Wikidata is a community-edited knowledge base that compiles information about the world into machine-readable data. The platform has become a valuable resource for a variety of subjects, including art.
On its About page, we learn that Wikidata records what others have already published. The available data on paintings, then, is not just a testament to art history, but also to how art is documented.
This data is structured, i.e., organized into properties and values that describe materials, time of creation, genres, movements, creators, and much more.
This investigation is possible because the data is freely available and can be used for any application.
In the following, we will zoom out to see aggregate patterns across more than one million paintings in Wikidata…
…and zoom in on a sample of nine thousand paintings with images for closer inspection.
When were these paintings made?
The vast majority date from the last 600 years. While scattered entries appear before 1400, the data begins a steady ascent from the 15th century onward.
Zooming in on this timeframe, three periods of accelerated growth emerge:
The first rise around 1500 coincides with the Renaissance, an era of increased artistic production and systematic documentation across Europe.
A second, sharper spurt occurs in the mid-17th century, aligning with the rise of Baroque. This was an era when art transitioned from exclusive church and aristocratic commissions to an open market, effectively turning art into a commodity.
Thirdly, the data shows a considerable explosion of art during the 19th century, reflecting the emergence of Modern Art, followed by another spike in the 1960s, a period marked by a range of cultural transformations around the world.
The property "made from material" (P186) refers to the type of paint used and the surface to which it is applied.
Oil paint dominates the materials used for painting with over 50% usage. This reflects institutional bias as much as artistic preference. Oil on canvas was the standard of European academies for centuries, and those collections have been most actively digitized.
In the sample, the prevalence of oil is even more pronounced.
Before canvas became dominant, wooden panel was the standard support, especially around 1500, when its smooth surface allowed for precise, detailed application of paint.
Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait (1434) shows what oil on panel could achieve.
The painting depicts a merchant and his wife in their home. Van Eyck applied thin glazes to create depth and luminosity: the brass chandelier glows, the convex mirror reflects the room, the green dress shimmers.
Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1490–1500) demonstrates another advantage of panel…
The structural support needed for large triptychs designed to open and close. The three panels depict paradise, earthly pleasures, and hell, a moral arc from creation to damnation.
Rembrandt's Night Watch (1642) shows why canvas eventually prevailed.
At this scale (363 × 437 cm), canvas was lighter and more practical. Its woven texture also enabled the thick impasto brushwork that gives the painting its dramatic lighting.
Genres classify paintings by subject matter. These categories reflect not just what is shown in the painting, but the conventions of artists and the expectations of audiences.
Portrait leads by a wide margin, followed by religious art and landscape.
The prevalence of portraits reflects centuries of private patronage.
Those who could afford to commission art often sought to preserve their own likeness or that of their kin.
Three portraits illustrate how the genre evolved.
First, of course, Mona Lisa (ca. 1503–1506) by Leonardo da Vinci.
It remains the most recognized portrait in Western art, depicting Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine merchant. Its sfumato technique and enigmatic expression influenced the genre for centuries.
Just glancing over the many portraits created over the centuries…
…we notice a certain stiffness and predictability in pose and expression.
By the late 18th century, portraits grew more casual and intimate.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun's Self-Portrait with Her Daughter, Julie (1789) captures affection through an informal, dynamic composition.
Another hundred years later, we see a greater variety of poses and styles.
Édouard Manet's Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872) departs further from tradition. Loose brushwork captures mood and personality rather than detailed likeness.
Religious art ranks second, though its temporal distribution differs from portraiture.
These works cluster between 1400 and 1680, when the church remained the dominant patron in Europe. Altarpieces, devotional panels, and biblical narratives filled churches and private chapels.
A smaller, distinct spike appears at the turn of the 13th century, marking the transition from Byzantine traditions to the Proto-Renaissance.
During this period, artists began introducing spatial depth into sacred subjects.
Giotto's Madonna Enthroned (ca. 1310) is a key work from this period. Unlike the flat icons that preceded it, the panel suggests a three-dimensional space.
Two centuries later, we notice ever more elaborate paintings to furnish the interior of churches. In particular altarpieces and devotional panels were commissioned to inspire faith and make scripture visible to those who could not read.
The Ghent Altarpiece (1432) by Jan and Hubert van Eyck is a massive polyptych with twelve panels depicting the Adoration of the Lamb. It served as both a liturgical centerpiece and a showcase of the newly perfected oil technique.
