The 30-second answer

Here's the number, and then I'll show you where it comes from. A hand-painted oil portrait from your photo runs $166–$822 at an atelier that prices by the square centimetre, and $300–$3,500 from an independent artist who prices by the hour, and no, the second number does not mean a better painting — I'll get to that. The single biggest thing moving that price is canvas area, not talent: the same painter charges roughly 2.6× more for a 24×36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) canvas than a 12×16 in (30.5 × 40.6 cm) one. The second thing is how many faces are in the frame, which is the part that separates a Thanksgiving photo from a headshot.

On OriginalUniqueArt in August 2026: a 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) single-figure oil portrait is $214, a 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) is $320, and a 36 × 48 in (91.4 × 121.9 cm) is $489. Slap a fourth-through-sixth face on there and it's +$75 flat, no matter the size. Etsy ran $95–$319 for a comparable job the same week; PaintYourLife wants $299 for 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) plus $50 per extra person or pet; Singulart listed a commissioned portrait at PLN 32,750 (≈ US$8,801) for 150 × 100 cm, which is a whole different sport.

Lead time is where everybody gets fooled. An atelier turns your photo into a shipped painting in 4–5 weeks standard, under 3 weeks for +$30 urgent. An independent painter takes 8–12 weeks just to paint it, then 6–12 more weeks of curing before it can even be varnished, and a painter with a following will quote you six months like it's nothing. That 10× price gap I mentioned? Mostly a queue-and-calendar gap, not a talent gap.

Everything from here is the receipts. One thing worth checking before any of these numbers mean a thing to you: the tables below assume your source photo can actually support the painting you want — a weak photo sinks more commissions than a weak price tier ever will.

The side-by-side, before we go any further

Because I know half of you came here to compare five tabs you already have open, here's the buying-terms grid up front — not the price ladder (that's §6, vendor by vendor), but what each channel actually promises you before your money leaves. Where a vendor doesn't publish a number, I say so instead of making one up.

Read that last column twice before you swoon: Singulart's certificate and returns window are real, and so is the 30–50% the platform skims off the artist before anyone touches a brush — you're paying original-art prices partly for escrow. The three atelier columns use similar size-and-face pricing formulas, which is why the numbers rhyme.

1. Three different things get called "commissioning a painting"

Nearly every confused price comparison online happens because people mash these three products together like they're the same purchase. They aren't. They're apples, oranges, and a much more expensive orange.

Both ends of that table are telling the truth. An atelier sells you skilled labor at a knowable price, the way a good tailor sells you a suit that fits. An independent artist sells you authorship, the way a chef sells you their name on the menu. If you want a painting of your grandmother that looks like the photo of your grandmother, the atelier is the correct purchase and the price gap is not a quality gap — it just isn't. If you want a painting that is recognizably by a named artist, no atelier on earth can sell you that, at any price, because that's not the product.

2. The price matrix (the citable asset)

Size × subject complexity, hand-painted oil on stretched cotton canvas. These are live computed prices on OriginalUniqueArt for August 2026, not teaser "from" prices designed to get you in the door. They exclude frames and options; worldwide shipping is included — every order in the ledger described in §7 carries a $0.00 shipping line, which still amazes me a little.

2.1 Base price by canvas size and number of faces

Two structural facts sit inside that table, and they're worth knowing cold:

1. Price scales with area, but sub-linearly. There's a fixed charge for setup — photo assessment, mock-up, artist assignment, stretcher, shipping — plus a labor charge that grows a little slower than the canvas area itself, a small built-in volume discount as canvases get bigger. So the small end of the table is basically paying for setup, and the large end is paying for labor. Go from 8 × 10 in (20.3 × 25.4 cm) to 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) and you multiply the area by 10.8× but the price by only 1.9×. That's the best deal quietly hiding in this whole article.
2. Complexity is a flat surcharge, not a multiplier. A fourth face costs the same $75 on an 8×10 as it does on a 48×72. On the small canvas that's a brutal +45%. On the big one it's a shrug, +9%. If you've got a five-person family portrait, going bigger is disproportionately cheap — the math is quietly begging you to size up.

