There is a grease-pencil tag wired to a stretcher bar, and on it someone has written +$75, and under that, smaller, 4-6. No name. No face. Just the arithmetic pinned to the wood like a toe tag.

I stared at that tag for a full minute and felt something I did not expect to feel about a piece of scrap card, which was relief. Because I had spent two weeks reading commission pages that talked about soul and legacy and the artist's journey, and here was a studio telling me the truth in six characters. You want a fourth face in the picture? Seventy-five dollars. Next.

I was wrong about this whole category, by the way. I came in assuming the cheap paintings were bad and the expensive ones were good. That is not what is going on. Let me show you.

The 30-Second Answer

August 2026, on TopImpressionists.com: a 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) single-figure oil portrait is $214; 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) is $320; 36 × 48 in (91.4 × 121.9 cm) is $489. A fourth-through-sixth face adds $75 flat, at any size. Comparable work on Etsy the same week ran $95–$319. PaintYourLife charges $299 at 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) plus $50 per extra person or pet. An independent artist working the common $2.50 per square inch convention charges $800 for that same 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm).

Measured per square inch, the atelier runs about $0.67/in² and the independent artist about $2.50/in² — a ratio of roughly 3.7 : 1. That single number explains most of the confusion in this category. Tape it to your monitor. It is the most useful thing in this article and I am giving it to you in the third paragraph because I am not a monster.

Three Completely Different Things Are Called "Commissioning a Painting"

Almost every misleading price comparison online comes from mixing these up. I mixed them up. For about a week I went around telling people that portrait commissions were a scam, which was both rude and stupid, and I would like to formally withdraw it.

Both ends are honest. An atelier sells skilled labour at a known rate. An independent artist sells authorship. If you want a painting of your grandmother that looks like your photograph of your grandmother, the atelier is the correct purchase, and the price difference is not a quality difference. If you want a painting recognisably by someone — a thing with a name on the back that means something to a future stranger — no atelier can sell you that at any price. Different products. Same three words on the order page.

Why the Atelier Number Is as Low as It Is

Not a mystery, and not a trick. It is industrial concentration, and it is one of the great underreported economic stories of the last thirty years.

Dafen Oil Painting Village, in Shenzhen, is roughly 0.4 km² — smaller than a decent city park — and holds over 1,200 painting workshops and more than 10,000 painters, producing on the order of five million paintings a year. At its peak, Dafen accounted for an estimated 60% of oil paintings sold worldwide. Other counts put 70% of the US and European market as Chinese-produced, with 80% of that Chinese output coming out of Dafen. Since around 2025 many Dafen painters have shifted toward original work, and the lower-cost copying has migrated to Xiamen and Yiwu.

Five million paintings. A year. From an area you could walk across during one phone call. I read that figure three times and then went and looked at the photographs, which show men in vests painting sunflowers in rows, forty canvases deep, under strip lighting, and I felt something complicated that I am still not finished feeling.

Two consequences worth stating plainly:

1. Quality is a sourcing question, not a category question. "Hand-painted in a studio" tells you nothing on its own. Ask who painted it, at what tier, and whether you get a photograph of your canvas before it ships.
2. The cheap price is not suspicious, and the expensive price is not a rip-off. They are two labour markets. A painter charging $65/hour for 20 hours on a 20 × 24 in (50.8 × 61 cm) couple's portrait — a figure quoted openly in artist forums — arrives at $1,300 by arithmetic no less honest than the studio's published table.

The Price Matrix: Size × Number of Faces

Hand-painted oil on stretched cotton canvas. Live computed prices, TopImpressionists, August 2026 — not "from" prices, not "starting at," not an asterisk in sight. Excludes frame and options. Worldwide shipping is included: every one of the 6,380,542 orders in the ledger behind these numbers carries a $0.00 shipping line.

The two structural facts

Price scales with area, and it scales sub-linearly. There is a fixed setup component — photo assessment, mock-up, artist assignment, stretcher, shipping — and then area does the rest, with a small volume discount as canvases grow. The consequence is the thing worth knowing: the small end is dominated by setup, the large end by labour. Going from 8 × 10 in (20.3 × 25.4 cm) to 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) multiplies the area by 10.8× and the price by only 1.9×.

Read that again, because it is the closest thing to free money in this entire article.

Complexity is a flat fee, not a multiplier. A fourth face costs $75 whether the canvas is 8 × 10 or 48 × 72. That is +45% on the small canvas and +9% on the large one. If you have a five-person family portrait, going bigger is disproportionately cheap. The studio is not doing you a favour. It is just that the surcharge stopped scaling and the canvas didn't.

