Paint by numbers is younger than most people assume. It is a product of Detroit in 1951, it was very nearly abandoned before it sold a single kit, and within three years it was one of the most successful novelty products in American history.
Where the idea came from
Dan Robbins was a commercial artist at the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, which was owned by Max Klein. Klein wanted something that would sell paint to adults rather than to children, and Robbins was asked to think of it.
Robbins credited the idea to a story about Leonardo da Vinci numbering sections of a composition so that apprentices could fill them in. Whether Leonardo actually did that is not well established, and Robbins told it as an anecdote rather than as research. What matters is that it gave him the mechanism: divide a picture into regions, number the regions, match the numbers to premixed paints, and the drawing problem disappears.
His first designs were abstracts, on the theory that adults would want something modern. They did not sell, and he switched to landscapes, still lifes and animals. That change is the reason the category still looks the way it does.
Nobody wanted to stock it
Robbins spent a long time being turned down. Buyers thought the concept was either too simple to interest adults or too strange to explain to a customer.
The break came with S. S. Kresge, the variety store chain that later became Kmart, which placed a large order. The kits went on sale in 1951 under the Craft Master name.
Then it went off like a rocket
By the middle of the decade Palmer Paint was selling kits by the million each year, and the whole category had been copied by every competitor who could get a design printed. For a few years in the 1950s there were more paint by number pictures being hung on American walls than any other kind.
Two details from that period are worth knowing because they say something about how completely it saturated the culture.
Thomas E. Stephens, President Eisenhower's appointments secretary, collected finished paint by number pictures from cabinet members, staff and friends, and had them hung in the West Wing corridor. Eisenhower himself was a keen amateur painter, and for a while the executive branch of the United States government had a paint-by-number gallery in it.
And in 2001 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History mounted an exhibition about the phenomenon, treating the kits as a serious object of study in postwar taste. The critics of 1953 would have found that very funny.
What the critics said, and what Robbins said back
The objection was immediate and it has never entirely gone away: that this is not art, that it produces conformity, that a nation of people painting identical mountains is not a nation of painters.
Robbins never argued the point. His position, more or less, was that he had never claimed to be creating artists; he had made something that let people who would never otherwise pick up a brush spend an evening with paint and finish with something they were pleased by. Half a century later that is still the honest description, and it is still the reason people buy them.
Robbins died in 2019, at ninety-three.
What has actually changed since
Less than you would think. The mechanism is identical. What has moved is the manufacturing and the source of the images:
- Printing. Fifties kits were printed on board or on artist's canvas board in relatively coarse regions. Modern printing puts far finer detail on pre-primed cotton canvas, which is why kits today can carry a couple of thousand regions rather than a couple of hundred.
- Paint. The originals were oil. Almost everything now is acrylic, which dries in minutes rather than days and cleans up with water.
- Where the design comes from. The 1950s designs were drawn in-house to be painted. Most kits today are adapted from an existing image by software, which is why so many of them have that slightly washed, over-divided look.
- Custom. The genuinely new thing. A photograph can now be converted into a numbered canvas on demand, which was not possible at any price in 1951.
The mechanics of that conversion are more interesting than they sound, and we have gone into them in how a picture becomes a numbered canvas.
Why the fifties kits are collected now
Finished vintage kits turn up in antique shops and estate sales constantly, and they have quietly become collectable, partly for the period subject matter and partly because so few survive: they were painted by amateurs, hung in kitchens, and thrown out when the room was redecorated.
Our vintage-styled designs come out of that same tradition of subject matter, and our own range still leans where Robbins ended up: landscapes, cabins, water and birds, rather than the abstracts he started with.
The part that has not changed at all
Somebody sits down at a kitchen table after supper, opens a numbered pot, and fills in a section of sky. That was the whole product in 1951 and it is the whole product now.
Our guide for beginners covers starting one, our piece on famous paintings as numbered canvases covers which pictures translate to the format, and the current designs are in the full collection.
