Famous Spanish Paintings: 11 Masterpieces From El Greco to Picasso

by Luciano Drehmer October 13, 2026

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 13, 2026Updated on October 15, 2026

Madrid holds eight of the eleven famous Spanish paintings below. Six belong to the Museo del Prado, including Velázquez's Las Meninas and Goya's The Third of May 1808, and Picasso's Guernica hangs at the Reina Sofía. The other three are in a Toledo church, the Louvre and MoMA.

The list runs from El Greco's burial scene of 1586 to Picasso's mural of 1937. To set them against work from other countries, browse famous paintings from around the world, or read about famous Italian canvases and Germany's most celebrated paintings.

Famous Spanish paintings at a glance

#	Painting	Artist	Year	Where it is
1	The Burial of the Count of Orgaz	El Greco	1586–1588	Santo Tomé, Toledo
2	The Surrender of Breda	Diego Velázquez	c. 1635	Prado, Madrid
3	Agnus Dei	Francisco de Zurbarán	1635–1640	Prado, Madrid
4	Jacob's Dream	Jusepe de Ribera	1639	Prado, Madrid
5	The Young Beggar	Bartolomé Esteban Murillo	1647–1648	Louvre, Paris
6	Las Meninas	Diego Velázquez	1656	Prado, Madrid
7	The Third of May 1808	Francisco de Goya	1814	Prado, Madrid
8	Saturn Devouring His Son	Francisco de Goya	1820–1823	Prado, Madrid
9	Walk on the Beach	Joaquín Sorolla	1909	Museo Sorolla, Madrid
10	The Persistence of Memory	Salvador Dalí	1931	Museum of Modern Art, New York
11	Guernica	Pablo Picasso	1937	Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

The Golden Age: 1586 to 1656

Seventy years separate El Greco's burial scene from Las Meninas. In that time Spanish painting moved from a Crete-born artist working for a Toledo parish to Velázquez at the court of Philip IV. Most of these pictures are Baroque, and how to recognize a Baroque painting shows what to look for.

01The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, El Greco (1586 to 1588)

El Greco, The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, 1586–1588 — Two saints in gold vestments lower the armored count into his tomb while heaven opens above the mourners.
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El Greco trained as an icon painter on Crete, then worked in Venice and Rome. He settled in Toledo in 1577. El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz was made for the count's chapel in Santo Tomé, the painter's own parish church. The canvas is more than 15 feet tall, and it still hangs in Santo Tomé (the church's visiting hours and tickets, checked October 2026).

The subject is a miracle from the 14th century. Don Gonzalo Ruíz, lord of the town of Orgaz, died in 1323 after leaving money to Santo Tomé. Toledo told the story that Saints Augustine and Stephen came down from heaven to lower him into his grave.

The contract of 1586 asked for portraits of living Toledans as witnesses, so the mourners are El Greco's neighbors. The parish priest, Andrés Núñez de Madrid, reads at far right. The painter's young son, Jorge Manuel, points toward the saints. The man above Saint Stephen who looks out at us is El Greco himself. For his later work in the city, see El Greco's best-known Toledo paintings.

02The Surrender of Breda, Diego Velázquez (about 1635)

Diego Velázquez, The Surrender of Breda, c. 1635 — The victorious general lays a hand on the Dutch governor's shoulder as the key changes hands, with Spanish lances upright at right.
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In June 1625 the Dutch governor of Breda, Justinus van Nassau, handed the keys of the city to Ambrosio Spínola. Spínola was the Genoese general who led Spain's troops in Flanders.

Philip IV later filled the Hall of Realms in his Buen Retiro palace with paintings of his military victories. Velázquez, then the most prestigious painter at court, got this one. Work on the hall began in 1634 and ended by spring 1635, which dates Velázquez's Surrender of Breda to about 1635.

For a victory picture it is oddly gentle. Smoke rises in the background, but in front the winner greets the loser almost as a friend. Pedro Calderón de la Barca told the event the same way in his 1635 play The Siege of Breda. Velázquez signed the canvas on a sheet of paper painted in the lower right corner.

03Agnus Dei, Francisco de Zurbarán (1635 to 1640)

Francisco de Zurbarán, Agnus Dei, 1635–1640 — A lamb with its feet tied lies on a gray ledge against a black ground.
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Zurbarán's Agnus Dei has one subject and nothing else. A merino lamb, eight to twelve months old, lies alive with its feet bound in the pose of a sacrifice. The Latin title means Lamb of God, a name for Christ, but at the Prado the picture is called simply A Lamb.

It is small, about two feet wide, and dates from the years when Zurbarán was at the height of his career. He painted five other versions, probably for private buyers. The painter and writer Antonio Palomino recorded how much one collector prized his:

“An art lover in Seville has a lamb by this maker's hand, painted from life, which he says he values more than one hundred living rams.”

