Lists of famous paintings to copy tend to rank them by fame, which tells you nothing useful. Difficulty in reproducing a painting has almost nothing to do with how important it is and almost everything to do with four specific properties, none of which are obvious from looking at a thumbnail.
Here are the four, and then ten well-known paintings ranked from most forgiving to least.
The four things that make a painting hard to copy
1. A compressed value range
Value means how light or dark something is, independent of its color. When a painting keeps almost everything within a narrow band, the differences between one area and the next become very small, and small differences are hard to see, hard to match and glaringly obvious when you get one wrong.
how hard it really is answers the general question, which has less to do with the picture than most people expect.
This is the single biggest source of difficulty, and it is invisible in reproduction. A painting can look bright and cheerful and still be brutally hard for this reason.
2. Soft edges
A hard edge tells you exactly where one thing stops and the next begins. A soft edge does not, and copying it means deciding for yourself where the boundary is, several hundred times, consistently. Impressionist painting is built almost entirely from soft edges, which is why so much of it is far harder to reproduce than it looks.
3. Faces
People are extraordinarily good at reading faces and hopeless at reading almost anything else with the same precision. A tree can be a little wrong and still be a tree. A mouth a little wrong is a different person, or nobody. Any painting whose subject is a face is difficult, regardless of how simple the rest of it looks.
4. The surface being the subject
In some paintings the marks are the point. Thick ridges of paint, visible strokes, a texture you could feel. That can be imitated with a brush and cannot be reproduced at all on a flat numbered canvas, where every region is filled smoothly by definition.
Ten paintings, easiest first
1. The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Hokusai, around 1831
The most forgiving famous image there is, and for a structural reason: it is a woodblock print, so it was made as flat areas of color with drawn outlines from the start. Nothing has to be translated. Strong contrast, a small palette, and every boundary already decided.
2. The Scream, Munch, 1893
Broad swirling bands of orange and blue, hard contours, a limited palette and enormous contrast. The face is stylized rather than modeled, which sidesteps the usual problem with faces entirely.
3. Almond Blossom, Van Gogh, 1890
Van Gogh's flattest painting, and the one influenced most directly by Japanese prints. A single turquoise ground, branches drawn as clear dark contours, blossoms with defined edges. Very little depends on the texture of the paint.
4. Harmony in Red, Matisse, 1908
Large flat areas of color, decorative pattern, almost no modeling anywhere. Matisse deliberately removed depth from it, which is exactly what makes it straightforward to reproduce.
5. The Starry Night, Van Gogh, 1889
Middle of the ranking, and interesting because it is easier to copy than it is to copy well. The palette is narrow and the swirls are already organized into readable bands, so the drawing is manageable. What you cannot reproduce is the impasto, and with the impasto gone the sky stops turning. You can read more about how it was made in our piece on The Starry Night.
6. The Kiss, Klimt, 1907 to 1908
Two paintings in one. The gold robes are pattern work, tedious but not difficult, since everything has a hard edge. The two faces and the hands are modeled conventionally and are much harder than everything around them. Most amateur copies fall apart in exactly that small area.
That is the pattern generally: the hardest kits are hard in one small area rather than all over.
7. Bouquet of Chrysanthemums, Renoir, 1881
Strong local color helps, and the flowers have enough contrast to be readable. What makes it awkward is that Renoir's petals dissolve at their edges. There is a great deal of deciding to do about where each bloom ends.
8. Sunflowers, Van Gogh, 1888 onward
Almost always described as a beginner painting, and it is not. The whole picture lives inside a narrow band of yellows from lemon to ochre, which is the compressed-value problem in its purest form. Beautiful, and unforgiving of any error. Our piece on Van Gogh paintings on numbered canvas goes into why.
9. Water Lilies, Monet
Frequently recommended to beginners, and close to the worst possible choice. There are no contours at all. Water, reflection, sky and lily pad all sit within a few steps of each other in value, and the entire painting is soft edges. Three of the four difficulty factors at once. Our article on the Water Lilies covers what Monet was actually doing.
10. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Vermeer, around 1665
The hardest on this list, and it is routinely described as easy because the background is plain and the composition is simple. The background is not the painting. The painting is a face lit by a single soft source, with the most gradual modeling in Western art, and there is no way to fake it. The Mona Lisa sits in the same category for the same reason: Leonardo's sfumato is a deliberate refusal to put an edge anywhere.
It is also the most parodied painting in history, and the famous parodies and why they exist is a longer story than the joke suggests.
Why the same dozen paintings keep appearing
It is not only fame. Copyright generally lasts for the artist's lifetime plus seventy years, so the artists whose work can be freely reproduced are those who died long enough ago. That is why Van Gogh, Monet, Vermeer, Hokusai and Klimt appear on every list, and why Picasso, who died in 1973, does not.
What we make instead
Ledgebay does not sell reproductions of famous paintings. Our catalog is licensed original artwork, which means every design was painted for this rather than adapted to it, and that shows in how the canvases divide up.
Applying the four factors above to our own catalog is a useful exercise. Golden Hour looks gentle and is one of the harder ones, because of the compressed values. Away From it All looks involved and is one of the easier ones, because the shapes are large and well separated. The full range is worth looking at with those four questions in mind rather than by subject.
And if what draws you to a famous painting is the idea of having a picture that means something on your wall, there is a more direct route. Custom Paint by Numbers builds a canvas from a photograph of your own, which is the one image nobody else has.
