Paintings by numbers: They were as much a part of the 1950s as atomic clocks and poodle skirts, barbecues, Elvis and Ed Sullivan, largely because they were such an ideal fit for the time. Post-World War II, Americans were enjoying a new affluence and an abundance of leisure time to fill, a move towards the quieter life of the suburbs, with its complexes of mass-produced houses, and these painting kits became a perfect metaphor for living life within the lines.

Introduced to the public at the 195l Toy Show in New York, they were the brainchild of Dan Robbins, head designer of Detroit's Palmer Paint Co., owned by Max S. Klein. Childhood enjoyment of coloring books and painting is said to have inspired Robbins, who claimed a further impetus from reading that Leonardo da Vinci would assign numbered sections of his paintings to assistants to paint. The original sets, marketed under the name Craft Master, included two brushes and gelatin capsules of premixed oil paint.

The pictures were printed on rolled canvas, but when competitors entered the market using boards marked with light blue outlines, Craft Master followed suit, later switching to acrylic paints as well. Robbins' first prototype subject was "Abstract No. 1," but Klein shot it down in favor of a dramatic sea scene, "The Fisherman." Later groups were the Masterpiece Series, the Master Masterpiece Series, depicting paintings by Gainsborough and Rembrandt, and the large Super Master Craft kits with canvases measuring 24 by 36 inches.

It didn't take long for painting by numbers to become a national craze, making Everyman and Woman an artist; (each box proclaimed "Every man a Rembrandt!"): people who had never held a brush before were now seduced by the hypnotic activity of filling in the designated spaces and seeing their own masterpieces emerge. (In fact, it was estimated that 10 percent of these hobbyists went on to paint on their own.). The popularity of these kits — soon made by a number of other such firms as Crafttint, Masterpiece and Hasbro — was so contagious that by 1954, 12 million of them had been sold, depicting everything from The Last Supper to flowers and kittens, Paris street scenes, cowboys, ballerinas, and clowns, all dismissed by the art world as uncreative commercial kitsch — one critic bemoaning the fact that more of these diagrammatic pictures hung on the walls of American homes than did real paintings. The hackneyed subject matter was to them as much of a turn-off as the mechanical process.

The much maligned paint-by-number artwork became totally legitimized in 2001, when the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History staged an exhibition called "Paint by Number: Accounting for Taste in the 1950s." (Andy Warhol had done a riff on the genre in 1962, in a work called "Do It Yourself (Flowers.") Curated by William L. Bird Jr., himself a paint-by-numbers collector, this widely seen showing of more than 200 examples included some painted and signed by celebrities, such as J. Edgar Hoover's rendition of "Swiss Village" and Ethel Merman's "Old Mill." They presented the paint by numbers genre as a significant icon of the conservative American postwar 1950s, thereby inflating an already emerging post-modern collecting field. They were, after all, perfect — if somewhat ironic — pieces to hang over the retro midcentury modern sofa.

For collectors, the originals on canvas are particularly sought after. Some focus on completing series — limited editions of Dracula, the Mummy, and Frankenstein, for example, are in high demand, with one unused Frankenstein kit having sold for $500, while an "Abstract Number One" with Dan Robbins' signature found a buyer for $1,000. In addition to the original 36 works by Robbins, paintings designed by another key Craft Master artist, Adam Grant, are very collectible.