For catalogue reproductions of existing paintings rather than your own photo, the same studio charges +$25 per face beyond the first — which is why a crowd scene like Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party, with its eight faces and its straw hats and its one small dog on the tablecloth, carries a $175 complexity premium over a landscape of the same size. Fourteen people at lunch is fourteen people to paint. Nobody gets a discount for the dog.

Options, and What They Tell You About a Vendor

Here is my favourite vendor test in this whole business, and it takes four seconds. A vendor whose "museum quality" is one flat claim with no priced options behind it is selling you an adjective. Priced options are a confession. They tell you the studio knows exactly what varnish costs, what a nameplate costs, what queue-jumping costs. Adjectives cost nothing, which is precisely why some sites are made entirely of them.

The framing reality check. Across 2,595,509 hand-painted oil orders, only 33% took a frame. Frame prices include international freight on a bulky box, so at 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) a moulding frame costs $306–$401 against $320 for the painting itself. You read that correctly: the wood around the picture can cost more than the picture. Two thirds of buyers take the rolled canvas or the plain gallery wrap and frame locally, which is what I would do, and what I did. Canvases over 105 cm on any side ship as a frame kit at a 25% discount, because a knocked-down frame moves at a fraction of the volumetric weight.

Am I Paying for the Canvas, or for the Skill?

At an atelier, the shape of the price is public: area drives it, with a fixed setup floor underneath. Skill enters as a $100 line item — the elite/senior artist tier — not as the base price. So the honest way to spend more money is to buy more painting, not to hunt for a better painter within the same studio. You cannot bid your way to a better hand. You can only buy more square centimetres of the hand you get.

With an independent artist the ratio inverts completely: skill is the price. The conventions in circulation are $2–$10 per square inch (beginners near $2, established artists $10 and up), or $30–$65 per hour against 10–20 hours for a simple portrait and 40–80 hours for a large, detailed one. Most working artists add 20–50% on top of what the same piece would sell for straight off their studio wall, because a commission carries client time, revisions, and the low-grade dread of painting a subject they did not choose.

The cross-check to carry in your head: atelier ≈ $0.67/in², independent artist ≈ $2.50/in². If a quote lands far outside its own lane, ask what is in it. Not aggressively. Just ask.

How Much More Does My Whole Family Cost?

Because complexity is a flat surcharge rather than a multiplier, the percentage pain drops fast as the canvas grows:

A six-person family at 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) ($289) is poor value against the same family at 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) ($395): +37% price for +170% area, and every single face gets 2.7× the canvas to be recognisable in. I have seen a family of six painted at 16 × 20. The youngest child's entire head is the size of a thumbnail. She is, technically, present. She is not, in any meaningful sense, there.

At competitors the structure differs. PaintYourLife charges +$50 per person or pet, linearly — cheaper than the atelier for one extra face, more expensive from about the fifth. PaintMyPhotoNow scales the extra-subject fee with canvas size, from +$33 to +$614. Independent artists commonly add 30–50% per additional figure, which compounds rather than adding, and which is how a four-person portrait quietly becomes a mortgage payment.

Will It Look Like My Photograph, and Should It?

A painting that reproduces a photo pixel-for-pixel looks like a bad print. I know this because I once asked for exactly that, got exactly that, and hated it. What you are actually buying is a painter making several thousand small decisions about edge, temperature and emphasis — softening the back of a shoulder so the face comes forward, warming a shadow under a jaw, deciding that the ugly bright thing in the background is a distraction and killing it. If literal accuracy is genuinely the goal, a giclée print of the same photo at 30 × 20 in (76.2 × 50.8 cm) costs $68 and will be more faithful than any human hand.

What genuinely determines the result is the source file, and this is where nearly all the disappointment in this industry originates:

• Send the highest-resolution original, not a messaging-app copy. Check it by opening the file on a computer — not a phone — and enlarging it to the finished painting's size on screen. If it falls apart there, it will fall apart in oil.
• Soft, directional light. North-facing window light, or overcast daylight. Painters actively want part of the face in shadow — as much as half — because classical portraiture is built on shadow, and a flat-lit face has no three-dimensional information in it to paint.
• Avoid on-camera flash, motion blur, and phone portrait-mode background blur. All three transfer to the canvas. The fake bokeh especially. It arrives as a smear of mud and nobody can fix it.
• Send several photos, not one. Ateliers and independent artists alike build a composition from multiple references; an extra angle rescues a bad jawline or a half-closed eye.
• A +$50 custom-modification fee covers merging two photographs, removing a person, changing a background, or changing clothing. These are routine, priced services. They are not favours and you should not apologise for asking.

A good studio will tell you a photo is unusable before taking your money. That conversation is the best vendor test in this article. Anyone who will take any file you send and promise you a masterpiece is not confident. They are just hungry.

