Why the Masterpieces Are Holding Their Noses: A Short, Slightly True History of Art Parody
We get asked the same question a lot, usually after a long silent moment in someone's entryway: "But… why is she holding her nose?"
The honest answer is: at some point, someone looked at the Mona Lisa — actually looked — and decided she'd probably smelled something nobody wanted to know about. We did the same to Van Gogh, to Vermeer, to Whistler's mother, and to a handful of others. That is, in one phrase, the Balthazart take on art parody: a small gesture that brings greatness back down to eye level.
But underneath the joke, there's a real tradition. Parody didn't start with us, and it doesn't stop at a peg on a nose.
Art parody is as old as art itself
We tend to picture masterpieces the way we see them today: behind thick glass, in a silent room, with a red rope two metres away. That's not their natural state. Originally, almost every one of those paintings made someone laugh — a neighbour of the artist, a patron who didn't like his portrait, an engraver who turned it into a caricature the next week.
- When Leonardo finished the Mona Lisa, his contemporaries found her odd — that ambiguous smile was almost a defect. The earliest copies poking fun at her expression date from his century, not ours.
- In 1919, Marcel Duchamp drew a moustache on her and titled it L.H.O.O.Q. (read it aloud in French — that's the whole joke). It wasn't a prank: it was one of the founding gestures of modern art.
- Andy Warhol silkscreened Mona Lisas by the dozen. Banksy painted his with a rocket launcher. Every generation has another go. Why? Because a masterpiece only really exists once people want to mess with it.
Seen this way, our Mona Lisa holding her nose isn't a break with tradition. It's the next entry in the queue.
The nose-pinch: a small theory
Why holding the nose specifically? Three reasons, from the prosaic to the slightly poetic.
1. Their century smelled. Before 1850, Paris, Florence, Amsterdam — same story (sewers, horses, lead-based oil paint, absinthe). Drop Leonardo, Vermeer or Vincent into a properly ventilated modern living room and they would weep with gratitude. The nose-pinch is just their working conditions, documented.
2. The gesture breaks the pose. All these portraits share one thing: gravity. The arched brow, the placed hand, the eye turned toward eternity. Add a clothes-peg, and suddenly the sitter becomes someone who shares your flat — a flatmate who has just learned the downstairs neighbour is cooking cabbage.
3. The wall it hangs on stops pretending. A classical poster above a toilet bowl is décor taking itself seriously. A Van Gogh holding his nose in the same spot? That's décor that knows where it is. You stop pretending your loo is a gallery; you acknowledge it has a job to do, and you make it a shared joke.
That third layer — the one no visitor says out loud — is why our customers tend to hang these posters specifically in the rooms where museum-grade silence has no business being.
The big five: who's pinching, and why
Our series isn't a catalogue, it's a cast. Each face holds the peg for a specific reason — and each finds its own wall.
Leonardo da Vinci — the Mona Lisa
She's our historical best-seller, and there's no mystery: the Mona Lisa is the most recognisable painting in the world, and the most copied. To touch her is to nod to all of image history at once. The parody works because it's also a tribute: you don't poke fun at a painting you don't love.
- Mona Lisa holding her nose — the entryway wall. The poster that tells your guests, the moment they step in, that you don't take décor too literally.
Vincent van Gogh — the self-portrait
Brief detour to Vermeer above — back to him in a second. First, Vincent.
Van Gogh painted over thirty self-portraits, and most of them share a fixed stare that lingers. People have explained it with exhaustion, alcohol, absinthe — all things that, incidentally, smell strong. The theory holds.
- Portrait of Van Gogh holding his nose — particularly good in a reading nook or above a writing desk. The gaze stays exactly as piercing as it was; only the context has changed.
Johannes Vermeer — Girl with a Pearl Earring
Along with the Mona Lisa, the most-filmed face of the 20th century (thanks to Scarlett Johansson and Tracy Chevalier's novel). The painting is a mystery nobody has solved: who was she? We don't know. What we do know is that she's turning around — and that she looks like she has just caught a whiff of something from the next room.
- Girl with a Pearl Earring holding her nose — a favourite in bathrooms. Vermeer's chiaroscuro works just as well over tiles as over museum walls.
James Whistler — the Mother
The painting's official title is Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler refused to treat it as a portrait — for him, it was a study in composition). The world immediately renamed it "Whistler's Mother" and turned it into the universal symbol of the stern mother who knows. If anyone in this gallery has earned the right to hold her nose with dignity, it's her.
- Whistler's Mother holding her nose — outstanding in a kitchen, next to a hob. The disapproving look comes included.
Grant Wood — American Gothic
The most-parodied painting in American history — to the point that the farmer with the pitchfork became a meme before the word existed. Wood painted it in 1930, during the Great Depression; he himself called it a piece of humour (a reading museums rarely volunteer). Putting a clothes-peg on this couple is just making the memo legible.
- American Gothic parody — a joy in a corridor, because you pass them in passing, exactly like inside the painting.
And the presidents? The kings?
We have the same series for the faces everyone recognises the moment they enter a room — usually framed in an office, on a bill, or at the back of an archive clip. A few favourites:
- George Washington or Theodore Roosevelt for desks and video-call corners. Guaranteed ten seconds of smile at the start of each meeting.
- Winston Churchill or Henry VIII for dry British-humour households.
All of them, strangely, look as if they've always been wanting to hold their nose. The parody is just revealing what the official paintings politely concealed.
What we're actually trying to do
We sell posters. We also have, in theory, a slightly more specific mission:
- Make a museum portable and unsacred. Many of our customers write to say "I'd never hung a classical painting on the wall — this one, yes." There's a door into art that a museum can't open, because it runs through a joke.
- Turn a serious room into a living one. A parody above a toilet bowl is a small sign saying we laugh here, together. That matters more than people think.
- Keep the craft visible. None of our posters is randomly generated. The clothes-peg is hand-drawn, integrated pixel by pixel, and the colours of the original painting are respected. If we allow ourselves a joke, we don't allow ourselves sloppiness.
If this article made you smile and you're wondering where to begin, the full parody collection is sorted by style (painters / presidents / animals / scene) and by wall (entryway, hallway, office, bathroom, loo). And if you have a masterpiece in mind that ought to be pinched next, write to us — we read everything.
Browse the gallery of pinched masterpieces → All posters