Van Gogh died in 1890, so his work has been out of copyright for well over a century. That is why there are more Van Gogh paint by numbers kits in the world than of any other painter, and why the quality of them varies so wildly.
Ledgebay does not make one. We license original artwork rather than reproduce famous paintings, so there is no Starry Night on our shelf. What we can offer is the part nobody else writes about: which of his paintings actually survive being converted into numbered regions, and which ones fall apart in the process.
The problem with numbering a Van Gogh
Start with the honest difficulty, because it applies to all of them.
With most paintings, the image and the surface are separable things. You can flatten a Constable or a Vermeer into regions of color and still have most of the picture. With Van Gogh you cannot, because the brushwork is the painting. The thick directional strokes, the ridges of paint standing off the canvas, the way a sky is built from hundreds of separate marks: that is the content, not the decoration.
A numbered canvas flattens all of it. What you end up with is the composition and the color, which is a real and worthwhile thing, but it is a version of the painting rather than the painting. Go in expecting that and you will enjoy it. Go in expecting the original and you will be disappointed by something that was never possible.
Which paintings survive it, and which do not
Almond Blossom, 1890 — the best fit by some distance
Painted for his brother Theo and sister-in-law Jo when their son was born, and openly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints. That influence is exactly why it converts well: it is deliberately flat. A single turquoise ground, dark branches drawn in clear contours, white blossoms with defined edges. Almost nothing depends on impasto. If you want a Van Gogh that will look right as a numbered canvas, this is it.
Irises, 1889 — nearly as good
Painted in his first week at the asylum at Saint-Rémy, and again shaped by Japanese prints. Strong contour drawing, and large distinct areas of color: blue-violet blooms, green sword leaves, red-orange earth. The boundaries are already there in the original, so the conversion has something to find. He thought of it as a study rather than a finished work, which did not stop it selling for close to 54 million dollars in 1987.
Café Terrace at Night, 1888 — works well
His first painting with a starry sky behind it, and a good candidate for numbering because the architecture gives it hard edges. A large flat wash of lamp-lit yellow terrace against a deep blue sky, with clear divisions between building, awning, pavement and figures. The café is still on the Place du Forum in Arles and has been renamed after him.
The Starry Night, 1889 — better than you would expect, with a catch
Painted from the window of his room at Saint-Rémy, combining what he could see with a village he largely invented. It converts surprisingly well, because the palette is narrow and the swirls are already organized into distinct bands of value that a conversion can follow.
The catch is the one described above, and it bites harder here than anywhere else. Flattened, the swirls become shapes rather than movement, and what made the sky feel like it was turning is gone. It will read as an accurate flat version of a famous image. It will not feel like standing in front of the painting.
Sunflowers, 1888 to 1889 — much harder than it looks
There is not one Sunflowers but a series of canvases, and the reason they are so admired is exactly the reason they are miserable to number: the whole picture lives inside a narrow band of yellows, from lemon to ochre to brown-gold, with very little contrast anywhere.
On a numbered canvas that means a dozen pots that look nearly identical, printed numbers sitting on pale ground where they are hard to read, and a single wrong region showing up immediately. It is the same difficulty our own Golden Hour design has, for the same reason. Beautiful, and not a first project.
Wheatfields and cypresses — generally the weakest
The wheatfield paintings are almost entirely surface. Take away the strokes and what remains is bands of gold and green with a dark vertical, which is not much of a picture. Wheat Field with Cypresses, bought privately in 1993 and given to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a magnificent painting and a poor numbered canvas.
The self-portraits — hardest of all
Faces need many closely related values to read as faces, and Van Gogh's flesh tones are famously strange in isolation: greens, ochres and pinks that only make sense in company. Convert that into flat regions and every small error is a distortion of a face, which the eye catches faster than any other kind of mistake.
A short and accurate life
Worth setting down plainly, because a lot of what circulates about him is wrong.
He was born in 1853 in Groot-Zundert in the Netherlands, the son of a Protestant minister. His mother drew and painted watercolors. At twenty he was working for the art dealers Goupil in Southampton Street, London, and by 1876 he was an assistant teacher in Ramsgate. He worked as a lay preacher among miners in the Borinage in Belgium, and only committed to painting in his late twenties. The Potato Eaters, his first major work, was painted in 1885, when he was thirty-two.
In 1888 he moved to Arles and, for a few months, shared a house with Paul Gauguin. The friendship went badly. After a violent argument that December, Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear. The following May he admitted himself voluntarily to the asylum at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole in Saint-Rémy, where he painted around 150 canvases in a year, including The Starry Night and Irises.
He moved to Auvers-sur-Oise in May 1890, under the care of Dr Gachet, on Camille Pissarro's recommendation. He died there in July, at 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Wheatfield with Crows was long described as his final painting, though which canvas came last is now disputed.
The whole working life was about ten years. Nearly all of the paintings anyone can name were made in the last three.
If it is the pictures you want
We have written about individual works elsewhere, with the paintings themselves rather than kits: The Starry Night and the self-portraits both go further into how they were made.
And it is worth naming the honest difference in what you are buying. A famous-painting kit gives you a copy of a picture the world already has. The alternative is a canvas of something only you have: Custom Paint by Numbers builds a numbered canvas from a photograph of your own. Neither is better in the abstract. They are answers to different questions.
If it is the light and the color you were really after rather than the specific painting, the landscape designs are the closest thing in our own catalog, and they were painted to be painted.
