General Advice

Oil Painting Reproduction

Reproductions have long been part of art history. The reproduction of admired artworks has been a marvelous source of learning and inspiration for many of today's well-known artists. As Renoir observed, 'It is in the museum that one must learn to paint'. Under the tuition of established artists, painters like Manet, Renoir, and Degas...etc. developed their techniques through copying the production of existing artworks in museum's galleries like the Louvre in Paris.

Reproductions are an opportunity for the general public to actually see and even own some of the otherwise unaffordable and often safely stored away art masterpieces. Whether it is a Monet in your living room that helps to educate and expose your children to art, or it is a Van Gogh in your office's reception area, these hand painted master pieces will not only draw great attention, but they will add sophistication to your walls and rooms.

Some of the Popular Artists

Vincent (Willem) van Gogh (b. March 30, 1853, Zundert, Neth.--d. July 29, 1890, Auvers-sur-Oise, near Paris)
Vincent (Willem) van Gogh generally considered the greatest Dutch painter and draughtsman after Rembrandt. With Cézanne and Gauguin the greatest of Post-Impressionist artists. He powerfully influenced the current of Expressionism in modern art. His work, all of it produced during a period of only 10 years, hauntingly conveys through its striking color, coarse brushwork, and contoured forms the anguish of a mental illness that eventually resulted in suicide. Among his masterpieces are numerous self-portraits and the well-known The Starry Night (1889).


Leonardo DA VINCI (b. 1452, Vinci, Republic of Florence [now in Italy]--d. May 2, 1519, Cloux, Fr.)
Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.
Rembrandt HARMENSZOON VAN RIJN (b. July 15, 1606, Leiden, Neth.--d. Oct. 4, 1669, Amsterdam)
Dutch painter, draftsman, and etcher of the 17th century, a giant in the history of art. His paintings are characterized by luxuriant brushwork, rich color, and a mastery of chiaroscuro. Numerous portraits and self-portraits exhibit a profound penetration of character. His drawings constitute a vivid record of contemporary Amsterdam life. The greatest artist of the Dutch school, he was a master of light and shadow whose paintings, drawings, and etchings made him a giant in the history of art.

The number of works attributed to Rembrandt varies. He produced approximately 600 paintings, 300 etchings, and 1,400 drawings. Some of his works are: St. Paul in Prison (1627); Supper at Emmaus (1630); The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632); Young Girl at an Open Half-Door (1645); The Mill (1650); Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653); The Return of the Prodigal Son (after 1660); The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild (1662); and many portraits.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (b. Feb. 25, 1841, Limoges, France--d. Dec. 3, 1919, Cagnes)
French painter originally associated with the Impressionist movement. His early works were typically Impressionist snapshots of real life, full of sparkling color and light. By the mid-1880s, however, he had broken with the movement to apply a more disciplined, formal technique to portraits and figure paintings, particularly of women (e.g., Bathers, 1884-87).

Renoir is perhaps the best-loved of all the Impressionists, for his subjects---pretty children, flowers, beautiful scenes, above all lovely women---have instant appeal, and he communicated the joy he took in them with great directness. `Why shouldn't art be pretty?', he said, `There are enough unpleasant things in the world.' He was one of the great worshippers of the female form, and he said `I never think I have finished a nude until I think I could pinch it.' One of his sons was the celebrated film director Jean Renoir (1894-1979), who wrote a lively and touching biography (Renoir, My Father) in 1962.

Pablo Picasso
Famous as no artist ever had been, he was a pioneer, a master and a protean monster, with a hand in every art movement of the century. Pablo Picasso dominated Western art in the 20th century is, by now, the merest commonplace. Before his 50th birthday, the little Spaniard from Malaga had become the very prototype of the modern artist as public figure. No painter before him had had a mass audience in his own lifetime. The total public for Titian in the 16th century or Velazquez in the 17th was probably no more than a few thousand people--though that included most of the crowned heads, nobility and intelligentsia of Europe.

