We do not make Monet kits. Every one of our 39 designs is original artwork licensed from a living artist, and we do not reproduce anyone's paintings. If that is what brought you here, the answer comes first.
What is worth reading is why Monet is the single most difficult painter to convert into a numbered canvas, and what that tells you about the format. It is also worth knowing which of our designs carry the qualities people are usually after when they search for him.
What Monet was actually doing
Claude Monet lived from 1840 to 1926 and was the central figure of Impressionism. The movement took its name from one of his canvases: Impression, Sunrise, painted in 1872, which a critic seized on to mock the whole group. The name stuck.
From 1883 he lived at Giverny, where he built the water garden — the pond, the willows, the Japanese bridge — that produced the water lily paintings of his last decades. Because he died in 1926, his work is long out of copyright, which is why reproductions of it are everywhere.
The thing that matters here is his method. Monet painted with broken color: separate small strokes of unmixed color sitting side by side, left for the eye to combine at a distance. He also worked with almost no hard edges. A lily pad does not have an outline in a Monet; it has a boundary where one set of marks stops and another starts.
Why that resists numbering
A numbered canvas needs the exact opposite of both. It needs regions with clear boundaries and flat, even fill. Take a painting whose whole subject is the shimmer between colors and divide it into outlined patches, and you remove the thing that made it worth looking at. What you get is a diagram of a Monet.
Kits of his work do exist elsewhere, and this is why they tend to disappoint people who know the originals. It is not poor manufacturing. It is a genuine mismatch between the technique and the format.
The paintings that convert best into numbered canvases are ones built from defined shapes with clear tonal separation — which is why representational landscape and wildlife artwork is what this format has always used.
If you want to paint like Monet
Do not look for a kit. Three things get you closer than any template will:
- Do not mix on the palette. Put two related colors side by side on the canvas and let them read as one from across the room. Step back constantly, because that is the only distance at which it works.
- Paint the light, not the object. Monet painted the same haystacks and the same cathedral facade over and over, because the subject was the light on it at that hour rather than the thing itself.
- Keep every edge soft. The moment you outline something, the effect collapses.
Our piece on the water lilies goes further into what he was after in that series.
The designs that carry the same qualities
If what appeals is water, reflected light and gardens rather than Monet's name specifically, three of ours come closest.
Still Waters is a house by a lake with pink blossom and a waterbird, and the reflection in the water is most of the painting. Cosmos From the Garden is pink cosmos in a glass jar, pale and chalky, and it is the quietest thing in the catalog. October puts autumn flowers in pitchers with more color than anything else we make.
Moonlight Bay and Away From it All are both flat, calm water with a treeline reflected in it, which is the Giverny effect at a different temperature.
The other route
If the appeal is a garden you actually know rather than one in Normandy, a custom canvas made from your own photograph is the honest version of it. Somebody's garden, in the light it had on the day you photographed it, is closer to what Monet was doing than a copy of his pond would be.
The full catalog is in one collection.
