Quick answer: Paint by numbers was created in Detroit around 1950 by Dan Robbins, a commercial artist working for the Palmer Show Card Paint Company, after its owner Max Klein asked him for a hobby product that would sell more paint. Robbins said he borrowed the idea from Leonardo da Vinci, who gave numbered sections of a canvas to his apprentices. The kits went on sale under the Craft Master name in 1951, sold slowly at first, and then became one of the great fads of the decade: by the mid-1950s the company was making tens of thousands of sets a day, and 1955 was the peak year. Critics called the kits regimented; millions of households bought them anyway. In 2001 the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History gave the craze its own exhibition. Today the same idea comes as a 16 × 20 inch linen canvas with acrylic paints, and the designs range from Vermeer to your own photograph.
If you painted a kit at the kitchen table in 1956, or watched a parent do it, you already know most of this story from the inside. This is the rest of it: where the idea came from, why it took off, who sneered at it, and how a box of numbered oil paints from Detroit turned into the hobby you have on your table today.
What you will find in this guide
A paint company in Detroit
The story starts with a small business rather than an artist's studio. The Palmer Show Card Paint Company in Detroit, owned by an engineer named Max Klein, made paints for sign writers and hobbyists. In 1949 Klein hired Dan Robbins, a commercial artist who had drawn for the car industry, to illustrate children's books. Soon afterward Klein gave him a plainer job: come up with a hobby kit that would make people buy more paint.
That is the whole origin. Paint by numbers was invented to sell paint, in the city that was then building most of America's cars, by a man whose previous job had been drawing them. Nobody involved thought they were starting an art movement.
The Leonardo da Vinci idea
Robbins said later that he remembered hearing how Leonardo da Vinci set creative assignments for his students and apprentices, handing them numbered sections of a sketch to fill in with the colors he had chosen. Whether or not Leonardo did exactly that, the idea gave Robbins his method: draw a picture, divide it into shapes, number each shape, and match the numbers to small pots of paint. Anyone who could read a number and hold a brush could finish the painting.
There had been earlier attempts to patent something similar, but Robbins and Klein were the ones who turned it into a product people could buy in a store. Robbins designed the pictures; Klein's company made the paints and the boxes.
The first kit flopped
The very first design was not a landscape. Robbins painted an abstract still life, called Abstract No. One, and it did not sell. Buyers in 1951 did not want to spend an evening filling in shapes that stayed shapes. The company switched to what people actually hung in their living rooms — landscapes, seascapes, horses, kittens, Paris street scenes, religious pictures — and sales began to move.
The kits went out under a new brand, Craft Master, from 1951. The box carried two promises that still describe the hobby well: "Every man a Rembrandt" and "A beautiful oil painting the first time you try." The paints were oils then, in little numbered capsules, with a stiff brush and a board or canvas printed with faint blue lines and numbers.
The craze of the 1950s
What followed was one of the fastest-growing hobbies the country had seen. Within a few years Craft Master had around 800 employees and was turning out roughly 50,000 sets a day. Accounts of the peak differ in the details, but they agree on the year: in 1955 Americans bought paint by number kits by the millions, and competing companies rushed out their own versions. The original company grew faster than it could manage and eventually went under, while the hobby itself kept going under other names.
Why did it catch on so hard? A few reasons stand out even now:
- Leisure time was new. Postwar households had evenings, weekends and a little spare money, and television had not yet filled all of them.
- Art felt out of reach. Most people had never held a paintbrush after grade school. A kit promised a real oil painting on the wall without a single lesson.
- The pictures were the pictures people wanted. Mountain lakes, covered bridges, the Last Supper, a pair of ballerinas. The designs matched the taste of the living rooms they were meant for.
- It worked. The method is forgiving. Numbers do not judge, and a finished canvas really does look like a painting from across the room.
If you grew up in one of those houses, you probably remember the smell of linseed oil and the particular blue of the printed lines. Those lines, by the way, are why so many surviving 1950s canvases have a faint blue cast: the oils were thin and the printing showed through.
Critics, the White House and Andy Warhol
The art world did not approve. Critics of the day wrote that the kits reduced painting to clerical work and that adults willing to color inside somebody else's lines were being regimented. Some of the designs copied famous paintings, which made the complaint sharper. Robbins answered the charge for the rest of his life, including in his 1998 memoir, Whatever Happened to Paint-By-Numbers?, and his answer was modest: he never claimed that painting by number was art. He said it gave people the experience of making a picture, and that this was worth having on its own.