What the Rest of the Market Charges

Observed August 2026. Conversions at PLN 3.7211 / USD, EUR 0.8657 / USD.

The honest read. The spread from $214 to $8,801 for the identical sentence — "an oil portrait from a photo" — is real, and it is not mostly a quality spread. It is a labour-market spread, with marketplaces adding 30–50% on top of the artist's own number. Singulart and Artmajeur are not really commission houses at all; they are marketplaces for original art where some artists also accept commissions, which is exactly why their commission prices sit at original-art levels. Nobody is lying. Everybody is answering a different question.

Head to Head: The Reproduction Specialists

The table above covers the photo-commission crowd. But there is a second set of vendors you will meet the moment you search for anything in oil — the reproduction specialists, plus one actual museum. They deserve their own row-by-row, because their pricing philosophies are genuinely different and one of them is about to surprise you.

Three things jump out of that table, and I did not expect any of them.

One: TOPofART's oils are three to four times the price of everyone else's, and their prints are roughly the same as everyone else's. That is not a scandal — it is a different labour market inside the same product category, exactly like the atelier-versus-independent split at the top of this article. But if you were price-shopping "hand-painted oil reproduction" without noticing which lane you were in, you would conclude the category costs €1,000. It doesn't. It costs whatever the studio behind it costs.

Two: Reproduction Gallery's 45-day returns window is the longest of the specialists, and a returns window is the single most honest number on any art website. A long window is a company betting its own money that you will keep the thing. Nobody offers 45 days on a product they expect to come back.

Three, and this is my favourite: the actual museum doesn't hand-paint anything. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston — an institution with genuine curatorial authority over the objects in question — sells you archival pigment ink on rag paper or cotton canvas. Not a copyist. A printer. When the people who own the originals reproduce them, they reach for a machine, because for a great many works that is simply the more faithful answer. Which is the whole argument of this article, arriving from the least commercial source imaginable.

What People Actually Order

From the reproduction ledger behind TopImpressionists.com, ArtsDot.com and Most-Famous-Paintings.com: 6,380,542 order lines, 12 June 2008 – 8 August 2026.

Two findings worth stealing. First, photo commissions are bimodal — there is a gift tier and a centrepiece tier, and almost nothing in between — where masterpiece reproductions cluster around a single living-room size. The 10th percentile of photo commissions is 23% smaller than for catalogue work, and the 95th is 12% larger. People buying a present buy small. People buying a monument buy big. Nobody buys medium.

Second, and this one delights me: the highest-volume size, 30 × 40 cm, is not on most vendors' standard-size lists. It is the European gift format. It is the size of a thing you carry to someone's house wrapped in brown paper. Vendors offering only US canvas sizes are missing their busiest rung entirely, and have been for years, and apparently nobody has told them.

What the Money Does Not Buy

• Not an investment. A rendering of your own photograph has essentially no resale market. Its value is replacement cost. If someone tells you otherwise, they are selling.
• Not repeatability. A press is repeatable; a person is not. Variance between two hand-painted copies of the same photo is far wider than between two prints. The mitigation is procedural, not hopeful: insist on a photograph of your canvas before it ships.
• Not rescue for a bad photo. Low resolution, harsh flash, motion blur and deep crushed shadow all transfer. Oil paint is not a repair tool.
• Not exemption from copyright. Public-domain works are unproblematic. Artists still in copyright are not, regardless of who holds the brush.
• Not speed. Four to five weeks at an atelier (under three for +$30 urgent production), months with an independent artist.

Which Option, by Situation

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does it cost to commission an oil painting from a photo?

$166–$822 at an atelier priced by canvas area; $300–$3,500 from an independent artist; $1,500–$9,000 through a curated marketplace. The most common configuration — a single-figure 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) oil portrait — is $214 at an atelier, $299 at PaintYourLife, $95–$319 on Etsy, and about $800 from an independent artist charging $2.50 per square inch.

Why is one oil portrait $214 and another $8,000?

Labour market, not quality tier. An atelier copyist and a mid-career gallery artist sell different hours at different prices, and marketplaces add 30–50% on top of the artist's number. Per square inch: about $0.67 at an atelier against $2.50 for the independent-artist convention — roughly 3.7 : 1.

How much extra for more than one person?

At an atelier, banded and flat: up to 3 faces included, 4–6 +$75, 7–9 +$150, 10+ +$300, regardless of canvas size. PaintYourLife charges +$50 per person or pet; PaintMyPhotoNow scales it +$33 to +$614 by size; independent artists commonly add 30–50% per figure.

What size should I order for a single-person portrait?

