# Which famous painting was most hated when it was first shown?

> Booed, guarded, rejected, painted over. Every work here got a hostile reception first and a museum wall later.

*By YPB Team · Published September 17, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/which-famous-painting-was-most-hated-when-it-was-first-shown*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Olympia** — score 1000/1000
   Manet's 1865 nude drew such abuse the Salon posted guards beside it.
2. **The Gross Clinic** — score 622/1000
   Eakins' 1875 surgery scene was refused by the 1876 Centennial art show as too gruesome.
3. **A Burial at Ornans** — score 622/1000
   Courbet's 1850 village funeral, attacked for painting peasants at history-painting scale.
4. **Nocturne in Black and Gold** — score 466/1000
   Ruskin accused Whistler of flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.
5. **Rodin's Monument to Balzac** — score 466/1000
   Commissioned in 1891, rejected by the writers' society in 1898 and not cast in bronze until 1939.
6. **A Sunday on La Grande Jatte** — score 363/1000
   Seurat's dots were mocked as a mechanical trick at the 1886 exhibition.
7. **The Last Judgment** — score 363/1000
   Michelangelo's nudes were condemned and later painted over with drapery.
8. **The Third of May 1808** — score 363/1000
   Goya's execution scene was kept out of sight for decades after it was painted.
9. **Impression, Sunrise** — score 363/1000
   A critic said wallpaper was more finished, and accidentally named a movement.
10. **Rude Descending a Staircase** — score 363/1000
   The New York Evening Sun's 1913 cartoon of the painting that scandalised the Armory Show.
11. **The Raft of the Medusa** — score 363/1000
   Gericault's 1819 shipwreck was read as an attack on the French navy.
12. **Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe** — score 0/1000
   Manet's clothed men and naked woman scandalised the 1863 Salon des Refuses.
13. **Fountain** — score 0/1000
   Duchamp's signed urinal was rejected by the very show that promised to reject nothing.
14. **The Night Watch** — score 0/1000
   Rembrandt's group portrait reportedly left several paying sitters unhappy.

Tags: art, classics, paintings, scandals, critics