I Make Thousands Copying Famous Works of Art

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Most of us struggle to draw a tree that looks anything like the real thing. Artists like Andréa Dlouha are capable of reproducing not just reality – they replicate other people’s work with millimetre-stroke precision, too. In her Paris atelier, she has faithfully copied works by some of the most famous artists in history, including Picasso, Van Gogh and Renoir. She’s sometimes even commissioned to duplicate family portraits for the next generations.

“I don’t have a favourite period,” Dlouha says. “It changes, depending on the times and on people’s requests. There are wonderful things in every era.” Dlouha herself seems to have come from another time, with her radio permanently tuned to classical music and her studio walls covered in paintings. Even though she is one of the last reproduction artists left in France, with clients from all over the world, she still seemed a little astonished that we’d taken an interest in her work.

Back in the 19th century, art reproductions were very much in demand. But the advent of new technology meant printed reproductions of famous artworks became affordable and mainstream, undercutting the once-lucrative sector. 

The key to Dlouha’s success is a combination of talent and diligence: Her paintings don’t just look exactly like the original – she also uses the same historical techniques to execute them. She mainly paints with pigments created just as in the olden days. “This is a 16th-century-style oil,” she explains, pulling up a jar from a shelf. “You have to cook it over a fire for two hours [before using it].”

In the past, painters only had five basic colours to work with, which they mixed together in order to create their pallets. “That’s how they made their pictures harmonious and not too bright,” Dlouha says. At the time, reproduction was considered an art form in and of itself, passed down from master to trainee. “Each master’s workshop had its own secrets,” Dlouha said. “It took people an average of 13 years to become a [reproduction] artist.”

Dlouha approaches her paintings like they’re a maths problem. “It’s like making a cake with no recipe,” she says. She takes inspiration from studies of art restoration, and she also tries to see the paintings in person as much as possible, because colours are always slightly different on posters or in art books. 

A reproduction artist’s work isn’t to be confused with forgery. First of all, to make a legal copy of an original artwork, the latter must not be copyrighted. In France, a painting is considered public domain when it has been 70 years since the death of the last surviving author. On top of that, you can’t reproduce the painting in its original size. You’re also required to mark the copy on the back, and finally, it’s forbidden to imitate the original painter’s signature.

French museums welcome reproduction artists. You have to ask for permission to paint directly in front of an artwork, but you’ll usually get it if you go during the week when there aren’t too many visitors, according to Dlouha. She has even travelled abroad to observe a painting up close, most recently to Germany to look at a copy of a Brueghel. “It’s a sort of internal immersion,” is how she describes it. “I stay awhile, I leave, I come back.”

As passionate as she is about her vocation today, Dlouha didn’t always dream of being an artist. She used to be a biologist and worked for several years in the pharmaceutical industry, but wasn’t very motivated by her job. At some point, she decided to paint a picture to put up in her home – her first copy ever, which she admits wasn’t very good. “The moment of truth for me was when I lost my job,” she says. “I was having money issues. That’s when I decided to seize the day – and it worked.” 

Dlouha left everything behind and opened her workshop. She had no formal training and simply learned by doing. It took 20 years to perfect her technique and make a career out of reproductions. At first, her decision worried her loved ones. “People said to me, ‘Why go through all this trouble? It costs €30 to buy a reproduction online these days,’” she says. “That’s like comparing a plastic bag to a Hermès.”

Her clients have to be a little patient, though, because it usually takes her a year to finish a piece. Her fees are consistent with this long and demanding task, starting at €1,500 for a small painting and going up to tens of thousands of euros, depending on the difficulty and the size of the reproduction. Of course, Dlouha can’t make just any size painting – they have to fit through her atelier’s doors.

Besides selling her work, Dlouha also trains her own students – who are generally either novice painters or people studying how to restore classics. On the day we met, she was just finishing up with one of her classes. As her students left, I could see the look of admiration in their eyes.

When I asked her if she didn’t find it frustrating being such a good painter but only working on copies, Dlouha replied that the question echoes an age-old debate in the art world. Some see reproduction artists as mere craftspeople; others say they’re artists just like any other.

Dlouha doesn’t feel she has enough time to dedicate herself to paintings of her own, as her commissions keep coming. Besides, “As a reproduction artist, you have the weight of 500 years of classical painting on your shoulders,” she says. “Sometimes, it’s hard to free yourself from all that.”

Still, Dlouha is content with the work that she does. “It’s not creative art, but you still have to reinvent yourself with every single copy,” she says – and she makes a comfortable living from her art, too. “That whole romanticised idea of the starving artist,” she jokes, “never sounded that romantic to me.”