Finding and Recognizing Good Reproductions of Paintings

This is the first post of what I hope to be many regarding the analyzation and appreciation of master paintings (and drawings). I have over the years saved tens of thousands of paintings to my computer, and I feel it would be a good idea to share some of these images and discuss my ideas regarding them and the things I enjoy about them. I specifically want to focus on the aspect of design—the choices the artists made that make the images successful. I also hope to post up some paintings by artists who are less often talked about.

But before I get into that, I think it is important to go over some considerations that must be taken first regarding the images I will be discussing and sharing. Since these paintings are from all over the world and are not in front of us in real life, but rather are small jpg files on a screen, they obviously will not look the same as they should. As such, it is important to select the images of these paintings that most closely match the original. It is also important to recognize how even the best of jpgs will not replicate the truth of a painting.

Whenever I find an image of a painting I will reverse image search it to see other images online of the same painting in case there is a better version available. Here are some the criteria I personally keep in mind when selecting the best images:

-Is the image of a reasonable resolution? If it is too small then we cannot get a good look at it and fully appreciate all the nuances of the image. A very small image may still provide some crucial information such as the composition or colour relationships, but it will be lacking many other qualities to make it a complete statement and shouldn’t be judged fully. I like to search for the largest available size of an image because I find they tend to be of better quality and more often come from an original source; the largest image also has the most information regarding detail, texture, and brushwork/technique. Google Art Project will often have massive images which are great for analysis (though I do find their colour reproduction is sometimes a bit off). Here's an Armin Hansen in which all we can see is composition really, the image is simply too small for a full analysis.

-Is the image in focus? Many images are blurry—either from when the photo was taken or from file compression artifacts. These are often not useful images in analyzing. This Stanhope Forbes painting is unfortunately useless for edgework and detail analyzation.

-Is the image in the right key? The image may be washed out or too dark overall or have the lights blown out. Compare it to other versions of the painting online to see if it is shifted in one direction or another, and use common sense. Even a high key painting typically has a few dark accents in it to keep it grounded (there are of course many exceptions, but it is a good rule of thumb). Many paintings especially in books will be reproduced a bit too dark.

-Is there glare? Especially in dark passages and on areas with thick, textural paint there may be glare which washes out important information and throws off the balance of the image. Note that some photos of paintings are taken purposely with a raking light to emphasize the texture. Here is a Krachkovsky painting in which the accidental glare interferes with the dark tree masses. And a Sorolla in which the lighting is intended to emphasize the physical paint texture.

-Are the colours accurate? This one can be harder to tell without having seen the original image, but even an untrained eye should be able to tell a fair bit with just a bit of consideration. Check to see if the overall image is too cold, too warm, too grey, too saturated, or shifted towards one particular colour. The lighting a painting was photographed in will dramatically change its appearance (incandescent lighting, fluorescent lighting, natural indirect light, natural direct light etc). The variety of hues in an image is important—in most cases if there is more hue variation then it will be closer to the original colours. This is a more complex issue as well especially with older paintings as other factors come into play such as the permanency of colours, the yellowing of varnishes, and the dirt accumulated on the painting over time. It is common for the original painting to no longer represent how it was when it was first painted. Typically paintings will be slightly warmer and darker if they are old. Here is a Jeff Jones painting that has been shifted heavily towards pink hues. Notice how monochromatic it appears.

-Are there watermarks? Obviously any watermarking will detract from the image. Try to avoid anything with watermarks directly on the image. A rare exception to this is with images from the Museo Del Prado in Spain, in which very high resolution images of good quality are on their website. The watermarking on the images are small and innocuous enough that they are not particularly detracting and are more than made up for by the rest of the quality of the image.

-Is the image the full painting? It is common for an image to be a cropped portion of a painting, so check to see that it is the full thing. If the painting was not photographed straight on, then it is a quick fix in Photoshop to warp the image and correct the perspective on it. 

This image is found when looking for Howard Pyle's paintings, but it is just a microcomposition in a larger image, seen below.

-Has the painting been restored? This is less common, but worth noting. A restored or cleaned painting will often look vastly different than before (and hopefully closer to how it was when originally painted). Some paintings will have both a pre- and post-restoration online, and while we hope that the restored version is better this is not always the case.

-Does it feel “off”? In art there is always that gut reaction we have, and we should trust it. If something feels off even though it seems to satisfy the logical criteria, then the image probably is off in some way. Trust your gut.

-Have you seen the painting in real life, or other paintings by the same artist? This is a best case scenario since you can better judge how it looked in real life. Many of these considerations are dependent on experience gained through seeing paintings in real life. I highly recommend going often to galleries in person to build this experience and also because even the best of photos and scans come nowhere close to the reality of a painting in front of you. Photos miss that certain “something”, that glow that paintings can emanate, they miss the physical textures of the paint and the effect they have as the light bounces off it, they miss the true size of the painting and the impact it has, they miss many subtleties regarding colour and edges. So even when seeing a good reproduction we should keep this in the back of our minds.

The points above are some of the things that go through my mind when I see a painting online. They are some personal criteria that I have come up with and should cover most bases when considering an image, though I may have missed some. As I mentioned before, it is useful to reverse image search any painting you find to try to find a better reproduction or a larger file.

But what if there are only poor reproductions online? If it is a small file or has many jpg artifacts then there is not much we can do. If the problem lies somewhere else, then we can correct some of it in Photoshop. I don’t really recommend playing with an image too much unless you are an artist yourself with some Photoshop experience, but sometimes a bit of adjusting an image can really bring out quite a lot. Surprisingly Auto Tone, Auto Color, and Auto Contrast work well as a starting point in many cases. I usually duplicate the painting on top of itself and play with it so that I can easily compare it to the original as well as lower the opacity of it to get a more subtle correction.  Here is an example with a bad reproduction of a George DeForest Brush painting on the left and a colour corrected version on the right. You can see how it originally was very yellow/orange and saturated from warm artificial lighting. I used Auto Color on it and lowered the saturation, and the resulting image is much more naturalistic in terms of colour and value. Recognize though that the image is still slightly out of focus and the image is a crop of a larger painting and, even though the colour has been corrected to a degree, I would not trust it to be a fully accurate representation of the original.

Lastly I would like to mention a couple ways to find good images. Just by going into specifics of Google Image Searches you can improve your chances of finding good images--I like to search within large image sizes. Some museums will have very high quality images on online collections so it is a good idea to check there. The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, Museo Del Prado, and the Rijksmuseum all are examples of this. Another good place is to check auction houses. Since people are spending large sums of money on artwork, the auctioneers will often post very good images of them online. Sometimes you will need to sign up as a member to view these images, but it often is free and worth the effort.

This post ended up a bit longer than I anticipated, but I wanted to be thorough with the covering this before I begin talking about paintings and their design.