Reproductions
Museum-quality oil painting reproductions, painted by hand
The phrase “museum quality” is on every cheap canvas listing on the internet. This page is what it should mean, how to test it in a minute, and what a hand-painted copy of a famous painting actually costs here.
There are two industries selling “oil painting reproductions”. One paints them. The other prints a photograph of the painting onto canvas, sprays it with a texture gel, and ships it in three days. Both use the same words, and one of them costs a fifth as much — which is why the words stopped meaning anything.
We are in the first industry, in Dafen, Shenzhen: the village that has supplied galleries, hotels and cruise ships with painted copies for thirty years. That origin is a liability in marketing and an advantage in fact — the people here have painted the same four hundred paintings ten thousand times, and they know which ones cannot be faked and which ones cannot be enlarged. This page is the honest version of what you get, including where a print is the better buy.
What “museum quality” should mean
In conservation, museum quality describes how a work is made and what it is made of: pigment ground in a drying oil, applied to a prepared cloth or panel, built in layers, varnished so the surface can be cleaned without touching the paint. It is a claim about materials and method, not about how closely the copy resembles a photograph of the original.
Which makes it testable. Five things decide whether a reproduction in front of you is paint or ink, and none of them requires expertise — only a lamp and a minute.
1. The surface, under raking light
Angle a lamp almost parallel to the canvas and look across it. Real oil throws irregular shadows: ridges where the brush lifted, dragged edges, thin passages where the weave shows through. A print is flat. A print pretending to be a painting has texture applied by a gel roller, and gel is uniform — it looks like icing pressed through a nozzle, not like paint pushed by a brush.
2. The edge, and the back
On a real painting the paint wraps the side with the same irregularity as the front, and you can see how many layers went down. On a print the image stops at the edge, or continues with photographic smoothness. The back is more decisive still: stretched print canvases usually carry a barcode, a print date and an unprinted white border.
3. The scale the composition can survive
Not every painting enlarges. A Vermeer interior holds at 30 × 40 in because its detail is tonal; a Bruegel crowd turns to mush past 24 × 36 in, because there are four hundred faces in it and a copyist can only give each one a suggestion. Any studio that quotes the same eight sizes for every painting is selling a size chart, not a judgement.
4. The colour source
Most cheap reproductions are painted from a JPEG found online — often a museum postcard scan, colour-shifted toward whatever the postcard printer liked. We work from open-access museum files and colour-corrected photography, and when the best file available is poor we say so before you order. A copyist cannot invent a colour that is not in the reference.
5. The provenance of the copy
Every reproduction ships with a numbered certificate naming the original artist and work and stating plainly that this is a modern hand-painted copy. That document is what makes the piece insurable and what stops it being passed off as an antique later — including by you, accidentally, in an estate sale.
How we work from a museum image
The source file matters more than buyers expect. A copyist reproduces what they can see, so a low-resolution JPEG produces a painting of a JPEG: colour shifted toward the postcard it was scanned from, darks crushed into a single black, small passages invented. We work from open-access museum photography wherever it exists — the Rijksmuseum, the Met, the National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago all publish high-resolution files — and we tell you when a painting's best available source is weak rather than painting a confident guess.
Then the scale arithmetic. Most famous paintings have one proportion, and it is rarely the proportion of the wall you had in mind: the Mona Lisa is 30 × 21 inches, The Starry Night is 36 × 29, and a Water Lilies panel is nearly two metres wide. We can paint to the original dimensions exactly, or to a multiple that keeps the proportion — a painting is not a poster, and cropping it to fit a frame changes the composition rather than resizing it.
Last, the brushwork. A reproduction is not a colour-by-numbers exercise: the copyist has to decide which passages were glazed thin and which were laid on thick, because that difference is the whole reason the original reads as depth rather than as a photograph of depth. Under raking light you can see those decisions, which is exactly why we ask you to check the surface that way when the parcel arrives.
