The Louvre Museum Reproduction Oil Paintings

Is the Louvre the Most Visited Museum in the World?

With nearly three million visitors a year, The Louvre is the most visited museum in the world.

Is the Mona Lisa in the Louvre Museum?

The star attraction of the Louvre is the Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci between 1503 and 1506.

Undoubtedly, one of the most famous renaissance oil paintings, the Mona Lisa, is the star attraction.  It is estimated that in excess of 30,000 visitors a day see the Mona Lisa's smile. 

Francesco del Giocondo commissioned the original da Vinci oil painting as a portrait of his wife, Lisa Gherardini. Curiously, he never purchased the painting and King Francis I of France eventually purchased it.  This is how it comes to be in the Louvre.

Famous Paintings in the Louvre

The Louvre Collection displays over 7,500 paintings, with the significant majority by French artists.

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix is in the collection, as well as works by La Tour, Ingres, Fragonard, and Corot. In addition, the Judgement of Solomon and The Triumph of Pan by Nicolas Poussin are also on view.

The Italian paintings come from the collections of Kings Francis I and Louis XIV, with King Francis buying works by Raphael and Michelangelo and bringing Leonardo da Vinci to paint in his court. As well as the Mona Lisa, The Louvre has many religious paintings, such as da Vinci's Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptiste.  Caravaggio paintings include The Fortune Teller.

Dutch Golden Age painters include several Johannes Vermeer artworks such as The Lacemaker and The Astronomer.   

However, later paintings include The Tree of Crows by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.

What is the History of the Louvre?

The Louvre received its single most significant bequest of 584 paintings from a prominent Parisian doctor, Louis La Caze, in 1869. The La Caze Collection is split between some 250 paintings in the Louvre with the remainder in provincial museums throughout France.

In the center of Paris, the Louvre Museum sits on the right bank of the Seine. Built first as a fortress, the building was converted into a massive palace by King Francis I in 1546.  However, it was left to house the Royal Collection of art and sculpture in 1682, when the French royal family occupied the Palace of Versailles.

Expanded significantly after the French Revolution and in the Napoleonic era, the Louvre now contains some 380,000 objects, of which at least 35,000 are on permanent display. The collections are divided into eight areas, Egyptian Antiquities, Near Eastern Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan, Roman Antiquities, Islamic Art, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, Paintings, Prints and Drawings.

Now you own fine art reproductions of any of the famous oil paintings in the Louvre Museum