2.2 Where the "1–3 faces free" line actually sits

Ateliers band faces because faces are where copy work gets genuinely hard — a landscape forgives a wobble, a jawline does not. The banding on OriginalUniqueArt:

For catalogue reproductions of existing paintings — not your photo, an already-famous one — the same studio charges +$25 per face beyond the first, which is exactly why a crowd scene like Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (8 faces, everyone mid-laugh, wine on the table like it's the best afternoon of 1881) carries a $175 complexity premium over a landscape the same size.

2.3 Options, priced separately

Every line below is something you can decline, which I appreciate, because a vendor whose "museum quality" is a single flat claim with nothing behind it is selling you an adjective, not a service.

Frame prices span those bands across 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) to 36 × 48 in (91.4 × 121.9 cm), and the price includes worldwide shipping of the framed piece — which is exactly why framing a large canvas costs more than the painting on it does. Canvases over 105 cm on any side ship as a frame kit at a 25% discount on the frame line, because a knocked-down frame flies at a fraction of the volumetric weight.

Reality check on framing: across 2,595,509 hand-painted oil orders in the ledger, only 33% took a frame (864,399 orders). Two thirds of buyers grab the rolled canvas or the plain gallery wrap and frame locally, and honestly, that's usually the smart move — local framing beats paying international freight on a box of air.

3. Choosing the size: what the format reference actually tells you

The single decision that moves your price most is the one most buyers make dead last. Three rules that hold across the whole market:

Rule 1 — Match the aspect ratio of your photo, not a standard canvas. A 3:2 phone photo cropped into a 4:5 canvas loses a quarter of the frame, and the crop always eats the edges of a group — someone's elbow, someone's dog, gone. Ateliers that generate their size ladders from the source image's own ratio (the ArtsDot/OriginalUniqueArt size selector walks a geometric series of surface areas at the image's native aspect, capped at 250 cm on the long side) sidestep this entirely. If your vendor only offers standard US canvas sizes, decide the crop before you decide the size.

Rule 2 — A portrait wants a head roughly life-size, or a touch under. For a head-and-shoulders single figure, that's 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) to 20 × 24 in (50.8 × 61 cm). Below 12 × 16 in (30.5 × 40.6 cm) the face shrinks to smaller than a passport photo and detail stops paying for itself. Above 30 × 40 in (76.2 × 101.6 cm) a single head stops feeling intimate and starts feeling like it's about to say something to you.

Rule 3 — For groups, count heads, then add area. Because complexity is a flat surcharge and area is the price driver, a 6-person family at 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) ($289) is a bad deal against the same family at 24 × 36 in (61 × 91.4 cm) ($395): +37% price for +170% area, and every face gets 2.7× the canvas. Bigger is basically the house buying you a round.

What buyers actually choose (from the order ledger, §7): the median hand-painted commission from a customer photo is 4,636 cm² with a 79 cm (31 in) long side — right around 24 × 32 in (61 × 81.3 cm). The single most-ordered size for photo commissions is 30 × 40 cm (12 × 16 in) — the gift size — with 61 × 46 cm (24 × 18 in) close behind.

4. Lead times (the second citable asset)

This table is the one worth screenshotting. The price gap between an atelier and an independent artist looks like a scam until you put the two calendars side by side and just look at them.

4.1 The three questions that predict a late delivery

"Am I in a queue, and how long is it?"

Not "how long does it take to paint" — the painting itself is rarely the bottleneck, the waiting room is. Ask for a start date, not a finish date.

"Will it be varnished when it ships?"

If a vendor promises a fully varnished oil painting in under six weeks, one of three things is true: it isn't oil, it's painted paper-thin, or the varnish is going on too early. All three are worth knowing before you pay. The honest answer sounds like "we ship unvarnished or retouch-varnished, and here's how to varnish it in a year" — and that honesty is a good sign, not a red flag.