Claude Monet (b. Nov. 14, 1840, Paris, Fr.--d. Dec. 5, 1926, Giverny)
French painter, initiator, leader, and unswerving advocate of the Impressionist style. He is regarded as the archetypal Impressionist in that his devotion to the ideals of the movement was unwavering throughout his long career, and it is fitting that one of his pictures--Impression: Sunrise (Musée Marmottan, Paris; 1872)--gave the group his name.

Camille Pissarro (b. July 10, 1830, St. Thomas, Danish West Indies--d. Nov. 13, 1903, Paris)
French Impressionist painter, who endured prolonged financial hardship in keeping faith with the aims of Impressionism. Despite acute eye trouble, his later years were his most prolific. The Parisian and provincial scenes of this period include Place du Théâtre Français (1898) and Bridge at Bruges (1903).

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925)
An expatriate American, he showed remarkable technical precocity as a painter. After studying with Carolus-Duran, he achieved a great reputation for his portraits, employing a style that could be seen as derived from Velázquez by way of Manet. Moving in the circle of the Impressionists, he came to know most of them, and they reacted to his work in varying ways. Degas, as might have been expected, was brutally dismissive; Pissarro, in sending his son to see him in London, where Sargent spent the major part of his working life, described him as `an adroit performer'; but with Monet he had a close and mutually profitable relationship. In the 1880s he began to paint landscapes that were overtly Impressionist in technique and approach, despite a certain superficiality. At this time he visited Monet at Giverny on several occasions, painting two memorable portraits of him: Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood (c.1885; Tate Gallery, London) and Claude Monet in his Bateau-Atelier (1887; National Gallery of Art, Washington). Although Monet was later to deny that Sargent was an Impressionist, this was unjust, especially in relation to some of his works in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, Sargent's technique for painting large canvases out of doors, as evinced in Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885-86; Tate Gallery, London), was to be of use to Monet in his larger compositions. Sargent persuaded Monet to exhibit at the New English Art Club, and at the Leicester Galleries in London.

Some Most Popular Oil Painting Reproductions

Da Vinci - Portrait of Mona Lisa
This painting is also known as La Gioconda, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo; This figure of a woman, dressed in the Florentine fashion of her day and seated in a visionary, mountainous landscape, is a remarkable instance of Leonardo's sfumato technique of soft, heavily shaded modeling. The Mona Lisa's enigmatic expression, which seems both alluring and aloof, has given the portrait universal fame.

Kandinsky - The Blue Mountain
The original 'The Blue Mountain' was painted by Kandinsky in 1908 after he first visited the small Bavarian village of Murnau, near Munich, in Germany. 'The Blue Mountain' is described as a preliminary phase in Kandinsky's cautious yet determined effort to free painting from its dependence on the forms of nature.

Kandinsky - Impression III
Kandinsky painted the original 'ImpressionIII' on January 3, 1911, two days after Kandinsky attended a New Year's concert in Munich with music by Schoenberg. Extant preparatory sketches reveal a direct relationship to the incident of the performance.

Monet - Spring Flowers
Hand painted museum-quality reproduction oil painting on canvas. Monet painted the original 'Spring Flowers' in Honfleur, France, in 1864. This painting is directly related to Monet's enthusiasm about the flowers in the Honfleur area. Also, the influence of Boudin and Jongkind, who worked with him for a while in 1864, is evident in the rich impasto of this painting.

Monet - The Walk. Lady with a Parasol
Hand painted museum-quality reproduction oil painting on canvas. Monet painted the original 'The Walk. Lady with a Parasol' in France in 1875. Monet had just learned from Boudin, who encouraged him to paint outdoors, that whatever was painted on the spot, in the open, possessed an energy and vitality in the brushworks, that were unattainable in the studio.

Monet - Sunset in Venice
Monet painted the original 'Sunset in Venice' in Venice, Italy, in 1908. Monet felt that the city's atmosphere was beyond the power of art to capture. This could explain the 'faerie realm of colors' that critics of the Venice paintings tend to speak of - mirroring the mood of a romantic fairy tale.

