The Top Ten Most Infamous Paintings in Art History

Feature image: Francisco de Goya, The Clothed Maja, c. 1800-07, Museo del Prado, public domain via Fundación Goya en Aragón

Some paintings are famous for their beauty, and others are infamous for the problems they caused. The following paintings are ranked from least to most infamous, based on the scandal's scope and the damage it caused to the people involved. Each one caused a public scandal in its own day, through official rejection, a courtroom, the Inquisition, censorship, or a physical attack, and the closer a painting sits to the top spot, the further its fallout reached into the artist's career and the course of art history.

In the summer of 1539, Henry VIII sent his court painter, Hans Holbein the Younger, to Düren, Germany, to paint Anne of Cleves, the princess his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was promoting as the king's fourth wife. Henry agreed to the match based on the portrait and his envoys' reports. When he finally met Anne at Rochester on New Year's Day 1540, he was badly disappointed and reportedly told his court, "I like her not." The couple married on January 6, 1540, and the marriage was annulled about six months later on grounds of non-consummation. Cromwell, who had championed the alliance, was executed that July. Holbein's Anne of Cleves (1539) has hung in the Louvre since the museum opened in 1793, and a 2024 cleaning restored the bright blue background Henry would have seen.

James McNeill Whistler painted Nocturne in Black and Gold, The Falling Rocket (1875) from a fireworks display at Cremorne Gardens in London, using dark oil washes on panel with flecks of color to suggest sparks. It was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877, where critic John Ruskin launched a withering attack, accusing Whistler of being a 'coxcomb' who would 'ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face'. Whistler brought suit for libel. At the 1878 trial, the jury were in Whistler's favor and awarded him damages of a single farthing (the smallest coin in existence). The legal costs drove him into bankruptcy the following year, and he was forced to sell his newly built house in Chelsea. The painting is now in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Gustave Courbet painted A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) at the scale traditionally reserved for history painting, more than six meters wide, and filled it with the ordinary townspeople of his native village in eastern France gathered around an open grave. The mourners were his neighbors, relatives, and local officials, painted life-size and unidealized. When the canvas appeared at the Paris Salon of 1850-51, critics attacked it as ugly and vulgar, and many read its plain country people at heroic scale as a political provocation in the years after the 1848 revolution. The scandal made Courbet the leading figure of Realism, and the painting now hangs at the Musée d'Orsay.

The official Paris Salon of 1863 rejected so many works that Emperor Napoleon III ordered a separate exhibition for them, the Salon des Refusés, and Édouard Manet's Luncheon on the Grass (1863) became its biggest scandal. Manet based the composition on a Renaissance engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael and on Titian's pastoral tradition, then set a nude woman beside two fully dressed young men in modern clothes, looking straight out at the viewer. Critics and crowds treated it as an indecent joke at the expense of classical painting. The ridicule made Manet the most talked-about painter in Paris and gave the younger artists who became the Impressionists a rallying point. The painting now hangs at the Musée d'Orsay, and Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Pablo Picasso each painted their own versions.

Amsterdam's civic guardsmen commissioned Rembrandt van Rijn to paint their company, and in 1642 he delivered a group portrait full of movement, shadow, and noise, with every figure caught in the middle of an action. A long-running legend claims the painting ruined his career, a story historians have since dismissed, but the canvas went on to suffer more than almost any famous painting. When it moved to Amsterdam's Town Hall in 1715, they cut four pieces away so it would fit between two doors, and none have been found. A man attacked it with a knife in 1911, another slashed it twelve times in 1975, and a third sprayed it with acid in 1990. The name The Night Watch first appears in a 1797 document, and the painting remains the centerpiece of the Rijksmuseum. Since 2019, the museum has studied and restored it in full public view through Operation Night Watch, the most extensive research project in the painting's history.