"What happens if I don't like it?"

The atelier answer is a mock-up before painting, plus a stated returns window — OriginalUniqueArt publishes a 30-day money-back guarantee. The independent-artist answer is usually a non-refundable deposit, typically 10–50%, and that's normal and fair, because their time is already spent the moment you're in their book.

4.2 Rush options, and what they actually buy

+15% (PaintYourLife "Express") and +$30 (OriginalUniqueArt urgent production) both buy the exact same thing: queue position, not faster painting. Nothing on earth shortens oil's drying schedule. If a vendor's rush option claims to compress the painting itself, what it's actually compressing is the number of layers, and you should ask what got skipped.

4.3 The curing rule, stated plainly

Oil paint is touch-dry in 24–72 hours and fully cured in 6 months to 2 years, depending on thickness — it dries the way a steak rests, not the way a puddle evaporates. Final varnish belongs after cure; trade rule of thumb is six months minimum. A reputable studio ships unvarnished or with a light retouch varnish and tells you so — and varnishing later is a twenty-minute job you or a framer can knock out. That is not a corner being cut. It's the material being handled correctly.

5. Worked example: what a Mona Lisa actually costs, at two sizes

The most-requested reproduction on the planet is also the cleanest way to show the pricing at work, because everyone already knows the original: Leonardo's Mona Lisa (La Gioconda), 77 × 53 cm, oil on poplar panel, c. 1503–1519, Musée du Louvre. She's small in person — everyone says so, everyone's a little disappointed the first time, and everyone buys the print anyway.

The size ladder is generated from the artwork's own aspect ratio (1797 : 2711, i.e. 0.663 wide-to-tall), stepping surface area by 1.09 per rung. Two rungs are worth pricing out.

Size A — the Louvre-scale copy: 77.4 × 51.3 cm (30.5 × 20.2 in)

Within 1 cm of the original panel on the long side.

Size B — the statement wall: 100.2 × 66.4 cm (39.4 × 26.1 in)

30% larger on each side; 68% more canvas area.

Put the two side by side and the whole cost structure falls out like a magic trick. The canvas grew 68% and the painting price grew only 30% — the sub-linear area exponent doing its quiet work. But the frame price grew 47%, because framing cost tracks perimeter and volumetric shipping weight, both of which scale faster than a painter's labor does. At large sizes, the frame is the expensive half of the order — which is exactly why two thirds of buyers skip it.

The Louvre footnote worth knowing

The Louvre has run a copyists' programme for centuries — around 150 copyists admitted at a time, with roughly a one-year waiting list, easels crammed elbow to elbow in the galleries like art school never ended. But there's a rule: a copy made in the museum must differ from the original by at least one fifth in size, and must carry the copyist's own signature, never the master's. So the one thing the Louvre's own copyists structurally cannot sell you is the 77 × 51 cm Size A above — a same-scale Mona Lisa. A commercial atelier can, and does; that rung is the single most-ordered Mona Lisa size there is.

6. What the rest of the market charges

Observed prices, August 2026. Currency conversions at PLN 3.7211 / USD, EUR 0.8657 / USD.

The honest read of that table. A spread from $214 to $8,801 for "an oil portrait from a photo" looks insane until you realize it isn't mostly a quality spread at all. It's a labor-market spread — a copyist in a production studio and a mid-career gallery artist are selling different hours at different prices, the same way a diner and a tasting-menu restaurant both sell you dinner. The marketplaces tack on 30–50% over the artist's own number on top of that. Singulart and Artmajeur aren't really commission houses at all — they're marketplaces for original art where some artists happen to also take commissions, which is exactly why their commission prices sit at original-art levels.

The per-square-inch cross-check. The independent-artist convention of $2.50/in² is a handy yardstick. At 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) (320 in²) that's $800. The atelier price at the same size is $214 — about $0.67/in². That ratio, roughly 3.7:1, holds up remarkably well across sizes, and it's the single cleanest number in this whole article for summarizing the atelier-versus-independent choice.

