Who invented paint by number?
Max Klein owned the paint company, Dan Robbins worked out the numbered regions, and the credit has been argued over ever since. What the record supports, and what is company folklore.
The short answer is that two men are named, they worked at the same small Detroit paint company, and the balance of credit between them has been argued about for seventy years. The longer answer is more interesting, because it explains why the format existed at all — and why it has outlived nearly everything else the 1950s craft industry produced.
The Palmer Paint Company
Max Klein owned the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit. It was a modest business selling paint, and like every paint business it had the same problem: paint is a commodity and people only buy it when they already have a reason to use it. The commercial insight behind paint by number was not really about art. It was about manufacturing a reason.
Dan Robbins was a commercial artist working for Klein, and he is the man usually credited with working out the actual system — dividing a composition into regions flat enough to be filled with a single unmixed colour, numbering them, and matching those numbers to a row of small paint pots. That is the whole invention, and it is a design problem rather than an artistic one: the picture has to survive being reduced to a limited number of flat areas, and the areas have to be big enough for an amateur with a cheap brush.
The line was sold under the Craft Master name. The advertising slogan was “Every man a Rembrandt”, which tells you exactly who the product was aimed at and exactly what promise it made. It is worth pausing on that slogan, because critics later attacked the kits for making a promise they could not keep — and because, read more carefully, it is really a promise about the experience rather than the outcome.
Who gets the credit
Robbins has generally been described as the inventor of the numbered-region system, and Klein as the businessman who owned the company, funded it, and pushed it to market. Both accounts have been contested in retellings over the decades, sometimes by the participants and their families. If you read several histories you will find the emphasis shifting depending on who is speaking.
This is normal for a commercial product rather than a patented invention: a system like this emerges from conversations in a small company, and there is rarely a clean moment where one person can be said to have had the idea. It is honest to say that Robbins did the design work and Klein made it a business, and to leave the sharper apportionment alone. Anyone who tells you with confidence exactly who invented it is telling you more than the record supports.
The da Vinci story
Almost every account of paint by number includes an anecdote about Leonardo da Vinci numbering sections of a work so that apprentices could fill them in, with Robbins having taken the idea from that. It is a good story and it is repeated everywhere, including in places that ought to check.
It should be treated as the company’s own origin anecdote rather than as documented history. There is no solid evidence that da Vinci used a numbered-region system in this way. What is true, and probably the seed of the story, is that Renaissance workshops genuinely did divide labour — a master would set the composition and the assistants would carry out much of the execution. That is a real and well-attested practice. Numbers on a canvas are not part of it.
Why it worked commercially
The kits became a genuine mass craze in the United States in the early 1950s. Explanations tend to reach for the cultural: postwar prosperity, new leisure time, a suburban household with walls to decorate and no art to hang on them. All of that is plausible and all of it is the sort of thing that is easy to assert and hard to demonstrate.
The mechanical explanation is more solid. The product removed every barrier between wanting to paint and painting. You did not need to be able to draw, which is the barrier that stops most people. You did not need to choose colours, which is the second barrier. You did not need to know how much paint to buy or which brush. The box contained a complete outcome, and the outcome looked like a painting from across a room.
It also had a property that manufacturers love: it consumed the product. Every finished canvas used up the paint, and finishing one created appetite for the next. A paint company selling paint by number is not really in the hobby business; it is in the business of giving people a reason to empty small pots.
Sales figures for the peak years get quoted in retellings and they vary considerably from source to source. Treat any specific number you see with caution. What is not in doubt is the shape: a very fast rise, a couple of years of enormous ubiquity, and then a decline as the novelty exhausted itself and the market filled with imitators.
Why critics dismissed it
The critical reaction was hostile and fairly consistent. The objection was that the kits were a counterfeit of art: they produced the appearance of a painting while removing everything that makes painting an act of authorship. You do not choose the subject, the composition, the palette, or where one colour ends and the next begins. You supply labour.
That objection is not stupid and it is not wrong on its own terms. Where it went astray was in assuming that the people buying the kits were confused about this — that they thought they were becoming artists. Mostly they were not. They were buying an activity, and the activity was pleasant in a way that had very little to do with the argument being had about it.
The postscript is worth noting. The Smithsonian later exhibited paint-by-number kits and finished canvases as artefacts of American popular culture. The objects the critics dismissed became museum pieces, not because anyone changed their mind about their artistic merit, but because what they document — a specific idea of leisure, taste and domestic decoration — turned out to be historically interesting. That is a useful caution against being too confident in either direction.
How the structure survived
The physical kits never entirely disappeared and are still sold. But the structure — outlined regions, numbers, an indexed palette — moved to screens in the 2010s and found conditions that suited it much better than a canvas board ever did.
Three of the format’s original constraints were artefacts of oil paint rather than of the idea. You painted one colour at a time because you were washing a brush. You waited between adjacent areas because wet edges bleed. And a mistake was permanent because paint is permanent. None of those apply to a screen.
The third is the one that matters most, and it is the one many colouring apps have thrown away by choice. They fill the wrong region in the wrong colour, or deduct something, or break a streak — faithfully reproducing an accident of oil paint as though it were a feature of the design. Numbrush does not: tapping a region that does not belong to the selected colour does nothing at all, which is why there is no undo button and no eraser.
What has genuinely persisted from 1951 is the underlying observation Robbins made: that if you remove the decisions, what is left is still enjoyable. That was a real discovery about people, and it has survived a complete change of material.
Frequently asked questions
Who invented paint by number, Dan Robbins or Max Klein?
Dan Robbins is generally credited with designing the numbered-region system, and Max Klein owned the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit that produced and sold it as Craft Master. The precise balance of credit has been disputed in retellings for decades, and the record does not settle it cleanly.
Did Leonardo da Vinci really invent paint by number?
No. That is the company’s own origin anecdote, not documented history. Renaissance workshops genuinely divided labour between master and assistants, which is probably the seed of the story, but there is no evidence of a numbered-region system of this kind.
When was paint by number most popular?
It became a mass craze in the United States in the early 1950s, peaked within a few years, and then declined. Specific sales figures vary a great deal between retellings, so it is safer to describe the shape of the trend than to quote a number.
Why did critics dislike paint by number kits?
Because the composition, palette and boundaries are all decided before you arrive, so the buyer supplies labour rather than authorship. The kits were nonetheless later exhibited by the Smithsonian as artefacts of American popular culture, which suggests the confident version of the dismissal aged less well than the objects did.
Try it on a real canvas
Numbrush is colour by number for adults: mandalas, rose windows and geometric pattern work, twelve colours a picture, a magnifier for the tight spots, and a wrong tap that costs you nothing. Free, offline, no ads and no account.