In July 1816, the French navy frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of present-day Mauritania under the command of Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a royalist officer with little sea experience who won the post through political connections. About 150 people were set adrift on a makeshift raft, and after nearly two weeks, only fifteen were rescued alive, with survivors' accounts describing mutiny, starvation, and cannibalism. Théodore Géricault interviewed survivors, studied the sick and dead in Paris hospitals, and built a raft model before painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19) on a canvas over seven meters wide. He showed it at the Salon of 1819 under the neutral title Scene of a Shipwreck, and audiences read it at once as an indictment of the restored Bourbon government. The painting became a founding image of French Romanticism, and Eugène Delacroix, who posed for one of the dying men on the raft, carried its scale and drama into his own work. The Louvre acquired it in 1824, the year of Géricault's death.

The lawyer Laerzio Cherubini commissioned Caravaggio to paint Death of the Virgin (1601-06) for his chapel in Santa Maria della Scala, a church in Rome's Trastevere district run by the Discalced Carmelites. Caravaggio painted the Virgin as a dead woman with a swollen body and bare feet, laid out beneath a sweep of red drapery. The Carmelites rejected it, and the physician and biographer Giulio Mancini recorded their objection to its "lack of decorum." Rumors spread that Caravaggio had used a prostitute as his model, a claim that remains unconfirmed. Through Peter Paul Rubens, the rejected canvas went to the Gonzaga collection in Mantua, and it was put on public view in Rome for a week before it left the city. Carlo Saraceni painted the replacement that still hangs in Santa Maria della Scala, while the rejected canvas later passed to Charles I of England and then to Louis XIV, and it now hangs in the Louvre.

The Dominican friars of Santi Giovanni e Paolo in Venice commissioned Paolo Veronese to paint a Last Supper for their refectory, and in 1573 he delivered a canvas more than twelve meters wide, crowded with Venetian architecture, servants, jesters, dwarfs, German soldiers, drunkards, and a dog. On July 18, 1573, the Inquisition summoned him to explain himself. When the tribunal asked why such figures belonged at the Last Supper, Veronese answered that "we painters take the same license that poets and madmen take." The judges ordered him to correct the painting within three months at his own expense. Veronese changed the title instead, painting an inscription that renamed the scene the feast Levi gave for Christ in the Gospel of Luke, and the tribunal accepted it. The transcript of the hearing survives in full and remains one of the most cited early records of an artist defending creative freedom. The canvas now hangs in the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice.

John Singer Sargent was a rising young portraitist in Paris when he persuaded Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, an American-born society beauty, to sit for him. He showed the result at the Salon of 1884 under the discreet title Portrait of Madame ***, with one jeweled strap of her black gown slipped from her shoulder. The portrait "received more ridicule than praise," in the words of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gautreau's family demanded it be withdrawn, and Sargent repainted the strap onto her shoulder. The scandal damaged his Paris career, and in 1886 he moved permanently to London. He kept the painting for more than thirty years, and when he sold it to the Met in 1916, he wrote, "I suppose it is the best thing I have done." The portrait that nearly ended his Paris career is now the one he is best known for.

Pope Clement VII commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment (1536-41) across the Sistine Chapel altar wall, and Pope Paul III saw it unveiled in 1541. Michelangelo filled the wall with more than three hundred figures, most of them nude, and the outcry began almost at once. The papal master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena, reportedly said it belonged in a bathhouse or a tavern, and Michelangelo answered by painting him into the lower corner of hell as Minos, judge of the underworld, with donkey ears and a serpent wrapped around his body. In 1563, the Council of Trent ruled against indecent religious images, a decree that shaped Catholic painting through the Counter-Reformation. After Michelangelo died in 1564, his former assistant Daniele da Volterra was hired to paint draperies over the most exposed figures, earning the nickname "Il Braghettone," the breeches maker. Many of those cover-ups survived the 1990s restoration and remain on the wall today, making The Last Judgment the most infamous painting in this ranking and one still censored in the room where it was made.

Some of these scandals are still unfolding. Daniele da Volterra's draperies remain on the Sistine Chapel wall, and The Night Watch is in the middle of the largest study in its history after more than three centuries of cuts and attacks. Others have turned completely, and Madame X, Luncheon on the Grass, and A Burial at Ornans now draw crowds for the very qualities that once made them infamous paintings.

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