The First Paintings By Famous Artists

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Sandro Botticelli, Fortitude (1470)

This piece, a commission for the Commercial Courts in Florence, is seen as a competition of sorts. It was Botticelli’s first comission. He and another artist were asked to paint seven panels, under which legislative magistrates would sit. Bottecelli was originally given two panels but could not complete the work by the time requested. Peiro del Pollaiuolo, an established Florentine painter with a studio, was given the remainder of the work. Botticelli’s piece turned out much more vibrant and detailed than the other panels. He would paint The Birth of Venus a decade later. 

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Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi (1481)

As with many of his early works, da Vinci’s first-known painting was a commission, this one coming to him from the monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Leonardo did not finish this painting however, as he left Florence for Milan a year after he began. Fellow painter Filippino Lippi had to step in to take over the commission. This unfinished work of oil on wood is house in the Uffizi in Florence. 

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Rembrandt, The Stoning of Saint Stephen (1625)

The master of Dutch portrait painting completed this complex work when he was just 19 years old. As any precocious artist might do, Rembrandt played a bit of a joke on the viewer. It’s generally accepted that the character directly behind the saint, whose head seems slightly out of proportion, is a self-portrait of the painter.

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Claude Monet, View From Rouelles (1858)

Like many painters who would stray from trying to portray the world as accurately as possible, Claude Monet knew how to paint with very close to photorealism. Monet, known to many now as the master of Impressionism, strayed into works that enraged and inspired many, including Kandinsky, by disrupting color and form. Whether or not this had to do with his gradual loss of vision is up for debate. 

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Edgar Degas, The Bellelli Family (1858-1867)

Degas was 33 when he completed this painting. And that’s saying something, as the portrait of his aunt and her daughters was started nearly a decade beforehand. Degas would become a master of stacking figures in composition to form emotionally complex scenes. This one did not just hit close to home; it’s critically regard as a masterpiece for the sense of tension felt in this household. 

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Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885)

Munch never shied away from dark subject matter. Beginning in 1885, the painter, whose The Scream would bring him to prominence, created a cycle of paintings and illustrations around the death of his older sister, Johanne Sophie. Though this is the original version, he would create five more paintings and a number of other works in various mediums with the same title, over a period of 40 years. The subject matter rarely strayed, nor did the depictions—it seems Munch was haunted by this episode of his life. 

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Vincent Van Gogh, The Potato Eaters (1885)

Four women and one man sit around a table in a cramped room, lit by an oil lamp. It’s a remarkably dark setting and subject matter, done with an almost uncharacteristically realist take for the painter who’d come to be known for his broad, visible strokes and bright colors. Akin to many of his later works, Van Gogh would not see this painting gain any recognition during his lifetime.

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Pablo Picasso, Le Picador (1890)

Pablo Picasso got a start at a young age. The painter who brought Cubism to the fore during the early 20th century created this work at age nine. Though not quite as refined as the works he’d be doing even by age 15, Picasso definitely showed a knack for challenging perspective and form, even if subtly. This also foreshadows Picasso’s equine fascinations, which would become most developed in his tragic Guernica.

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Kandinsky, Odessa. Port, (1898)

Kandinsky is examined often for his pioneering trail to pure Expressionism. But looking at this Impressionist waterscape that predates his landmark Der Bleu Reiter by nearly a decade, one could hardly guess that he’d radically depart to the geometric, clashing compositions of his later work. We suppose you have to know the rules in order to break them…

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Georgia O’Keeffe, Untitled (Dead Rabbit With Copper Pot) (1908)

O‘Keeffe was a still-life artist at heart, though not in the traditional sense. She came to prominence with her close-ups of flower blossoms, taking a radical if not myopic approach to the form. It was with this painting, for which she won a still-life prize in college, that proved she could imitate with accuracy not just her mentors but also the world around her. As she would come to realize her own talent, the realism of this painting would fade into the background. Further, this may have inspired Joseph Beuys’ piece How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare, which featured similar burnished-gold patinas and, obviously, a dead rabbit.

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Salvador Dali, Landscape Near Figueras (1910)

Dali’s best-known works are photo-quality surrealism, bending the limits of time, space, imagination, perception, and technique all at once. But his earliest known painting achieved something almost as impressive, considering he painted Landscape Near Figueras when he was only six years old. Sure, it’s nearly rudimentary. But given the perspective and contrast, it’s a remarkable feat. 

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Frida Kahlo, Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress (1926)

Though Frida Kahlo was a dominant force of mid-century Primitivism, she’s also known for having an incredible wardrobe. In her first painting, Self Portrait in a Velvet Dress, she makes the clothes as much the subject of the piece as she does herself. Her continued portraits, though focusing less on clothes, would often feature adornments to the individual, emphasizing a communication between the artifice of environment and the sense of self. 

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Mark Rothko, Untitled (1940)

Casual consumers of both art and television are familiar with the abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko (one of his paintings was effectively the centerpiece of an episode of Mad Men). But few realize that before the artist was known for his "color field" paintings, he dabbled in figurative surrealism. Though some of the daubs of contrasting paint can be recognized piece to piece for technique, Rothko is virtually incognito here. 

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Jackson Pollock, Mural (1943)

Jackson Pollock is both the most recognizable and imitable artist of the modernist movement. Mural, is said by many to be the most important American painting ever made. It not only presaged his drip style, it was loaded with cultural, social, and personal poignancy. 

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Andy Warhol, The French Look (1950s)

Though Andy Warhol’s true entrance to the pop art world was his 1962 first showing of 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans, he was a prolific illustrator throughout the ‘50s. His illustrations first came to prominence when he developed a blotted-line technique for a line of shoes. This technique, which Warhol honed when he was still a student, would point to his first inclinations towards printmaking. 

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Cy Twombly, Untitled (1951)

Twombly, one of the outsider-insider members of the New York School of modernism, began studying art at a very young age. This, almost certainly not his first painting proper, is the first painting prefiguring his work in graffiti, cryptology, minimalism, and abstract expressionism.

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Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting (seven panel) (1951)

Rauschenberg would become famous for what he called his “combines” later in life, challenging the notions of materials, texture, and depth within a painting. But his early works, including the scandalizing White Painting (seven panel) simply challenged the concept of nothing. Nothing could be read of these in terms of authorship, intent, or narrative. 

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Jasper Johns, Flag (1955)

Perhaps of all the artists here, Jasper Johns most represents what his general artistic practice would be, even in his early works. Flag marks a fascination with painting as a method and an obsession with appropriating subject matter from not just popular culture but also Johns dreams. This first painting came to him as he slept. 

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Roy Lichtenstein, Ten Dollar Bill (1956)

Lichtenstein is said to have “taken the hand out of art” by painting easily recognizable items from gum wrappers, comic books, and other pop culture artifacts in a style that looks like they were printed by a machine. But before he began this practice in the 1960s, he tried his hand at Abstract Expressionism. His first known work was Ten Dollar Bill is a kind-of cubist deconstruction of the object itself.

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Jean Michel Basquiat, Untitled (1980)

Though Basquiat started painting on the walls of Soho as SAMO in the late ‘70s, this is one of his first known Expressionist art pieces. Typically his Expressionist works appear as newspaper spoofs, but this piece is uncharacteristically over-styled and barely recognizable in its lack of tribal tropes. Though the collage marks a fascination with parity and dichotomy that are frequently a focus of Basquiat’s work, this one looks nothing like the blocks of color and jagged lines that come later.

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