8,533 landscape, marine and city paintings catalogued in Wikidata, and the 4,740 real places they show. The rivers, cities and coasts painters kept going back to, who painted where, and how far from home they went to do it.
Wikidata, the free knowledge base behind Wikipedia, holds records for hundreds of thousands of paintings. For some of them, volunteers and museums have recorded what the picture shows, and when that is a real river, town or mountain it comes with coordinates. I took every painting that Wikidata calls a landscape, a marine (sea) painting or a cityscape and that depicts a place with a position on the map: 8,533 paintings by 2,393 named painters, from a Chinese scroll of 1348 to the twenty first century.
The map below shows where they look. Each circle is a place, sized by how many catalogued paintings show it and coloured by the genre that dominates there. Click one to see the pictures, with thumbnails from Wikimedia Commons. Switch to "Painters' journeys" to draw a line from each painter's birthplace to the places they painted. Then scroll on for the rivers, the favourite haunts of Monet, Turner and Canaletto, the long trips and the stay at home painters, and a warning about what a catalogue like this can and cannot tell us.
Circles: each depicted place, with area proportional to the paintings in the chosen genres and years that show it, coloured by the genre most of them belong to. A painting that shows several places counts at each. Lines (Painters' journeys): from each painter's place of birth to every place they painted, along the shortest route over the globe. Thumbnails are loaded from Wikimedia Commons as you open a place; each image keeps its own licence on Commons. Source: Wikidata, queried 1 November 2026 (CC0). Outlines: Natural Earth. Hillshade and relief © Esri; place names © OpenFreeMap, OpenMapTiles and OpenStreetMap contributors.
The single most painted place in the catalogue is a river. 228 paintings show the Seine, by 81 different painters, from 1637 onwards. Three Impressionists account for 35% of them: Claude Monet (38), Alfred Sisley (27) and Camille Pissarro (15). Paris itself comes second with 120, then two places in the north of Norway, Lofoten (97) and the county of Nordland (89), and Venice (95).
The 25 most painted places
Paintings that show each place, coloured by the kind of place. Hover for the painter and the collection with the most; click a bar to open the place on the map.
Further down the list come the Thames (58) and the Hudson (56), Dordrecht on the Dutch rivers (55), the Catskill Mountains (46), Vesuvius (44) and the white cliffs of Étretat (39). Water runs through the top of the list: 8 of the 25 most painted places are rivers, coasts or seas. Among the 100 most painted places, 30 are cities, towns or villages, 20 are single buildings, bridges or squares, 16 are rivers or canals, 13 are coasts, seas or islands and 13 are mountains, valleys or forests. The rest are whole regions, painted loosely enough that the catalogue names only a county, a state or a country.
What the 100 most painted places are
The 100 places with the most paintings, by kind (my classification, from their Wikidata descriptions), and the paintings that show them.
Most places are painted only once. 3,217 of the 4,740 places (68%) appear in a single painting, and only 155 appear in ten or more. The famous views pile up at the top of a very long tail.
Many painters had a home ground. Of Monet's 152 paintings in the catalogue, 38 show the Seine, 22 the English Channel and 19 Étretat on the Normandy coast. Sisley's favourite was also the Seine (27 of 80), followed by its tributary the Loing. Pissarro painted Pontoise 23 times and Paris in 39 of his 134, 11 of them views of the boulevard Montmartre. Cézanne returned to the Montagne Sainte-Victoire 17 times, Jan van Goyen to Dordrecht 24 times.
Painters' favourite places
For each painter, the share of their catalogued paintings that show their three most painted places (dark to light) and everywhere else (grey). Click a row to see that painter's places on the map.
J. M. W. Turner is the great exception, a painter of everywhere: his 52 paintings here show 56 different places, and Venice, with 13, appears more often than the Thames. Canaletto, the Venetian view painter, is in the catalogue as much for London as for his home city: 13 of his 32 paintings here show London and the Thames, 15 show Venice. His follower Francesco Guardi stayed put: 36 of his 37 show Venice. Three painters dominate the counts in a way no art historian would expect. Anna Boberg, a Swedish painter of the Lofoten Islands, has 223 paintings, more than anyone. Albert Bierstadt, painter of the American West, has 210, and Grandma Moses, the American folk painter, 175. Section 06 explains why.
Where was each painter born, and how far is that from what they painted? For 7,183 paintings (84% of the total) Wikidata gives both the painter's birthplace and a depicted place precise enough to measure. Half were painted more than 231 km from the painter's birthplace. 26% show somewhere within 50 km of it; 26% show somewhere more than 1,000 km away, and 11% more than 5,000 km.
Distance from the painter's birthplace, by period
Share of paintings in each distance band. A painting that shows several places takes the median distance. Paintings that name only a country, a region or a sea are left out. Hover a block.
The 1600s were the age of the painted home town. Half of the paintings from that century (51%) show a place within 50 km of the painter's birthplace, and the median distance is just 48 km: Dutch painters painting Dutch towns, rivers and churches. In the 1700s the median rises to 204 km, and in the 1800s, the century of railways, steamships and empires, to 331 km, with 31% of paintings made more than 1,000 km from home. After 1900 the median falls back to 232 km.
Median distance from birthplace, by country of birth
Countries of birth (today's borders) with at least 80 paintings and 20 painters. Bars: median distance (log scale). Hover for the share painted more than 1,000 km away.
Painters born in the Netherlands stayed closest: median 47 km, with 51% of their paintings within 50 km of their birthplace. Painters born in France: 175 km. Painters born in the United Kingdom went much further, median 407 km, with 44% of their paintings more than 1,000 km away, most often in the United States and Italy. German born painters went further still (887 km), and the Swedish median (1,004 km) is pulled up by Anna Boberg's trips north to Lofoten.
