Paint by number is a Detroit invention, and it is younger than most people assume. It was conceived in 1949, went on sale in 1951, and by 1954 had sold twelve million kits. Almost everything people mean by the word vintage in this hobby traces back to that five-year run.
How it started
Max Klein ran the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit and needed a reason for households to buy more paint. Dan Robbins, a young commercial artist working for him, proposed a hobby kit: a printed canvas divided into numbered regions, with a matching numbered pot for each one. Robbins said the idea came to him from a story about Leonardo da Vinci handing out numbered patterns to his apprentices.
The first design, made in 1949, was called Abstract No. 1, and it was not abstract in the way the name suggests. It was a still life of a water pitcher and a platter of fruit, with every color mixed and numbered by hand. It did not sell. Klein and Robbins concluded that the buying public wanted landscapes, animals and familiar scenes rather than anything that looked like modern art, and the catalog turned in that direction almost immediately.
The first six kits went out under the Craft Master name and were shown at Macy's in New York in March 1951. The line was marketed with the slogan Every Man a Rembrandt, which tells you exactly how it was pitched and exactly why the art world reacted the way it did.
The boom, and the backlash
Twelve million kits in three years is a genuine cultural event, and it produced the argument that still follows the format around. Critics treated it as the end of taste: painting reduced to filling in shapes, art made by instruction. Buyers treated it as the first time painting had ever been offered to them on terms they could accept.
The clearest illustration of how far it reached happened in the White House. Thomas Stephens, President Eisenhower's appointments secretary, handed out around twenty kits to cabinet members and Oval Office visitors and asked for the finished paintings back. Completed canvases came in from Nelson Rockefeller, from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, from former president Herbert Hoover and from Henry Cabot Lodge. In 1956 they were hung together in a West Wing corridor outside the Cabinet Room.
The argument was eventually settled in the format's favor, in the most institutional way possible. After Max Klein died in 1993, his daughter donated the Palmer Paint archives to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, and in 2001 the museum mounted an exhibition about the fad and the class argument underneath it, running until January 2002.
What collectors actually look for
If you are buying an original mid-century kit rather than a painting made from one, a few things separate a real find from a box of old cardboard.
- The brand and the box. Craft Master boxes from the 1950s are the ones most sought after, and condition of the printed box matters as much as what is inside it.
- Unstarted versus finished. These are two different markets. A sealed, unpainted kit is collected as an object. A completed painting from the period is collected as folk art, and the ones people pay for tend to be the ones where the painter went off script.
- Matched pairs. Many designs were sold as two-canvas sets meant to hang together, and a split pair is worth considerably less than an intact one.
- The subjects that defined the era. Last Supper reproductions, big-eyed animals, harbor scenes, horses, ballerinas and autumn landscapes turn up again and again, which is exactly why they read as period pieces now.
One practical warning. If you buy an unopened kit from the 1950s expecting to paint it, expect the paint to be unusable. Small pots of oil paint sealed for seventy years generally set solid or separate beyond rescue. Buy an original to keep, and buy a current kit to paint.
What vintage means when you are buying a kit today
Used about a modern kit, vintage is a description of style rather than age. It means representational painting in a traditional idiom: warm palettes, recognizable places, a certain amount of nostalgia built into the subject.
Our own vintage collection is that kind of grouping, and it is worth being plain about what it is. These are thirteen current designs chosen for a traditional look. They are not reproductions of 1950s kits and they are not old stock. The artwork is licensed original painting, printed now. Sealed period boxes are a different thing again, and what an unused 1950s kit is actually worth surprises most people.
Apple Harvest is the closest thing in the catalog to where the whole idea started, a still life of bushel baskets and a white bowl of apples, which is not far off the pitcher and fruit that Robbins first drew. Christmas Magic sits in the other great mid-century tradition, the snowbound cottage with the lights on, which was a staple of the period catalogs and has never really gone away.
The one thing the 1950s kits could not do
Every kit in that boom was a design somebody else chose. You painted what Palmer Paint printed, and the appeal was partly that the decision had been made for you.
The change since is that the canvas can now be built from your own photograph. Custom Paint by Numbers takes a picture you send and divides it into numbered regions, so the subject can be the house you grew up in or the dog you had, rather than a harbor scene from a catalog. The mechanic Robbins invented is unchanged. What has changed is who picks the picture. The format itself has barely moved, and what a numbered canvas actually is explains why it survived.
If you want to see how that looks in practice, the customer gallery is a hundred or so photographs of finished canvases sent in by the people who painted them. It is, in its way, the same thing Thomas Stephens was doing in 1956.