By 1600, the Catholic Church sought a new visual language to counter the Protestant Reformation. Religious art became more theatrical to stir emotion and reaffirm faith.
Caravaggio's The Entombment of Christ (1603) marks this shift in religious painting. Still a church commission, it moves from multi-panel Renaissance altarpieces toward a single canvas with dramatic lighting and expressive faces.
Occupying third position among the top genres, landscape painting rose to wider prominence later than portraits or religious art.
Landscapes appear throughout art history.
There is a notable increase around 1630.
Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) painted idealized Italian landscapes bathed in golden light. His compositional conventions, such as framing trees, distant horizons, classical ruins, influenced landscape painters for two centuries.
Landscapes surged in the 19th century, when Romantic and Impressionist painters made it a primary subject rather than a backdrop.
Caspar David Friedrich made the contemplative figure in the landscape his recurring motif. Many of his artworks feature solitary wanderers or small groups seen from behind, dwarfed by vast horizons.
His Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) places a solitary figure above a misty mountain range, inviting viewers to join in contemplating nature's scale.
Turner dispensed with figures altogether and dissolved castles, ships, and mountains into atmospheric fields of light.
Turner's Norham Castle, Sunrise (ca. 1845) depicts a medieval ruin in faint outlines within washes of golden light. Its emphasis on atmosphere over detail anticipated Impressionism by several decades.
Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise (1872) gave Impressionism its name, depicting the harbor of Le Havre in hazy morning light. It marks a turn toward conveying atmosphere rather than accuracy.
Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889) transforms a view from his asylum window into swirling energy. The painting shifts landscape from observation to emotional expression.
How can we place paintings in their historical context?
Art movements categorize art into periods that share themes, techniques, and time. Here, we will consider the six most prevalent movements.
The prevalence of Baroque can in part be explained by its long duration.
Characteristic features include dramatic lighting, vivid color, intense emotion, and biblical subjects.
Baroque peaked in the 17th century.
Caravaggio (1571–1610) is often credited with launching the Baroque style in Rome. His use of harsh contrasts became a defining technique of the era.
Judith Beheading Holofernes (ca. 1599) exemplifies the era's dramatic biblical scenes, rendered with stark contrasts and visceral realism.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) brought Baroque aesthetics to Flanders, producing monumental canvases filled with dynamic movement and sensuous figures.
The Elevation of the Cross (1610–11) uses a diagonal arrangement of straining figures to create a sense of motion. This triptych shows how Baroque art used scale and drama to make religious narratives immersive.
In Spain, Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) served as court painter, blending Baroque grandeur with psychological subtlety.
Las Meninas (1656) uses complex perspective and a mirrored reflection to blur the line between viewer and painting. Its theatrical composition transforms a royal portrait into an inquiry about seeing and representation.
Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656) was one of the few women to achieve recognition in the Baroque era. She is known for powerful depictions of biblical heroines.
Her Judith Slaying Holofernes (ca. 1612–13) depicts the same subject as Caravaggio's earlier version, matching its dramatic lighting while surpassing its physical intensity. Judith leans in, sleeves rolled, arms tensed, committed to the act.
Romanticism began in the late 18th century as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism and industrialization. Romantic painters valued emotion, imagination, and the sublime power of nature over reason and order.
They sought to evoke awe, terror, and wonder through dramatic landscapes, heroic struggles, and scenes of human vulnerability before nature.
Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) painted contemporary subjects with dramatic compositions and unflinching detail.
The Raft of the Medusa (1819) depicts shipwreck survivors on a makeshift raft with bodies in states of death, despair, and desperate hope as a rescue ship appears on the horizon.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) turned to historical and literary subjects and charged them with Romantic energy, favoring bold color and dynamic composition over classical restraint.
Liberty Leading the People (1830) commemorates the July Revolution with an allegorical figure of Liberty striding over the barricades, tricolor in hand. The painting fuses political reality with mythic grandeur.
Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) was a leading Italian Romantic, known for historical subjects with political undertones.
The Kiss (1859) shows two lovers in medieval costume locked in an embrace. Contemporary viewers recognized beneath its sentimentality a patriotic allegory of the alliance between Italy and France against Austrian rule.
Turning away from both Romantic idealization and academic conventions, Realism arose in mid-19th-century France as a new orientation towards everyday life. Realist painters depicted workers, peasants, and bourgeois society without embellishment, but with attention to detail.
