📚 Painting

Pigment on surface, from fresco to canvas: technique, the great movements, and the artists who kept redefining what a picture could be.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject painting in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Seven Lamps of Architecture	John Ruskin	1800	245
	Modern painters	John Ruskin	1843	134
	Georg Baselitz	Georg Baselitz	1970	113
	Van Gogh	Federico Zeri	1937	91
	A concise history of modern painting	Herbert Edward Read	1959	51
	Gerhard Richter	Richter, Gerhard	1971	50
	Painting as a Pastime	Winston S. Churchill	1921	49
	Bruegel	Keith Roberts	1676	42
	On not being able to paint	Marion Milner	1950	33
	Monet	Claude Monet	1963	29
	University prints	University Prints (Winchester, Mass.)	1900	27
	The painted word	Tom Wolfe	1975	22
	Malerei im 20. Jahrhundert	Werner Haftmann	1920	20
	English water-colours	Laurence Binyon	1933	19
	Painting in the Far East	Laurence Binyon	1908	17
	Artistic theory in Italy, 1450-1600	Anthony Blunt	1940	17
	The artist's handbook of materials and techniques	Ralph Mayer	1940	12
	Invertebrate zoology	Robert D. Barnes	1963	12
	Early Netherlandish Painting	Erwin Panofsky	1953	11
	Kunst der Farbe	Johannes Itten	1961	11
	Artist's photo reference	Gary Greene	1998	10
	Introduction to painting and drawing	John Henn	1986	9
	Techniques of the Impressionists	Anthea Callen	1982	8
	The Artist's Handbook	Angela Gair	1997	8
	The tao of painting	Mai-mai Sze	1956	7
	What great paintings say	Rose-Marie Hagen	1993	7
	Hawthorne on painting	Charles Webster Hawthorne	1938	6
	Composition of outdoor painting	Edgar Alwin Payne	1941	4
	The Eye of the Painter and the Elements of Beauty	Andrew Loomis	1960	4
	Chinese Painting Techniques	Alison Stilwell Cameron	1968	4

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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