Furthest from home
Painters with at least 5 measurable paintings, by median distance from their birthplace. Click a row to draw their journeys.
The longest distances belong to painters of Australia and New Zealand born in Britain, and to Australians who painted in Britain: the antipodes are about as far from home as it is possible to be. Marianne North, the English botanical painter, is the great traveller of the catalogue: 94 measurable paintings with a median of 8,467 km from her birthplace, in 20 countries from Brazil and Chile to India, Japan and Australia. Distance is not always travel, though. Albert Bierstadt (median 8,140 km) was born in Germany and made his career in the United States; Camille Pissarro (6,815 km) was born on St Thomas in the Caribbean and painted mostly around Paris. At the other extreme, Maurice Utrillo, born in Paris, painted Montmartre: his median distance is 1 km.
Where painters looked changed over time. In the 1600s, 62% of the catalogued paintings show a place in what is now the Netherlands: the golden age of Dutch landscape, from Dordrecht and Haarlem to the dunes and rivers. In the 1700s the centre moved south: 37% of paintings show Italy, the Venice of Canaletto and Guardi and the Rome and Tivoli of the Grand Tour, and 23% show Britain. In the 1800s France takes over with 27%, led by the Seine, Paris and the Channel coast, and the United States rises to 14%, with the Hudson River School and the American West.
Where the painted places are, by period
Share of each period's paintings by the country (today's borders) of the place they show. A painting of several places is split between them. Undated paintings (572) are left out. Hover a block.
Italy's share falls from 37% in the 1700s to 8% in the 1800s, the Netherlands' from 62% in the 1600s to 3%. Norway climbs from about 1% before 1800 to 6% in the 1800s and 9% after 1900, its fjords and northern coasts painted by Norwegian Romantics and by visitors. Part of that rise is one painter: without Anna Boberg, Norway's share after 1900 is 6%.
This is a map of what has been catalogued in Wikidata, not of everything ever painted, and the catalogue is uneven. The 8,533 paintings are linked to 1,019 collections, but a few institutions dominate. The biggest, Sweden's Nationalmuseum, accounts for 6.6% of all mapped paintings, and 222 of its 566 are by Anna Boberg: that single catalogue is why Lofoten and Nordland rank third and fifth in the world. The ten biggest collections hold 30% of the paintings; half of all the links to collections point to just 37 of them (3.6%), while 488 collections are represented by a single painting.
The collections behind the map
The 15 collections with the most mapped paintings. Dark part of each bar: the paintings by its single most represented painter. Hover a bar.
The same pattern runs through the top of the place list. Of the 20 most painted places, 4 owe at least half their paintings to a single painter and 4 to a single collection. Windsor Castle's 56 paintings are mostly in the National Trust (50), and 28 of them have no named painter. Every one of the 64 paintings recorded as showing the state of Rio de Janeiro comes from one Brazilian image library, the Brasiliana Iconográfica. Grandma Moses's 175 paintings put a small town in upstate New York, Cambridge (28), among the 30 most painted places in the world.
One painter, one collection
For the 20 most painted places: the share of paintings by the leading painter (left) and held by the leading collection (right). Hover a row.
Other gaps are quieter. Only 18% of the mapped paintings have a Wikipedia article of their own, so most are ordinary museum records rather than famous works. 15% have no collection recorded. And a painting reaches this map only if someone has recorded which real place it shows; a landscape described only as showing "a river" or "trees" is invisible here. Geography is lopsided too: 80% of the paintings show places in Europe and 12% in North America, leaving 8% for the rest of the world. Where a museum has described its landscapes in detail, the map fills in; where none has, it stays empty. The map says as much about who has catalogued as about where painters went.
Data. I queried Wikidata through the QLever endpoint on 1 November 2026 for every painting (instance of "painting") with a genre of landscape, marine art or cityscape, or one of three related genres (religious art, genre painting, animal painting), and a "depicts" statement pointing to something with coordinates. That gave 18,249 rows for 10,321 paintings. I kept the 8,757 paintings with at least one of the three landscape genres and set aside 1,564 that came in only through a related genre, most of them religious scenes (966) and genre paintings (564).
Which "places" are places. "Depicts" catches anything with coordinates, not just places. I dropped 94 of the 4,834 depicted items: 3 with no point on the Earth (Wikidata's Moon has its coordinates on the lunar globe and appears in 138 moonlit seascapes and nocturnes), 70 events with a location (sea battles such as the Four Days' Battle and Trafalgar, fires, floods, world's fairs and, among the few religious landscapes, the crucifixion), 19 ships and 2 others (a statue held in a museum and a yacht club). The rule and the full list are in the code, and the build fails if a keyword scan of the labels finds an event or a ship that is not on the list. 224 paintings had no place left and are not mapped. The rest, 8,533 paintings, show 4,740 places, 11,176 painting and place pairs in all.
Distances and periods. Distances are great circle distances from the painter's place of birth to each depicted place; a painting that shows several places takes the median. Countries, first level regions, seas and oceans (156 places) are kept on the map but left out of the distances, because one point cannot stand for them. A river is a single point in Wikidata, usually its mouth or a point along it, so distances to rivers are rough. Countries are today's, from Natural Earth. Dates are Wikidata's inception year, known for 93% of paintings. Only 2 paintings in the query carry Wikidata's separate "coordinates of depicted place". The one in this set, Vermeer's View of Delft, has that point within 1.4 km of each place it is said to depict, which is reassuring but proves little.
What this is not. It is not a sample of the world's paintings, nor of any painter's work. It is the part of Wikidata that has been described in enough detail to map, and it inherits the choices of the museums, projects and volunteers who described it. Section 06 shows how much a few of them matter. Wikidata's records can be wrong; I have not corrected them, only removed what is clearly not a place.