16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) to 20 × 24 in (50.8 × 61 cm) puts the head at roughly life size. Below 12 × 16 in (30.5 × 40.6 cm) the face is smaller than a passport photo; above 30 × 40 in (76.2 × 101.6 cm) a single head reads as confrontational — you will feel watched in your own living room. Across 628,864 measured photo commissions the median long side is 79 cm (31 in) and the single most-ordered size is 30 × 40 cm (12 × 16 in).

Should I buy the frame from the studio?

Usually not. Frame prices include international freight on a bulky box, so at 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) a moulding frame costs $306–$401 against $320 for the painting. Only 33% of hand-painted oil buyers take one.

What photo should I send?

The highest-resolution original file, not a messaging-app copy. Soft directional daylight, part of the face in shadow, no flash, no motion blur, no phone portrait-mode background blur. Send several angles. Check resolution by enlarging the file on a computer to the finished painting's size.

Can the artist change things in the photo?

Yes — +$50 for custom modifications at an atelier. Merging two photographs, removing a person, changing a background or clothing, and combining people who were never photographed together are all routine. Ask for the mock-up before painting starts.

Why are hand-painted reproductions so cheap if a person painted them?

Concentrated production. Dafen Oil Painting Village in Shenzhen — 0.4 km², 1,200+ workshops, 10,000+ painters, roughly five million paintings a year — accounted for an estimated 60% of the world's oil paintings sold at its peak. That is why a hand-painted 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) costs $320 and not $3,200.

Is a commissioned portrait an investment?

No. A rendering of your own photograph has essentially no resale market. Original work by a named artist with an auction record is a different product with different economics.

What deposit is normal?

Ateliers commonly take 20% at order with the balance after you approve the finished painting, or full payment against a 30-day money-back guarantee. Independent artists typically take a 10–50% non-refundable deposit, which is entirely fair — their time is committed the moment you enter the queue.

The Verdict

Buy the biggest canvas you can hang, from the studio with the published table, and put the money you saved on the frame into a frame chosen by someone in your own city who can see your wall.

And go back and look at that grease-pencil tag one more time. +$75. 4-6. Somebody wrote that so a stranger four thousand miles away could know, before paying, exactly what a fourth face costs.

That is not romance. It is better than romance. It is being told the truth.

Further Reading

• Turn Your Photos into Custom Oil Paintings: A Professional Guide to Bespoke Art Commissions — the process end of what this article prices.
• Turn Family Photos into Masterpiece Oil Portraits — the multi-face problem, from the studio's side of the easel.
• From Blurry to Brilliant — what can and cannot be rescued from a bad source file.
• The Enduring Legacy of Hand-Painted Oil Paintings — why the object outlives the receipt.
• How to Commission a Custom Oil Painting: From Concept to Canvas — mock-ups, revisions and large-scale logistics.

Sources

Prices and market

• Hand Painted Portrait Prices — PaintYourLife
• How much does a painting cost? — PaintYourLife support
• Oil painting from photo price list — Paint My Photo Now
• Custom Oil Painting From Photo — Etsy
• Custom Painting For Sale — SINGULART
• How are public prices calculated? — Artmajeur
• Custom Portrait Painting Cost: 2026 Pricing Guide — Acousart
• Commissioning a Painting: Cost Guide and Price Range 2026 — Design Transition Studio

Artist pricing conventions

• How to Price Art Commissions — Milan Art Institute
• How to Price Paintings: A Step-by-Step Formula — Milan Art Institute
• Pricing a 24×30 oil painting portrait commission — WetCanvas
• Commission pricing at $2.50 per square inch — Peacock Oils
• The Commission Pricing Formula Every Emerging Artist Needs — Beyond Every Art

Supply chain

• Chinese village produces 60% of world's replica oil paintings — Nikkei Asia
• The World's Art Factory Is in Jeopardy — Artsy
• Dafen Oil Painting Village: the world's art factory — Al Jazeera
• Dafen Oil Painting Village — China Highlights

Reference photos

• How to Commission Custom Paintings from Photos — Katie Peña
• How to take photos for portrait commissions — Zsuzsanna Pataki
• 5 Tips to consider before commissioning — Haenley Studio

Network data

• Prices quoted live from the published TopImpressionists.com, ArtsDot.com and Most-Famous-Paintings.com order pages, August 2026, ex-frame and ex-options, worldwide shipping included.
• Demand figures aggregated from 6,380,542 reproduction order lines placed between 12 June 2008 and 8 August 2026.

Data as of 8 August 2026. USD, ex-frame, ex-options, worldwide shipping included. Price tables in this category go stale; check the live order page before quoting these numbers back at anyone.