Antonio Palomino, on Zurbarán, in his lives of the Spanish painters (1724), translated

In summer 2026 the lamb was on loan in London, at the National Gallery's Zurbarán retrospective. The same show opened at the Louvre on October 7, 2026, and runs until January 25, 2027. Before a trip to Madrid, check the Prado's entry for A Lamb.

04Jacob's Dream, Jusepe de Ribera (1639)

Jusepe de Ribera, Jacob's Dream, 1639 — Jacob sleeps against the ground beside a tree while a pale band of light opens in the sky.
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Ribera was born in Játiva, in the province of Valencia, in 1591 and died in Naples in 1652. Jacob's Dream takes the story from Genesis of the patriarch who dreams of a ladder with angels going up and down. He turns it into a shepherd asleep in a field. The ladder is only a shaft of light in a blue and gray sky.

The picture probably belonged to the Madrid collector Jerónimo de la Torre by 1658, and his family kept it for decades. When it resurfaced in 1746 among the paintings of Queen Isabel de Farnesio, it was listed as a Murillo.

05The Young Beggar, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1647 to 1648)

At the Prado, Murillo is known for religious pictures such as The Immaculate Conception of Los Venerables and The Patrician's Dream. Murillo's Young Beggar shows his other side. A barefoot boy sits alone in a corner, picking lice from his shirt in a slant of sunlight. Shrimp shells lie on the floor, with a clay jug and a basket of fruit beside him.

The canvas came from the collection of Louis XVI and was on view when the Louvre first opened as a public museum in 1793. In the 19th century the French often called it Le Petit Pouilleux, the little lice-ridden boy. In April 2026 it hung in Room 718 of the Denon wing.

06Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez (1656)

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656 — The Infanta Margarita at the center between two maids of honor, with Velázquez at his easel on the left.
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Velázquez's Las Meninas of 1656 is a group portrait in a real room, the Cuarto del Príncipe of the Alcázar palace in Madrid. The five-year-old Infanta Margarita stands at the center. Two of the queen's meninas, or maids of honor, attend her: María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco.

Around them are Velázquez at a huge canvas, Mari Bárbola, and Nicolasito Pertusato teasing a mastiff. The lady-in-waiting Marcela de Ulloa stands beside a guard, and the chamberlain José Nieto waits in the doorway. Philip IV and Mariana of Austria, the girl's parents, appear only as a reflection in the mirror.

In 1724 Palomino gave it a section of its own in his history of Spanish painters, the only work he treated that way. He called it the most illustrious work by Velázquez. It entered the Prado in 1819, and in October 2026 it hung in Room 12.

Look at it twice. Up close the dresses dissolve into loose daubs of paint, and from a few steps back they turn into fabric again.

Picasso answered it three centuries later. Between August and December 1957 he painted a series of 58 paintings built around Las Meninas. In 1968 he gave the whole series to the Museu Picasso in Barcelona so it would never be split up.

Goya: 1814 to 1823

What is Goya's masterpiece? If you have to name one, make it The Third of May 1808. Britannica lists it among his painted masterpieces, with the two Majas, the nude and the clothed. It calls the picture "stylistically revolutionary" and ranks it with Manet's Execution of Maximilian and Picasso's Guernica among the most iconic images of military violence in art.

The other strong candidate is The Family of Charles IV, a royal group portrait so frank about its sitters that it comes close to caricature. For more of his career, see ten of Goya's best-known works.

07The Third of May 1808, Francisco de Goya (1814)

Francisco de Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814 — A man in a white shirt throws his arms wide before a firing squad whose faces we never see.
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On May 2, 1808, the people of Madrid rose against the French troops occupying the city. The reprisals began that same afternoon. Goya later painted two canvases on the episode: The 2nd of May 1808, the street fight, and Goya's Third of May 1808, the executions.

Archive research summed up in the Prado's file on the executions canvas has corrected the old story. The Regency Council commissioned the pair in February 1814, before Ferdinand VII came back to Madrid. Invoices show that their frames were finished in November 1814, for the royal palace. So the pictures were not made for the street decorations of the king's return, and Goya painted two scenes, not the four often claimed.

He moved the shootings to a rainy night for drama, although the real executions began in broad daylight. A 2008 restoration brought back the picture's original brightness.

08Saturn Devouring His Son, Francisco de Goya (1820 to 1823)

Goya painted Saturn, the Prado's title, straight onto a ground-floor wall of his house, the Quinta del Sordo, across from his painting of Leocadia Zorrilla. The murals there are known as the Black Paintings, for their dark pigments and somber subjects. Chemical analysis shows he worked in a mixed technique that included oil.

Baron Émile d'Erlanger bought the house in 1873 and had the murals moved to canvas, which cost them a great deal of paint. He gave them to the Spanish state, and they have hung in the Prado since 1889. In September 2026 Saturn was in Room 67.

