I’m sure you know what this is – this is hours of pleasure and fantasy – this is a painting by numbers masterpiece.
It is also a highly collectible period piece circa 1950, which makes it the perfect piece to go with your mid-century furniture, if you like a large helping of witty irony on display.
You remember Painting by Numbers don’t you? A set contained a canvas with numbered patches outlined in grey, some pods of numbered colours and a couple of paint brushes, plus a colour copy of the final image once you’d followed the instructions and filled each space with the right colour.
Don’t laugh because the craze has come of age ever since the Smithsonian created a whole exhibition around the phenomenon in 2001.
The said: ‘Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s revisits the hobby from the vantage point of the artists and entrepreneurs who created the popular paint kits, the cultural critics who reviled them, and the hobbyists who happily completed them and hung them in their homes. Although many critics saw “number painting” as a symbol of the mindless conformity gripping 1950s America, paint by number had a peculiarly American virtue. It invited people who had never before held a paintbrush to enter a world of art and creativity.’
The hobby is attributed to Max S. Klein, owner of the Palmer Paint Company of Detroit, Michigan, and to artist Dan Robbins, who conceived the idea and created many of the initial paintings. Palmer Paint began distributing paint-by-number kits under the Craft Master label in 1951. By 1954, Palmer had sold some twelve million kits. Popular subjects ranged from landscapes, seascapes, and pets to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Paint-kit box tops proclaimed, “Every man a Rembrandt!”
Today some people collect around a theme, for instance dogs and cats.
Others just want a general decorative effect – maybe a certain colour scheme like in this
New York, retro-styled kitchen.
And now there’s even a museum dedicated to the ‘art’: In 2008, a private collector in Massachusetts assembled over 6,000 paint by number works dating back to the 1950s from eBay and other American collectors to create the Paint By Number Museum, the world’s largest online archive of paint by number works.
Perhaps it’s time to get cracking on yours – I fancy starting a bird themed clutch
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