What a reproduction costs
The price is set by the canvas, not by the fame of the painting. A Van Gogh and an unknown nineteenth-century marine of the same size cost the same, because the work is the same: the same painter, the same cloth, the same risk that the composition will not survive being enlarged. The catalogue currently holds 164 works, starting at $289 for the smallest size.
| Canvas size | Price, unframed |
|---|---|
| 12 × 16 in | $340 |
| 16 × 20 in | $452.20 |
| 20 × 24 in | $567.80 |
| 24 × 30 in | $714 |
| 24 × 32 in | $737.80 |
| 30 × 40 in | $948.60 |
| 36 × 48 in | $1,162.80 |
| 48 × 64 in | $1,604.80 |
Four-by-three compositions, which is most of the catalogue. Tall and narrow paintings — a full-length portrait, a Japanese scroll — use their own ladder, printed on each painting's page. Framing is extra and priced there too; gallery wrap, white floater, oak floater and black floater are the four options.
Shipping is free worldwide, rolled in a rigid tube, tracked and insured. A framed piece travels crated instead and costs more in freight — for anything above 24 × 36 in we usually recommend the tube and a local framer, because a stretched canvas crossing two borders is a damaged canvas waiting for a sorting office.
Reproduction, print, or original
A reproduction is for the wall you actually have, in the painting you actually want: the picture that has been in your head since a gallery visit in 1998, at a size that fits above the sofa. A print is right when the piece is decorative, temporary, or needs to exist fifty times. An original is right when you want the thing itself and are prepared to pay four figures for a small one.
The failure mode to avoid is paying reproduction money for a print. Under $150 for anything larger than a postcard, and shipping inside a week, is not a painted copy — the calendar alone rules it out, since oil needs to dry between layers. If you want the full set of tests, including the ones that work on a listing photograph rather than on a canvas in your hands, that guide is here: hand-painted oil vs canvas print.
What we will not copy
Anything still in copyright: most twentieth-century painting, and every living artist. We will also refuse a photograph of a painting you do not own the rights to, and we will not paint a copy to be sold as an original — the certificate says what the piece is, and it says it on paper that outlives the sale.
Questions
Questions about reproductions
Hand-painted, in oil, by one painter from underpainting to varnish. Three things you can ask for before paying: a raking-light photograph of a recent reproduction so you can see brush ridges and canvas weave, a photograph of the back of the canvas, and the name of the painter who will do yours. A print mill cannot produce the third one, because the person who answers the email is not the person who paints.
Usually, if the proportions are the same. The original dimensions are in the catalogue entry for each work, and we can paint to those figures exactly — the price follows the canvas area. What we will not do is stretch a composition to fit a wall: changing the proportions means inventing or deleting parts of the picture, and that is a different job from a reproduction.
About two to three weeks from order to dispatch: roughly 10–14 days of painting and drying, then rolling or framing, then three to five business days in transit, free worldwide. Large canvases and crowded compositions — a Bruegel, a Bosch — sit at the top of that range, and we give you a firm date before you pay. A copy is faster than a commissioned portrait because nothing has to be invented, but oil still needs time between layers.
No. That rules out most twentieth-century work and every living artist, and it is not a matter of caution — a copy of a protected painting is an infringement. Works in the public domain, roughly artists who died more than seventy years ago in most jurisdictions, we copy openly, with the certificate stating what the piece is.
Yes, if you own it or hold the rights. Send sharp, evenly lit photographs of the surface and the back, and tell us the exact dimensions. This is a copy of a copy, so the surface and the colour are only as good as your photographs — the usual fix is to shoot it in daylight, at an angle that avoids reflections, in four overlapping sections.
It will look like a painting of that picture, which is not the same claim. Screens are backlit and saturate blues; oil is lit by the room. Expect slightly deeper shadows and a warmer white than your monitor shows, and slightly more visible brushwork at close range than the thumbnail suggests. Every reproduction is photographed before dispatch and you see that photograph first.
Where to go next
- The catalogue — 164 hand-painted reproductions, by movement and artist
- Hand-painted oil vs canvas print — five tests that expose a print in a minute
- Oil or acrylic — what the binder decides, and why it matters in twenty years
- Shipping and returns — the tube, the crating, and the duty arithmetic
- How we work — approvals, payment, and what happens if it goes wrong
Ask for a raking-light photograph
Before you pay anything: pick any painting in the catalogue, tell us the size, and we will send a photograph of a recent canvas taken at a raking angle plus the exact finished dimensions in writing.