7. What people actually order (first-party demand data)

The numbers in this section come from OriginalUniqueArt.com's reproduction order ledger: 6,380,542 reproduction order lines placed between 12 June 2008 and 8 August 2026, on OriginalUniqueArt.com. This is the part of the article nobody else can publish, because nobody else has eighteen years of receipts sitting in a drawer.

Headline figures

Size distribution — hand-painted oil

Most-ordered exact sizes

Three findings worth citing:

1. Commissions from photos skew smaller at the bottom and larger at the top than catalogue reproductions. The 10th percentile is 23% smaller and the 95th percentile is 12% larger. Photo commissions are bimodal — a gift tier and a centerpiece tier — where masterpiece reproductions all cluster around a single "fits the living-room wall" size, like everyone got the same memo.
2. The most-ordered photo-commission size, 30 × 40 cm, isn't on most vendors' standard-size lists. It's the European gift format. Vendors offering only US canvas sizes are missing the single highest-volume rung entirely, which is a strange thing to miss.
3. Prints run half the size of paintings. Median print order: 1,836 cm², 51 cm long side, against 4,941 cm² for oil. People buy paintings big and prints small — the exact opposite of what a purely price-driven model would predict, and a reminder that people are not spreadsheets.

8. The 25 most reproduced paintings in the world — and why those 25

Same ledger, hand-painted oil only, ranked by number of commissioned reproductions, 2008–2026. In-copyright artists are excluded — 146,812 order lines for Dalí, Picasso, Magritte, Rothko, Chagall and Richter among others are held out, because a public reproduction-demand ranking should only list works anyone is free to have copied. Duplicate catalogue entries for the same work are merged.

Why those 25 — four patterns

1. Recognizability at thumbnail size beats art-historical rank, every time. The Starry Night out-orders the Mona Lisa by 23%, and both out-order everything else by a factor of two or more — the sky over Saint-Rémy, swirling like it's about to swallow the church, reads perfectly from across a living room, same as the smirk does. Both survive being seen small, in bad light, from ten feet away. Paintings that need proximity to work — Vermeer's interiors other than the Girl, most of Rembrandt — barely register, the Prodigal Son the lone exception.

2. Faces suppress demand, and the data shows exactly why. Nineteen of the twenty-five have zero or one face. The three real portraits in the list (Mona Lisa, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Lady with an Ermine) are all single heads, and all three are among the most technically brutal things a copyist can be asked to do — a jaw is not forgiving. Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party at #18 is the only crowd scene in the whole ranking — eight faces mid-laugh over wine — and it carries a $175 complexity surcharge every other entry dodges. Buyers are, without anyone telling them to, optimizing for the exact thing that's also cheapest to paint well. Nobody planned that. It just happened.

3. Color fields reproduce better than they photograph. Kandinsky at #4 and #8, Klimt at #5 and #9, Pollock at #14, Vallotton at #11 — abstract and decorative work is wildly over-represented next to its actual gallery-visit popularity. The reason is physical, not sentimental: a print flattens a Klimt's gold and a Pollock's poured relief into nothing, a puddle where there should be a mountain range, while a hand-painted copy keeps the surface alive. The works people commission by hand are the works prints fail hardest at.

4. The long tail is genuinely, almost absurdly long. 211,599 distinct paintings have been reproduced at least once. The top 25 account for a low single-digit share of all orders. This is a market where the head is famous and the tail is personal — someone's grandmother's favorite Kuindzhi, a Matejko that means something specific in Poland that no algorithm will ever understand. Any vendor stocking only the top 50 is serving a sliver of actual demand.

And the connection back to portraits from photos: the two most-copied paintings on earth are a landscape and a single head. When you commission your own portrait from a photograph, you're commissioning the Mona Lisa problem — one face, close up, nowhere to hide — which is exactly why every atelier in §6 bands its pricing by face count, and exactly why the independent-artist market charges 3.7× more per square inch for it.

