Art history is full of women. They appear as goddesses, queens, muses, workers, and strangers, and the way each one looks at the viewer tells a different story. Some paintings let them gaze back with quiet confidence.
Others catch them mid-motion, unaware they are being watched. This guide follows that gaze through a handful of the most famous paintings of women, and shows how these faces live on as paint by numbers kits.
The list is not a ranking. Each painting below earned its fame for a different reason, and together they trace how the female face has been seen across five centuries.
Eyes That Refuse to Look Away
Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci (1503-1505)
The Mona Lisa is the most analysed portrait ever painted, yet nobody can agree on what her expression means. Leonardo used a technique called sfumato, layering thin glazes so the corners of her mouth and eyes blur softly.
The result is a face that seems to change as you look at it, now amused, now distant, always just out of reach.
That ambiguity is the source of her power. She looks at us directly, and we still cannot read her.
Our Mona Lisa kit recreates that steady gaze section by section, and the Mona Lisa With a Cat version adds a playful twist to the world’s most famous smile.
Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol (1964)
Warhol’s Marilyn portraits were made after the actress died, and they feel less like tributes than questions.
He repeated her face across a grid, using harsh silkscreen colors that flatten her into an image. The bright pinks and blues clash with what we know about her life, and that gap is the point.
The Marilyn in these prints stares out from behind a mask of celebrity. Our Marilyn Monroe kit brings that pop-art face to your wall, colors included.
Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace (1940)
Frida Kahlo painted herself because she had no other choice. Bedridden for long stretches after a bus accident, she turned the mirror into her main subject. In Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace, the thorns cut into her skin while her face stays calm, and a hummingbird hangs at her throat.
The painting balances pain and composure in a way that still feels modern.
Kahlo’s work changed what a female portrait could be. It stopped asking to be beautiful and started insisting on being true.
Caught in Movement and Light
The Ballerina, Edgar Degas (1878-1881)
Degas painted dancers the way a photographer catches a candid shot. His ballerinas stretch, tie their shoes, and rest between rehearsals, often with their faces turned away.
He was fascinated by the mechanics of the body, not the glamour of the stage, and his pastel colors keep the scenes soft and airy.
The Ballerina Dancer kit captures that mid-motion stillness, and the Ballerina in Red kit turns the same subject into a bolder, warmer scene for a modern wall.
Girl With a Pearl Earring, Johannes Vermeer (1665)
Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is often called the Dutch Mona Lisa, and the comparison fits. The girl turns toward the viewer over her shoulder, lips slightly parted, as if about to speak.
Vermeer built the whole painting around one small detail, the earring, which catches a single point of light against a near-black background.
The portrait has no story attached to it, and that emptiness is what lets every viewer write their own. She is not a goddess or a queen. She is just a face, and she has held our attention for over three centuries.
A Woman by the Sea
Not every famous portrait has a name attached to it. Some of the most memorable paintings of women are anonymous, caught in a quiet moment with the water behind them.
A figure alone at the shore carries a different mood than a formal portrait, less posed, more honest.
Our Woman by the Sea kit is built around exactly that feeling, soft colors and open space with a single figure at the center.
Women in Everyday Life
Woman Taking Tea
Domestic scenes gave painters a chance to show women as they lived, not as they posed. A woman with a cup of tea, caught mid-sip, belongs to a long tradition of interiors that runs from Dutch still lifes to modern table settings.
These paintings are quiet by design, and the stillness is what makes them hold attention.
The Woman Taking Tea kit brings that unhurried moment home, a natural fit for a kitchen wall or a reading corner.
The Woman With the Autumn Umbrella
Some of the strongest portraits of women come from city streets. A woman under an umbrella, wrapped in autumn colors, carries the mood of the season in her coat and stride.
Urban portraits show women in motion through the world, not frozen in a studio pose.
The Woman With the Autumn Umbrella kit captures that seasonal walk, with warm tones that suit a hallway or entryway.
Faces of the Modern World
African Woman
Modern portraiture has widened who gets painted and who gets to paint.
Portraits of African women celebrate texture, color, and heritage in ways that classical European art rarely attempted, with bold patterns and rich skin tones carrying the composition.
The African Woman kit is a striking example, a face full of presence that stands out in any room.
Contemporary Artistic Painting of a Woman
The most recent chapter in this story is abstract. Contemporary painters strip the face back to shape and color, asking what a portrait becomes when the details dissolve.
These works are less about likeness and more about feeling, and they reward slow, close looking.
The Contemporary Artistic Painting of a Woman kit brings that abstract approach to a numbered canvas, a bold choice for anyone who wants a conversation piece.
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, Gustav Klimt (1907)
Klimt wrapped his subject in gold leaf, and the result is one of the most luxurious portraits ever painted.
Adele Bloch-Bauer sits against a shimmering background of Byzantine-inspired patterns, her face the only fully natural element in the composition. The gold was controversial in its time, seen by some critics as decoration rather than painting.
The portrait is also a story of recovery. Seized during the war, it was returned to Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2006 after a long legal fight, and it now hangs in New York.
The face behind all that gold was a real woman, and her history is as layered as the painting itself.
The Gaze Comes Home
From the Mona Lisa’s unreadable smile to Warhol’s screen-printed Marilyn, the women of art history have been looked at for centuries.
What changes is who holds the brush. A museum visitor can only study these faces from behind a rope, but a painter gets to study them one numbered section at a time.
You can bring any of these faces home. Browse the Famous Art collection for more masterpieces, or see which designs other painters finish first on the Best Sellers page.
The women in these paintings have been watched for a long time. Now they can watch over your wall.