The public, meanwhile, included some famous names. During the Eisenhower administration, the president's appointment secretary, Thomas Stephens, hung a corridor gallery in the White House of paint by number canvases completed by officials and visitors. A few years later Andy Warhol, who understood popular taste better than any critic, collected the canvases and painted his own series in their style.
From kitsch to the Smithsonian
For thirty years the kits were a joke about suburban taste. Then the joke turned into history. Collectors began buying up finished 1950s canvases at yard sales in the 1980s and 1990s; a New York gallery showed a collection of them in 1992. After Max Klein died in 1993, his daughter gave the Palmer Paint Company's archives to the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where they are kept as the Paint by Number Collection.
From April 2001 to January 2002 the museum staged Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s, curated by William L. Bird, who also wrote a book on the subject that year. The exhibition took the craze seriously as a piece of American life: how millions of families decided what belonged on their walls, and why the people who wrote about art disliked it so much. In 2011 the Museum of Modern Art in New York accepted four of Klein's early designs into its collection. Dan Robbins lived to see all of it; he died in 2019 at the age of 93.
What changed, and what did not
The kit on your table is recognizably the one from 1955, with a few sensible improvements:
| 1950s Craft Master kit | A kit today | |
|---|---|---|
| Paint | Oil, in small capsules; slow to dry, strong smell | Acrylic, in numbered pots; dries in minutes, cleans up with water |
| Surface | Printed board or thin canvas, blue lines | Linen canvas, usually 16 × 20 inches (40 × 50 cm), grey lines that paint over cleanly |
| Colors | Often 20 to 30, some to be mixed | Typically 24; custom kits offer 36 or 48, nothing to mix |
| Designs | Landscapes, horses, religious scenes, a few masters | The same, plus Vermeer, Monet and Klimt, cats and cities, and canvases made from your own photo |
| Beyond the canvas | Boards only | Coasters, journals, clocks, wooden door hangers, light-up panels |
The biggest practical change is acrylic paint. It is the reason a canvas can be finished in evenings rather than months and the reason a mistake can be painted over the next day. The biggest change in the pictures is the return of the masters: the 1950s kits borrowed from famous paintings a little guiltily, while today a famous artists collection is a point of pride, with the Van Gogh farmhouses and the Monet river banks sitting next to a prairie barn at sunset that Dan Robbins would have recognized at once.
What did not change is the reason people do it. Robbins's own description still holds: the kit gives you the experience of making a picture, hour by hour, without anyone grading it. If that experience is new to you, our guide to the first evening with a kit is the place to begin, and if it is an old one you are coming back to, our guide for older hands and eyes covers what has gotten easier since 1955.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented paint by numbers?
Dan Robbins, a commercial artist at the Palmer Show Card Paint Company in Detroit, developed the kits around 1950 at the request of the company's owner, Max Klein. The two are usually credited together.
When did paint by numbers come out?
The first kits were sold under the Craft Master name starting in 1951. Sales were slow at first and peaked in the middle of the decade, with 1955 the biggest year.
Did Leonardo da Vinci really invent paint by numbers?
No. Robbins said he was inspired by stories of Leonardo handing numbered sections of a work to his apprentices, but the kit as a product was Robbins and Klein's idea in the twentieth century.
What was the first paint by numbers picture?
An abstract still life by Dan Robbins called Abstract No. One. It sold poorly, and the company switched to landscapes, animals and religious scenes, which sold very well.
Why did critics dislike paint by numbers?
They felt it reduced painting to following instructions and copied famous works without the skill behind them. Robbins replied that he never called it art, only an experience of making a picture.
Is paint by numbers in a museum?
Yes. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History holds the Palmer Paint Company archives and staged an exhibition on the craze in 2001 and 2002, and the Museum of Modern Art accepted four early designs in 2011.
Seventy-five years on
Every kit still begins the way Dan Robbins's did: a picture, a set of numbers, and an evening. If you would like to paint something he might have designed, the Nostalgic America collection has gas stations, jukeboxes and old pickups, and the American National Parks canvases carry on the mountain-lake tradition of the 1950s boxes. For the masters the critics worried about, the famous artists collection is where to look.
