The Benefits of Oil Painting Reproductions, Honestly Listed

The Sunflowers in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is a copy. Van Gogh painted it in Arles in January 1889 as a loose repeat of a canvas he'd already hung in Gauguin's room, and nobody standing in front of it thinks less of it. That's a fair place to start any honest list of the benefits of oil painting reproductions. Painters made them too, and mostly for the reason you'd want one: they wanted the picture where they lived.

If you're weighing a hand-painted copy of a famous painting against a poster or an original, here's what the money actually buys, and where the promises some people attach to copies fall apart.

You get to live with the picture

Seeing a great painting in person is rarely relaxed. At Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, Leonardo's Last Supper is shown in 15-minute slots for up to 40 people, and every ticket needs a reservation. The limits are there for conservation: the air in the room is treated and the flow of visitors is controlled.

The work itself is a dry wall painting, 460 × 880 cm, made between 1494 and early 1498. Leonardo avoided true fresco so he could work slowly and revise. You can't take a wall home, obviously. You can hang a canvas version of Leonardo's supper scene in a dining room and study Judas's hand over breakfast for as long as you like.

That's the first benefit, and the biggest one. A museum gives you minutes. A copy gives you years of ordinary mornings with the same image, which is how most people come to know a painting at all.

You choose the size

A mural almost nine meters wide doesn't fit over a sofa. A reproduction can be scaled to the wall you have, and a careful copyist can shrink or enlarge a composition without wrecking it. The Louvre goes further and requires it. The museum has run a copyists' bureau since it opened in 1793, and each copy made there has to be bigger or smaller than the original by a fifth. The canvases are stamped and numbered, so nobody can pass one off as the real thing.

For a buyer, scale is a practical question. Measure the wall, think about how far away you'll usually sit, and pick a size that lets the faces read from there. A small Last Supper turns the apostles into a row of dots. A big portrait can swallow a narrow hallway.

Copying is an old, respectable habit

Every year the Louvre gives 90 artists a three-month permit to paint in its galleries during opening hours, and the applicants come from all over the world. Nobody there is trying to fool anyone. Copying a master is how painters learn how a glaze was built up, or why a shadow sits exactly where it does.

Van Gogh copied himself. He painted five large versions of the sunflowers: three before Gauguin arrived in Arles, and two more after an attack of his illness and Gauguin's return home. The flowers stood for "gratitude," he wrote. When Gauguin later asked for one as a gift, Vincent was reluctant, and then painted two loose copies anyway.

A hand-painted reproduction sits in that tradition. A printed poster doesn't. It's a photograph of a surface, flat, with no brushwork of its own, and up close you can tell within a second.

Where the benefits of oil painting reproductions stop

Here's the part a lot of articles on this subject skip. A reproduction is not a financial investment. It won't appreciate the way an original can, and anyone pitching a copy as a nest egg is selling you a story.

The clearest illustration comes from a painting that spent decades credited to someone else. Salvator Mundi went for £45 at Sotheby's London in 1958, catalogued as the work of Leonardo's assistant Boltraffio. In 2005 a group of dealers bought it from an estate in New Orleans for $1,000 plus $175 commission. On November 15, 2017, after it had been attributed to Leonardo, it sold at Christie's New York for $450.3 million with fees. The name on the label did most of that work.

A reproduction is sold as a reproduction, so no attribution will ever lift its price that way. Its value is the picture on your wall and the pleasure of looking at it. There's no auction market waiting for it, so read up on whether a copy holds any resale value before you think of one as an asset. The same logic applies to the paintings people most often want at home: a copy of one of them is worth owning for the image, never for the name.

Is a reproduction worth buying anyway?

Often, yes, if you judge it as a painting and not as a portfolio. Four things decide whether a particular copy earns its price:

• It's actually painted. Look for raised brushstrokes and soft, slightly irregular edges where colors meet. A print with a clear "texture" gel on top is a different object.
• The colors are right. A copyist working from a washed-out photo will give you a washed-out painting, so compare the sample images with the photo on the museum website.
• The size suits the room, for the reasons above.
• The price makes sense for the labor. A large, crowded canvas takes a copyist far longer than a small still life, and one sold at poster prices almost certainly wasn't painted by hand. Here's a look at what a painted copy usually costs and what drives the number.

There's also a quieter benefit. A copy can hang in a bright kitchen or a house with a toddler without the dread that comes with an irreplaceable object. You still want to keep it out of direct sun, but a mishap means a repair, not a loss to the world.

The legal side is simple for old masters

In the US, copyright for works created since 1978 lasts the author's life plus 70 years, and older works fall under earlier rules. Leonardo died in 1519 and Van Gogh in 1890, far outside any of those terms, which is why the Old Masters are safe ground for copies. A copy of a living artist's work is another matter, and one to leave alone.

A picture you'll see every day

If one painting in this piece has stuck with you, that's usually the best sign it belongs on your wall. Art & See paints oil reproductions of museum masterpieces by hand, and you can browse the studio's painted copies of the masters to find the one you'd most like to walk past each morning. Measure the wall before you choose.

Sources

• Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, visiting the Last Supper
• Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, The Last Supper
• Van Gogh Museum, Sunflowers (F458)
• Van Gogh Museum, why so many sunflowers
• The Art Newspaper, the Louvre's copyists
• The Art Newspaper, Salvator Mundi timeline
• U.S. Copyright Office, how long copyright lasts