About us
About Saints Oil Paintings
We paint and sell hand-painted reproductions of saints in Western art: Catherine with her wheel, Lawrence with his gridiron, Peter holding the keys. Every reproduction is painted to order, by hand, in oil on canvas, and ships free worldwide.
The catalogue came first, and the rest of this page is about it. It is organised by the emblem each saint carries, because that is how the people these pictures were painted for told one saint from another.
The object is the caption
A painted saint is a puzzle that came with a printed answer. For most of the period covered here, the people standing in front of these pictures could not read the label, and there was usually no label. Painters solved it with an object: Catherine has her wheel, Lawrence his gridiron, Peter the keys of the kingdom, Sebastian the arrows. The object is the caption, and the convention was stable enough across four centuries and half a dozen countries that a viewer in Antwerp could read an altarpiece painted in Seville.
That convention is the axis of this catalogue. Entries are grouped by the emblem a figure carries, not only by the name a museum record gives, because the emblem is the part a reader standing in front of the panel can actually use.
Where the emblem stops working
An attribute identifies, but it does not prove. The palm of martyrdom belongs to hundreds of figures and settles nothing on its own. A book is carried by roughly half the calendar. Two saints named Catherine, one of Alexandria and one of Siena, are told apart by a wheel and a crown of thorns, and a worn panel can lose either.
The rule followed here is to keep the museum's wording and the reading of the picture side by side rather than let one quietly overwrite the other, and to leave a hedged identification hedged instead of tidying it into a certainty.
What this catalogue leaves alone
This is a record of pictures, not a devotional resource and not a reference on canonisation, cult or relic. Feast days, the history of a cause, and the theology behind a legend are all outside the remit. When a legend is needed to explain why a figure holds what they hold, it appears in a sentence and stops there.
The record
How an entry on Saints Oil Paintings is put together
Every catalogue field on this site is copied from a public record and can be followed back to it. Nothing here is generated from a guess about what a picture probably shows.
The catalogue is compiled and edited by Louie Drehmer.
The holding institution
Title, date, support, dimensions and current location come from the collection's own published record, through the open catalogue APIs that museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Rijksmuseum maintain.
Depicted-subject statements
Where Wikidata carries a structured statement naming the figure depicted, it is used as a second opinion on the identification, and it is cited with its own identifier so a reader can check it against the museum's wording.
The name behind the name
Painters of saints are often known by a workshop name, a place, or an initial. Artist identity and life dates are reconciled against the Getty Union List of Artist Names so that one hand does not end up split across two entries.
Our group
Saints Oil Paintings is one of six sites run by Art & See, each devoted to a single subject.
Saints Oil Paintingssaintspaintings.comSaints and martyrs, by the emblem each one carriesYou are here
Jesus Christ Oil Paintingsjesusoilpaintings.comThe life of Christ, episode by episode
Angel Oil Paintingsangelspaintings.comAngels, archangels and the celestial hierarchy
Horse Oil Paintingshorsespaintings.comThe horse in Western painting, by discipline
Vincent van Gogh Paintingsvincentvangoghpaintings.comVan Gogh's paintings, place by place and year by year- Oil Painting Reproductionsoilpaintingreproductions.orgReproductions explained: how they are made, what they cost, who paints them well