The movement insisted that contemporary subjects deserved the same serious treatment previously reserved for history and mythology.
Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) declared himself the standard-bearer of Realism, exhibiting monumental paintings of rural laborers and provincial funerals.
The Stone Breakers (1849) depicted two figures crushing rocks by the roadside. This backbreaking work was rendered at a scale typically reserved for noble subjects.
Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) devoted his career to depicting peasant life in the French countryside, lending dignity to agricultural labor.
The Gleaners (1857) shows three women bending to collect leftover grain after the harvest. Their stillness and the golden light elevate hard work to grandeur.
Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) achieved international fame for her large-scale animal paintings, studying anatomy in slaughterhouses and horse fairs despite the gender conventions of her time.
The Horse Fair (1852–55) captures a Parisian horse market in a frieze-like composition nearly five meters wide. Bonheur's technical precision and command of animal movement drew comparisons to old masters.
Impressionism was a distinctly French movement that emerged in 1860s Paris as a departure from meticulous detail and precision in favor of capturing the moment. Impressionist subjects were drawn directly from the artists' immediate surroundings.
The Impressionists favored visible brushstrokes, everyday subjects, and the fleeting effects of light over polished historical scenes.
Claude Monet (1840–1926) pursued light and atmosphere across changing conditions maybe most consistently.
La Grenouillère (1869) depicts weekend bathers on the Seine, sunlight breaking across the water. Monet and Renoir painted the same scene side by side.
While Monet's view extends out over the water to the other side of the river…
… Renoir's La Grenouillère (1869) turns toward the social bustle on the dock and shore.
Using soft dabs of color, he prioritizes the charm of figures over the mechanics of light. The scene becomes a warm celebration of Parisian life.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) brought Impressionist techniques to scenes of urban leisure.
Bal du moulin de la Galette (1876) transports the viewer to a Sunday afternoon in Montmartre, dappled sunlight filtering through trees onto a crowd of dancers. The loose brushwork conveys movement and spontaneity.
Edgar Degas (1834–1917) shared the Impressionists' interest in modern life but favored indoor scenes.
The Dance Class (ca. 1874) shows ballerinas in rehearsal, captured from an unexpected angle. Degas combined Impressionist color with precise draftsmanship, influenced by photography's cropped compositions.
Berthe Morisot (1841–1895) was a founding member of the Impressionist group and exhibited in seven of their eight exhibitions.
The Cradle (1872) depicts her sister watching over her sleeping daughter, rendered with feathery brushstrokes that dissolve the boundary between figure and space.
Symbolism emerged at the end of the 19th century as a reaction against Realism and Impressionism's focus on the visible world. Symbolist painters sought to express inner states, dreams, and spiritual mysteries through evocative imagery.
The movement drew on mythology, religion, and literature to create works that suggested rather than depicted.
Gustave Moreau (1826–1898) filled his canvases with mythological subjects, dreamlike visions dense with ornament.
Orpheus (1865) conveys the Symbolist idea that art is immortal. Instead of showing Orpheus's violent death, the painting depicts his severed head and lyre being carried by a young woman.
The Swedish artist Hilma af Klint (1862–1944) created abstract spiritual paintings decades before abstraction entered the mainstream, though her work remained largely unknown until the 1980s.
The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907) is part of a monumental series depicting stages of life through biomorphic forms and vivid color.
Af Klint believed she was channeling messages from higher beings. She produced work that anticipated abstract art by years while remaining rooted in Symbolist spirituality.
Expressionism emerged in early 20th-century Germany as a subjective response to modern life.
Wikidata also links Post-Impressionist precursors like Munch and Van Gogh with the movement, which is why Expressionist works in this dataset begin appearing already in the late 19th century.
Where Impressionists captured outward appearances, Expressionists turned inward. By distorting form and color, they sought to externalize emotional states.
Edvard Munch (1863–1944) is often considered a forerunner of the movement. His work explored themes of anxiety, mortality, and psychological turmoil.
The Scream (1893) has become an icon of modern anxiety: a figure on a bridge, hands raised to the face, beneath a red and orange sky. Munch described it as "the infinite scream passing through nature."
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) co-founded Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden in 1905, one of the first Expressionist groups.
