The paint by numbers craze started in the 1950s. It had a rough beginning, then it became a phenomenon, and millions of kits have sold since. The hobby is still going strong today. Here is a look at vintage paint by numbers, what the old kits are worth, and where to find them.
Collecting is one of the most active corners of the hobby. There is a real market of buyers and sellers, so you can sell an old kit or buy a vintage one, opened or still sealed, and the prices run higher than most people expect.
Can You Sell Old Paint by Numbers?
When painting by numbers launched in the 1950s, nobody expected it to become what it did. Within a few years it was ordinary for the art hanging in an American living room to have come out of a box with numbered paint pots in it.
Unopened kits are the ones collectors want. Craft Master boxes from the 1950s through the 1990s turn up in a wide range of conditions, and condition is most of the price.
What a kit fetches comes down to three things: how rare the design is, how old it is, and whether the box has ever been opened. A sealed floral or a television tie-in from the 1970s tends to sit around $50. An unopened oil kit from the early 1960s has been listed near $150. The genuinely early ones are hard to find at all, and sealed 1950s kits have sold for four figures.
Finished paintings from that era sell too, though they trade more on charm than on rarity, and a signature on the front does not hurt.
The Paint by Numbers Museum
Paint by numbers has a real place in American history, and there are two good places to go and look at it.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History mounted an exhibit called Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s, which took the kits from three directions at once: the people who made them, the people who painted them, and the critics who were appalled by them. The online version is still up and is worth an hour.
Separately, a private collector assembled more than 6,000 vintage kits, bought from online auctions and local sellers, into the Paint by Numbers Museum. It can be browsed online and holds work going back to the earliest 1950s boxes. It is the largest collection of its kind anywhere.
The Very First Paint by Numbers Kit
The format was invented at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit. Max Klein ran the company and Dan Robbins drew the early designs, sold under the Craft Master name. Robbins said the idea came from Leonardo da Vinci, who is supposed to have handed out numbered sections to his apprentices.
The launch nearly finished it off. The story from inside the company is that the first large order, for the stores that became Kmart, went out with the paint sets mismatched to the canvases, and the whole run had to come back off the shelves.
It recovered. The first good years were florals, landscapes and religious subjects, and once the format proved itself the copies arrived quickly, which is why so many different brand names from that period turn up at estate sales.
A Craft Master box from the peak years now runs around $100, and that is a collector's price rather than a painter's. Opening one costs you most of its value.
A Treasured Piece of Art History
There was a stretch when a large share of American homes had a paint by numbers canvas hanging somewhere in them, usually in a frame the painter chose themselves. The scale of that is easy to forget now.
The hobby is smaller than it was in 1955, but it has not gone anywhere, and the reason people come back to it has shifted. It is less about filling a wall and more about what an evening with a brush does for you. The 1950s buyers likely knew that too and had no particular language for it.
If you want to own a piece of that history, vintage kits are all over the auction sites, and the hunt is half the pleasure. If you would rather paint than collect, the modern version of a 1950s living-room scene is a canvas made from your own photograph — the house, the truck, the dog — printed and numbered in the United States. Finished ones are in the customer gallery, and there is more on the period in our piece on 1950s paint by numbers kits.
Resources
Smithsonian Institution — Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s