The Prado reads the god as a picture of the fear of losing one's power. German Expressionists and Surrealists saw the origins of modern art in the series. For the house, take a tour of Goya's Quinta del Sordo; for this one picture, read the story behind Goya's Saturn.

Rubens painted the same myth in 1636 to 1638 for Philip IV's hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada. That canvas is in the Prado too. In it an old god with a scythe bites a screaming boy who looks straight at the viewer.

Modern Spain: 1909 to 1937

09Walk on the Beach, Joaquín Sorolla (1909)

Joaquín Sorolla, Walk on the Beach, 1909 — Sorolla's wife, Clotilde, fights the breeze for her hat and parasol while their daughter María walks beside her.
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Sorolla's Walk on the Beach, in Spanish Paseo a la orilla del mar, was painted on the beach at Valencia in the summer of 1909. It came after a run of successes in the United States.

The sea and sand are long strokes of blue, mauve and turquoise, close to abstract. The cropping looks photographic. The frame cuts off Clotilde's wide-brimmed hat and leaves an empty strip of sand at the bottom.

The painting belongs to the Museo Sorolla, a state museum of Spain's Ministry of Culture set in the painter's former house in Madrid. In October 2026 the house was still closed for renovation, but a new wing next door opened to visitors on October 15.

10The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dalí (1931)

The Persistence of Memory is tiny, little more than a foot wide. Its setting is real: the golden cliffs are the coast of Catalonia at Cape Creus, in Dalí's home region. The limp watches picture what Dalí called "the camembert of time," and the ants on the one closed watch stand for decay. As he put it, "The difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad."

It was first shown in New York in 1932. By 1934 the Julien Levy Gallery had bought it from the Paris dealer Pierre Colle. That year an anonymous friend of the museum bought it from Levy and gave it to MoMA. In October 2026 it hung in Gallery 517 on the fifth floor. Dalí painted a sequel in 1954, The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory.

11Guernica, Pablo Picasso (1937)

Spain's Republican government asked Picasso, then living in Paris, for a mural for its pavilion at the 1937 world's fair. On April 26 that year, German aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica at the request of Franco's Nationalists. Picasso saw the photographs in the French press, including L'Humanité. He worked on the canvas from May 1 to June 4.

Guernica is more than 25 feet wide and painted only in grays, black and white. Its symbols include a horse, a bull and a woman holding a dead child. The Republic bought it from Picasso in 1937.

When World War II broke out, Picasso left it in the care of MoMA in New York. In 1958 he extended the loan until democracy returned to Spain. It reached Madrid in September 1981 and went on show that October in the Casón del Buen Retiro, an annex of the Prado. In July 1992 it moved to the Reina Sofía, where it hangs in Room 205.10 (the Reina Sofía's catalog page for the mural, checked October 2026).

Other modern Spanish painters to know

Juan Gris (1887 to 1927) moved to Paris in 1906 and met Picasso and Georges Braque. He became a Cubist, with a more systematic, crystalline geometry than theirs. His Portrait of Pablo Picasso (1912) shows Picasso as a painter, palette in hand. It carries the inscription "Hommage à Pablo Picasso" and belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joan Miró (1893 to 1983) moved from Barcelona to Paris in 1920, but he spent every summer on his family's farm at Mont-roig in Catalonia. He painted it in The Farm (1921 to 1922), a picture he came to regard as one of the key works of his career. Ernest and Hadley Hemingway owned it by 1925, and it now belongs to Washington's National Gallery of Art. By the mid-1920s Miró had left that realism behind for a Surrealist style of automatism and abstraction.

Antoni Tàpies (Barcelona, 1923 to 2012) filled his paintings with impasto textures and cryptic texts. For his print Pissarra, now in Chicago too, he spread a paste on the plate to get the rugged look of a blackboard. The Reina Sofía holds works of his titled Mur (Wall) and Homage to Miró.

Who is Spain's most popular painter?

Going by painters, the answer is Velázquez. After visiting the Prado in 1865, Manet called him "the painter of painters." Back in Paris he painted works of notably Spanish influence, among them The Fifer.

Going by crowds, the old masters still win. In 2025 the Prado had more than 3.5 million visitors for the first time. The Reina Sofía, home of Guernica, had about 1.6 million at its main building.

Bringing Spain's masters home

Our studio artists paint the older famous Spanish paintings above by hand in oil, from Velázquez's Meninas to Zurbarán's lamb, along with Goya's firing squad and Sorolla's windy beach. To look past Spain, browse famous paintings beyond Spain.

Sources

by Luciano Drehmer Published on October 13, 2026Updated on October 15, 2026

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Famous Spanish Paintings: 11 Masterpieces From El Greco to Picasso

Famous Spanish paintings at a glance

The Golden Age: 1586 to 1656

01The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, El Greco (1586 to 1588)

02The Surrender of Breda, Diego Velázquez (about 1635)