His Street, Berlin (1913) uses jagged forms and clashing colors to strip away urban surfaces. The tilted perspective and mask-like faces turn a crowded sidewalk into an image of modern isolation.
Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) pushed Expressionism toward abstraction, believing color and form could communicate directly without representing objects.
Composition VII (1913) abandons recognizable subject matter. A swirl of colors, lines, and shapes aims to provoke a direct emotional response.
Many more movements could be discussed. We now turn from the eras of art to the people behind the paintings.
Among the over 70,000 artists associated with paintings on Wikidata, the vast majority, nearly 60,000, are identified as male. Female artists account for just over 11,000.
Non-binary and gender-diverse identities are nearly invisible: just 19 artists. This tiny sliver reflects historical erasure, the limitations of binary categories in art documentation, and likely also the recency of non-binary recognition in institutional records.
However, the ratio of women among documented painters has risen steadily: from around 1.5% in the 1500s to over 40% for those born in recent decades. Each century roughly doubled the share of the previous one.
Although the Old Masters were predominantly male, as their name suggests, the data indicates that barriers to entry and recognition have gradually decreased.
The geographic distribution of artists tells its own story. Painters on Wikidata come almost exclusively from Europe and North America.
The rest of the world, which is home to more than 80% of the world's population, is dramatically underrepresented.
A similar but slower shift appears in geographic origins. Like women, painters from outside Europe and North America were long underrepresented, below 5% until the mid-19th century. The ratio rises through the 20th century, reaching nearly 20% for those born in the 1970s. But unlike gender, which approaches 40% in recent decades, geographic diversity remains limited.
When we consider the relationship between lifespan and productivity, we find the names of some of the most prolific painters.
The data also reveals lesser-known figures whose work rivals or exceeds that of the "canonical" artists. Three highly productive female painters stand out.
We conclude our tour of paintings on Wikidata with these three artists.
Marianne North (1830–1890) was a botanical artist who traveled the world to document plant species in their native habitats, working with oil paints in the field to capture the color vibrancy of the flowers she encountered.
Her paintings include works like A New Pitcher Plant from the Limestone Mountains of Sarawak, Borneo (ca. 1876), depicting the carnivorous species Nepenthes northiana she discovered.
Mary Vaux Walcott (1860–1940) was a naturalist and watercolorist who documented North American wildflowers. Her paintings constitute one of the most comprehensive botanical records of the continent.
California Poppy (Eschscholtzia californica) (1935) was part of a scientifically rigorous field study that Walcott pursued at age 75, distinguishing itself from purely aesthetic works by capturing the plant's complete life cycle and specific textures through her precise watercolor technique.
Grandma Moses (1860–1961) began painting in her seventies and became one of the best-known American folk artists.
There are various versions of Sugaring Off (1945), a series of paintings depicting the maple syrup harvest in rural New England. She lived to 101, a reminder that productivity and longevity can intersect in unexpected ways.
Not every painting has information for every property. The gaps reflect both the nature of historical documentation and the ongoing, volunteer-driven process of building Wikidata.
The most reliably recorded property for paintings, is creator, closely followed by inception and material.
Most paintings do not specify a movement directly. For this analysis, we had paintings inherit movements from their creators. Even with this enrichment, movement remains the least documented property.
The data explored here exists because of an ongoing community effort. The WikiProject Sum of All Paintings coordinates the work of documenting every notable painting on Wikidata.
Like Wikidata itself, the project compiles what others have already published, relying on secondary sources from museums, archives, and art historical scholarship.
It maintains clear guidelines for how paintings should be described, e.g., which properties to include, how to handle materials, genres, and attributions.
And because this is linked open data, anyone is free to query it, visualize it, or build upon it, as we have done here.
There is still a lot of work to be done: paintings missing creators, dates, materials, genres, or images.
You can help by picking a collection or an artist's oeuvre and filling in the gaps. Every edit contributes to painting a more complete picture.
This story is a case study of the Inflections Project, a collaboration between Marian Dörk and Johanna Drucker at the UCLAB of FH Potsdam, with contributions from Theresa Eingartner, Christopher Pietsch, and Philipp Proff.
Special thanks to Viktoria Brüggemann for her feedback on an early version of the essay.
It is built using !nflect, VIKUS Viewer, and Textarium. Find the source files on GitHub.
Data queries against Wikidata were carried out between 15 Dec 2025 and 18 Jan 2026.