Before They Were Icons: The Early Works of Great Artists

Feature image: Joan Miró, The Farm, 1921-1922 via Wikipedia/Public Domain

Every artist begins with uncertainty. The first years of painting are filled with imitation, trial, and discovery. What we call a “signature style” often takes decades to emerge. The early works of great artists reveal this transformation. They emphasize technique over innovation and discipline over freedom. These beginnings hold the seeds of everything that followed.

The early paintings of modern masters often hold a surprise in store. They are realistic, restrained, and deeply rooted in tradition. Yet beneath that surface lies the creative restlessness that would one day define their mature work. Examining these early pieces presents a rare opportunity to view famous artists before fame transformed them.

Long before Cubism, a teenage Pablo Picasso worked in the shadow of academic art. His painting Science and Charity (1897) captures a scene of compassion between a sick woman, a doctor, and a nurse. It is beautifully rendered, realistic, and sentimental. The composition feels almost theatrical.

This early work reveals Picasso’s training in traditional realism. He studied at the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, where he learned anatomy, proportion, and chiaroscuro with great precision. Yet the emotional charge already feels distinct. Even in his academic phase, Picasso focused on the human condition. Within a decade, he would dismantle that tradition entirely and build something new from its fragments.

Claude Monet’s earliest known painting, View from Rouelles (1858), depicts a serene countryside scene. The colors are muted and the brushwork careful. It feels closer to Corot or Courbet than to Impressionism. Monet was still a student of realism, learning how to represent what he saw accurately.

Even in this early piece, light plays a leading role. The gentle atmosphere and delicate reflections in water foreshadow the artist he would become. Within a few years, Monet’s brushstrokes loosened. His palette brightened. The landscapes became pure sensations of air and color. View from Rouelles marks the moment before that transformation began.

Before his chaotic drip paintings defined American modern art, Jackson Pollock painted the American West. In Going West (1934–35), he created a swirling composition inspired by his teacher, Thomas Hart Benton. The scene depicts settlers, horses, and vast plains, painted with muscular rhythm and energy.

The lines twist and turn in motion, hinting at the direction Pollock would take years later. His brush was already restless. He wanted gesture to speak louder than detail. Going West is figurative, yet its energy feels abstract. The same motion that carried him across the canvas in Autumn Rhythm began here, in the landscapes of his youth.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s early painting Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot (1908) feels dark, intimate, and academic. It captures a still life in somber tones, painted with care and precision. At this stage, O’Keeffe was studying realism at the Art Students League in New York.

Over time, she came to reject this strict approach. She began exploring pure color and form. The shift from Dead Rabbit and Copper Pot to Red Canna or Black Iris marks one of the most striking evolutions in 20th-century art. The early work shows discipline and control. The later work celebrates freedom and essence. Both reflect her devotion to finding truth through painting.

Before melting clocks and surreal dreams, Salvador Dalí painted quiet scenes of family life. His Girl at the Window (1925) depicts his sister Ana María standing before an open window in Cadaqués. The light is soft, the mood serene. Every brushstroke feels exact.

This painting demonstrates Dalí’s technical mastery. He understood classical form before he broke it apart. The perspective, the realism, and the control are remarkable for an artist in his early twenties. Later, when Dalí entered the Surrealist movement, he combined this precision with imagination. The skill he learned in Girl at the Window allowed his surreal worlds to feel vivid and believable.

Joan Miró’s Vegetable Garden with Donkey (1918) captures the landscape of Mont-roig del Camp, the Catalan countryside where he spent much of his youth. Vivid colors, simplified forms, and playful geometry characterize the painting. Every tree, furrow, and farmhouse feels alive. The scene is both orderly and dreamlike, suggesting that Miró was already searching for a language beyond realism.

Though the work predates his surrealist period, it contains the seeds of that evolution. The rhythmic composition and symbolic treatment of nature would later transform into his floating shapes and cosmic symbols. Vegetable Garden with Donkey shows Miró before abstraction, yet already thinking in signs, rhythm, and imagination. It stands as a bridge between observation and invention, the moment when the earth itself began to turn into art.

Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926) was her first serious work. Painted for her boyfriend, it follows the style of European portraiture. The background is filled with waves of deep red, and her gaze is direct and self-possessed.

This painting marks the beginning of her lifelong project: the self-portrait as a form of storytelling. Though the style is traditional, the emotional presence feels unmistakably her own. Later, Kahlo would replace the velvet gown with a Tehuana dress and symbolic imagery. Yet even here, she paints herself with pride and purpose. It is the origin of her artistic identity.

Mark Rothko’s Subway Scene (1938) captures figures waiting in an underground station. The palette is somber, the figures elongated and ghostly. At this stage, Rothko was influenced by urban realism and mythology. The geometry of the scene anticipates the structure of his later abstractions.

When Rothko turned to large color fields, he carried this same interest in atmosphere and emotion. The human presence disappeared, but the feeling of isolation remained. Subway Scene reveals that even in his earliest phase, Rothko was already painting the human condition through mood and tone.

Each of these early works tells a story of transformation. Behind every masterpiece lies years of quiet practice. Every great artist learns the rules before finding the courage to rewrite them. These beginnings remind us that originality grows from imitation, and mastery comes from persistent practice, inspiring and motivating the readers in their own artistic journeys.

To look at these early paintings is to witness becoming itself. The brush was still searching, but the voice was already there. From academic precision to emotional freedom, from imitation to individuality, these initial steps led to the movements that forever reshaped art.

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