Monet - The Thames at Westminster
Monet painted the original 'The Thames at Westminster' while he lived in London during the Franco-Prussian War in 1871. This subject was one that Monet would get back to frequently over the next twenty years. However, this early work is unusual, because its viewpoint is at ground level - most of the other versions were painted from a room in the Savoy Hotel.

Picasso - Child with a Dove
Picasso painted the original 'Child with a Dove' in 1901.

Picasso - The Tragedy
Picasso painted the original 'The Tragedy' in 1903.

Picasso - Family of Saltimbanques
Picasso painted the original 'Family of Saltimbanques' in 1905.

Van Gogh - Flowerpot with Chives
Van Gogh painted the original 'Flowerpot with Chives' in Paris, France, in 1887. Van Gogh's 'Flowerpot with Chives' was part of a series of color studies in painting simply flowers - trying to render intense color and not a gray harmony....

Van Gogh - Starry Night over the Rhone
Van Gogh painted the original 'Starry Night over the Rhone' in Arles, France, in September 1888. Van Gogh wrote the following to his friend the Belgian painter Eugene Boch about the 'Starry Night over the Rhone': "And lastly a study of the Rhone - of the town lighted with gas reflected in the blue river. Over it the starry sky with the Great Bear - a sparkling of pink and green on the cobalt-blue field of the night sky, whereas the lights of the town and its ruthless reflections are red-gold and bronzed green. It amuses me enormously to paint night scenes and effects and night itself on the spot."

Van Gogh - Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers
Van Gogh painted the original 'Still Life: Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers' in Arles, France, in January 1889

Van Gogh - The Good Samaritan
The original 'The Good Samaritan' was painted by Van Gogh in Saint-Remy in May of 1890.

Georgia O'Keeffe - Orange and Red Streak
O'Keeffe painted the original 'Orange and Red Streak' in New York in 1919. This is also when O'Keeffe got introduced to the idea of music as the perfect model for non-representational art. O'Keeffe's responses to music are obvious in a number of her paintings in 1919. Her colors are delicately coordinated and at the same time boldly orchestrated to achieve maximum expressiveness

Georgia O'Keeffe - Oriental Poppies
O'Keeffe painted the original 'Oriental Poppies' in 1928. Georgia O'Keeffe once said: "A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower - the idea of flowers. So I said to myself - I'll paint what I see - what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking time to look at it..."

Georgia O'Keeffe - Single Lily with Red
O'Keeffe painted the original 'Single Lily with Red' in 1928. The magnified head of a single calla lily, emphasized by its setting against a plain red background, was one of Georgia O'Keeffe's favorite flower motifs. It also became a sort of emblem of her art.

Renoir - Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette
Renoir painted the original 'Dancing at the Moulin de la Galette' in 1876. Renoir was fascinated by the people in his paintings. It is therefore not surprising that he painted several scenes of Parisians enjoying themselves, and this is the first. In this painting, Renoir delights in the effect of the sunshine filtering through the trees - even black is not shown as black, but as color that changes when light falls on it. The figures in the background rapidly diminish in size, drawing the eye in to the canvas.

Renoir - Luncheon of the Boating Party
Renoir painted the original 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' in 1880-1. Renoir's 'Luncheon of the Boating Party' may have been a response to Zola's plea for the Impressionists to paint more ambitious pictures of modern life - Zola was one of the most celebrated novelists and critics of his time. The site is the upstairs terrace of the Restaurant Fournaise - restaurant on an island in the Seine at Chatou, France. Among those shown is Aline Charigot (sitting on the extreme left), who later became Renoir's wife.

Miro - Le Corps de Ma Brune
The original 'Le Corps de ma Brune' was painted by Miro in Paris in 1925. 'Le Corps de ma Brune' is part of Miro's picture poems - pictures in which he combines colors and words. This entire picture is covered with the hand-written words of a popular folk song: Le corps de ma brune.... Not only do Miro's picture poems form part of one of the most interesting traditions in modern symbolic language, but they are also among his most multi-faceted and most beautiful paintings.





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