For about a decade in the middle of the twentieth century, a large share of the art hanging in American homes came out of a box with numbered paint pots in it. That is a genuinely strange fact, and it is why 1950s paint by numbers still has a hold on people.
Here is where it came from, what gives those kits their particular look, and how to get it on your own wall now.
Where It Started
The format was conceived in 1949 at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit. Max Klein, who ran the company, wanted a product that would sell more paint to ordinary households. He put the problem to Dan Robbins, who worked there designing packaging.
Robbins's answer was a canvas printed with numbered regions and a tray of paints matched to them. He said the idea came from Leonardo da Vinci, who was supposed to have handed numbered sections to apprentices to fill in — an anecdote Robbins told for the rest of his life, and one worth treating as a good story rather than documented history.
The kits went out under the Craft Master name. The first big order nearly finished the company off: the story from inside is that the paint sets went out mismatched to the canvases and the whole run came back off the shelves.
Then It Took Over
It recovered, and then some. By the mid-1950s Craft Master was selling in the millions, and competitors were copying the format as fast as they could print it, which is why so many different brand names from that period turn up at estate sales today.
Early subjects were florals, landscapes, religious scenes and the occasional famous painting. The boom faded by the end of the decade as the novelty wore off, though the kits never disappeared entirely.
There is a longer account, including what the old boxes are worth now, in our piece on vintage paint by numbers.
The Part Nobody Mentions: The Critics Hated It
Paint by numbers arrived at the same moment as Abstract Expressionism, and it was treated as everything the art world was against: mass-produced, prescriptive, and cheerfully middlebrow. The argument about whether it counted as art was loud and public.
The best evidence that it mattered is that Andy Warhol made paintings of it. His Do It Yourself series of 1962 reproduced paint-by-number canvases at gallery scale, part-filled, numbers showing. Whether that was a joke at the format's expense or at the critics' has been argued over ever since.
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History eventually mounted an exhibition on the subject — Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s — which is a fair measure of how the argument turned out.
What Gives 1950s Kits Their Look
If you want the period feel rather than just an old box, it comes down to four things:
- Flat, unblended color. Each section its own tone, edges visible. The blending that modern painters use to hide the format is exactly what a period piece should not have.
- A limited palette. Twenty or so colors rather than forty, so the whole picture holds together.
- Saturated, slightly unreal color. Skies bluer than skies, autumn oranges hotter than autumn. Mid-century commercial printing pushed everything up.
- Wholesome subjects. Cabins, harbours, horses, big American cars, families on holiday. A world without anything difficult in it, which is much of the appeal.
How to Get the Look Today
Three routes, and it is worth being plain about which we can help with.
Buy an original. Unopened Craft Master boxes and finished period paintings turn up constantly on auction sites, at estate sales and in thrift shops. A sealed 1950s kit is a collector's item and opening one costs most of its value — buy a finished painting if you want to hang something, and an unopened box only if you want to keep it.
Paint a modern kit in a period way. Choose a traditional subject, then deliberately do not blend: keep the sections flat, let the edges show, and resist softening anything. Most guidance, ours included, tells you to blend at the joins so a finished kit does not look like a kit. For this, do the opposite.
To be straightforward: we do not currently sell 1950s-styled designs. Our catalog is licensed traditional American artwork — cabins, waterfowl, florals, landscapes — which is adjacent to that world without being of it. The Road Home, Apple Harvest and Northwoods Retreat are the closest in feeling, and the full catalog is here.
Use a photograph from the period. The most direct route to a genuinely 1950s picture is a 1950s picture. Custom Paint by Numbers converts a photograph you upload into a numbered canvas printed in the United States — a family car, a holiday, a wedding, a house that is no longer there. Photographs of that era convert well, because the film stock was already high in contrast and low in fine detail. Finished ones are in the customer gallery.
Does Painting a Kit Make You an Artist?
The argument the 1950s critics had, in miniature, and it is worth answering honestly rather than flattering anyone.
A kit hands you the composition, the drawing and the colors — which are three of the four hard things. What is left to you is brush control, patience and finish, and those are real skills that transfer to a blank canvas.
So: painting a kit does not make you a painter, and it does teach you something a painter needs. Plenty of people have started here and gone on, and plenty have stayed and been perfectly happy. The 1950s buyers seem not to have worried about it much, which is probably the right attitude.
If you do want to go further, our acrylic landscape tutorial starts from a blank canvas, and learning to draw covers the part a kit leaves out.
