely in gold and yellow leaf, patterned with eyes and spirals borrowed from Byzantine mosaics he had studied in Ravenna. Adele was the only model Klimt painted twice in finished portraits.
The Nazis seized the painting from the family in 1938. It took Adele's niece Maria Altmann years of legal battles after 2000 to win it back, a case that later inspired the film Woman in Gold.
8. Egon Schiele, Sunflowers (1911)
Schiele painted wilting yellow sunflowers on thin, bent stalks, a deliberate answer to the healthy blooms Van Gogh had made famous two decades earlier. Schiele was twenty one and already showing with Klimt's circle in Vienna.
He returned to sunflowers several more times before his death in the 1918 flu pandemic, always choosing the plant past its bloom rather than at its peak.
9. Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana (1563)
Veronese filled a canvas more than thirty feet wide with over a hundred figures at a Biblical wedding banquet, dressed in golden yellow silk brocade that was fashionable in Venice at the time rather than in Roman Judea.
Napoleon's army cut the canvas from its frame in Venice in 1797 and shipped it to Paris as war spoil. It has hung in the Louvre ever since, directly across from the Mona Lisa.
10. Frederic Leighton, Flaming June (1895)
Leighton painted a woman asleep in a golden orange gown on a marble bench, one of the last works he finished before his death the following year. He was president of the Royal Academy at the time.
The painting vanished from public view for decades and reportedly sold for under fifty pounds in a London gallery around 1962, before a Puerto Rican museum bought it in 1963. It is now among the most requested loans in the museum's history.
11. Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872)
Moran painted the golden rock walls of Yellowstone after joining a government survey expedition in 1871, the first painter to see the canyon that gave the park its name. Congress bought the finished painting for ten thousand dollars.
The painting hung in the Capitol and helped convince Congress to establish Yellowstone as the first national park in the world in 1872, the same year Moran finished it.
12. Jean-Francois Millet, The Angelus (1857 to 1859)
Two peasants stop working in a golden evening field to pray as a distant church bell rings the Angelus. Millet said he added the prayer only after remembering his own grandmother stopping work at the sound of the bell.
Salvador Dali became obsessed with the painting decades later, convinced a coffin was hidden beneath the potato basket at their feet. In 1963 an X ray of the canvas was taken at his request, and it showed no coffin, only a shape Millet had painted over.
Where the yellows hang today
Van Gogh, Sunflowers: the National Gallery, London.
Turner, The Fighting Temeraire: the National Gallery, London.
Veronese, The Wedding at Cana: the Louvre, Paris.
Millet, The Angelus: the Musee d'Orsay, Paris.
Klimt, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I: the Neue Galerie, New York.
Yellow without the confusion
Why was yellow paint once considered dangerous? Common yellow pigments like Naples yellow and chrome yellow contained lead, and painters who ground and mixed them by hand faced real poisoning risk.
What is Indian yellow? A rare 19th century pigment with a distinctive glow, long linked to cattle fed on mango leaves, though the full story behind its production is disputed by historians.
Why did Van Gogh love yellow so much? He wrote to his brother Theo that yellow meant sunlight and friendship to him, and he used it more than almost any other painter of his generation.
What is the most famous yellow painting? Van Gogh's Sunflowers is the yellow painting most people recognize immediately, followed closely by Klimt's gold covered portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer.
Why do some Van Gogh sunflowers look darker today? The chrome yellow pigment he used reacts chemically with other colors over time, so several versions have shifted toward a duller, browner tone since he painted them.
If these yellow paintings pulled you in, you will love these too:
The color painters could never fully trust
Yellow runs through these twelve pictures as sunlight, gold, sickness, and warning, rarely settling into just one meaning at a time.
Van Gogh bought his chrome yellow paint by the tube from a supplier in Paris, cheaper and brighter than any yellow available to painters a century before him. He used so much of it in Arles that some of his surviving canvases are still visibly changing color today, more than 130 years after he mixed it.