Unused paint by numbers kits from the 1950s still turn up — boxed, sealed, paint capsules intact — and they have become genuinely collectable. This is where they came from, who painted the originals, and what to check before buying one.
How paint by numbers started
In 1949 Dan Robbins was a commercial artist at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, and his employer Max Klein gave him a straightforward brief: find a way to sell more paint.
Robbins' own account credits Leonardo da Vinci for the idea. He had read that Leonardo set apprentices numbered patterns to work through, indicating which color belonged in which area, as a way of teaching underpainting. Whether the historical detail is exactly right matters less than what Robbins did with it: he painted a picture, laid a transparent sheet over it, traced the shapes, numbered each one to a color, and had a product.
Every Man a Rembrandt
That was the slogan on the early packaging, and it captures the pitch precisely. The most prestigious thing in art, available to anyone with an evening and a brush.
Robbins' first design, Abstract No. 1, he described as "a little Braque, a little Picasso, and a lot of Robbins." It did not sell. Retailers wanted recognizable scenes, and the range moved quickly toward landscapes, horses, seascapes and still lifes — the subjects the category has largely stayed with ever since.
A post-war phenomenon
The timing was ideal. Post-war America had more leisure time and more disposable income than before, and a hobby that produced something to hang on the wall fitted the moment exactly.
By the mid-1950s the company — renamed Craft Master as sales grew — had sold many millions of kits, and the finished paintings were everywhere. Members of Eisenhower's staff famously hung their own paint by numbers canvases in the West Wing.
It also attracted real contempt from critics, who took the kits as evidence of mass-produced taste replacing genuine creativity. The Smithsonian later revisited exactly that argument in an exhibition on the phenomenon and what it said about American taste in the 1950s. The kits outlasted the criticism.
The artists behind the designs
The designs were painted by working artists, which is the part most often forgotten.
Adam Grant is the most striking case. Born in Poland, he survived Auschwitz, emigrated to the United States in 1950, and answered Craft Master's call for artists shortly after arriving. Robbins wrote warmly about him in his memoir. Grant went on to a respected career as a painter in his own right, and a man who had been in a camp eight years earlier spent the 1950s designing the pictures that hung in American living rooms.
Robbins himself kept painting for the company for years, and his work moved steadily from the abstract toward the naturalistic — landscapes and scenic subjects of the kind that filled magazines at the time.
Buying an unused vintage kit
Sealed kits from the 1950s and 60s come up regularly on auction and marketplace sites. A few things are worth knowing before you spend money.
The paint is usually the problem
Early kits used oil paint, supplied in small capsules or pots. Seventy-year-old oil paint has often skinned or hardened. Sometimes it can be revived with the appropriate medium; often it cannot.
Later kits, from roughly the 1970s onward, tend to be acrylic. Acrylic that has cured is finished — nothing brings it back, because the polymer has fused irreversibly. Our guide to reviving dried paint explains how to tell the difference.
So decide what you are buying it for. As an object to keep boxed, the paint hardly matters. As something to actually paint, assume you will be sourcing your own colors and matching them to the printed key.
What to check
- Completeness. Canvases or boards, paints, brush, color key and instruction sheet. The color key is the one that matters most — without it the numbers on the canvas mean nothing, and it is the piece most often missing.
- The box. On a sealed kit the box is much of the value. Look for water staining, crushed corners and fading.
- The canvas or board. Early kits often used card rather than canvas. Check for warping, foxing and whether the printed lines are still crisp.
- Maker and date. Craft Master is the best known, but Palmer, Pann Products, Testors and Waddingtons all produced kits, and British and American ranges differ in subject matter.
- Subject. As with anything collectable, condition sets the floor and desirability sets the ceiling. Horses, seascapes, religious subjects and mid-century modern designs tend to be sought after.
What they are worth
Most sealed kits sell for modest sums — this is a collecting field with plenty of supply. Prices climb for rare early Craft Master series, unusual subjects, and anything with documented provenance. Watch completed sales rather than asking prices before deciding what something is worth.
Finished vintage paintings
The completed canvases are collected too, often for less than the unused kits, and they have a particular appeal: each one was painted by somebody, in an evening, in a house, decades ago. Original frames add value, and a signature or a date on the back adds interest.
They are also the most honest argument against the criticism the kits attracted. Whatever a critic thought of the form, a great many people spent contented hours on them and kept the results on the wall for the rest of their lives.
If you want the look without the risk
A seventy-year-old kit with hardened paint is a collector's item rather than a project. If what appeals is the mid-century subject matter rather than the artifact, we have a vintage-style collection of designs in that tradition, with paint that works.
You can also see the full range in the shop, or look through the customer gallery. There is more on the history and on choosing a kit in our guide to paint by numbers companies.