9. What a commission does not buy you

Stated plainly, because a price guide that only lists upsides isn't worth the paper it's not printed on.

• It is not an investment. A commissioned portrait of your family has a resale value of approximately zero, and no amount of good lighting changes that. An original by a named artist with a market may hold value; a rendering of your photograph will not. Buy it because you want to live with it, full stop.
• It will not match your photograph exactly, and it shouldn't. A painting that reproduces a photo pixel-for-pixel looks like a bad print pretending to be a painting. What you're paying for is a painter making a thousand small decisions about edges, temperature, and emphasis. If exactness is the goal, a giclée of your photo costs $68 at 30 × 20 in (76.2 × 50.8 cm) and will be more accurate.
• Quality varies more than in printing. A press is repeatable; a person is not, and never will be. The gap between two hand-painted copies of the same photo — two painters, or one painter on two different days — is far wider than the gap between two prints. The mitigation is procedural, not financial: buy from a vendor that shows you a photograph of your actual canvas before it ships, and that names the skill tier you're paying for.
• A bad source photo cannot be rescued. Low resolution, harsh flash, motion blur, faces buried in shadow, that heavy phone-portrait-mode background blur — every bit of it transfers straight onto the canvas. A good atelier will tell you the photo is unusable; a bad one will paint it anyway and blame you later. Send the highest-resolution original file, not a messaging-app copy, and prefer soft daylight with the eyes clearly lit.
• Copyright still applies to reproductions. Public-domain works (broadly, artists dead more than 70 years) are unproblematic. Works by artists still in copyright are not, no matter who paints them or how — which is why §8 excludes 146,812 order lines.
• You will wait. Four to five weeks at an atelier, months with an independent. Nobody paints oil quickly and nobody hurries curing, and I mean nobody. If you need it by Friday, buy a print.

10. Which option, by situation

11. FAQ

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

$166–$822 at an atelier that prices by canvas area, depending on size; $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, roughly $95–$319 on Etsy, and about $800 from an independent artist charging the conventional $2.50 per square inch.

How much more does it cost for more than one person in the painting?

At an atelier, faces are banded: up to 3 included, 4–6 faces +$75, 7–9 +$150, 10 or more +$300, flat regardless of canvas size. PaintYourLife charges +$50 per person or pet. Independent artists typically add 30–50% per additional figure. Because the atelier surcharge is flat, extra people are proportionally much cheaper on a large canvas.

How long does a commissioned oil painting take?

Four to five weeks from an atelier — under three weeks for +$30 urgent production — including a digital mock-up you approve before any paint is applied. Four to nine months from an independent artist: 2 weeks to 6 months of queue, 8–12 weeks to paint a small oil, then 6–12 weeks of curing before it can be varnished. Rush options at either buy queue position, not faster painting.

Why is there a 10× price difference for the same size canvas?

Labor 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 own number. Measured per square inch: an atelier runs about $0.67/in² at 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm), against the independent-artist convention of $2.50/in² — a ratio of roughly 3.7:1.

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 gets smaller than a passport photo; above 30 × 40 in (76.2 × 101.6 cm) a single head reads as confrontational. Across 628,864 measured photo commissions the median long side is 79 cm (31 in), and the most-ordered exact size is 30 × 40 cm (12 × 16 in).

Should I buy the frame from the painting 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 itself. Only 33% of hand-painted oil buyers take a frame. Order the rolled canvas or the gallery wrap and frame locally.

How much is a hand-painted Mona Lisa reproduction?

$272 at 77 × 51 cm — within a centimetre of the Louvre panel's 77 × 53 cm — and $353 at 100 × 66 cm, hand-painted in oil on canvas, shipping included. A giclée print at the same two sizes is $68 and $87. Note that the Louvre's own copyists cannot make you the same-scale version: museum rules require a copy to differ from the original by at least one fifth in size.

What photo should I send?

The highest-resolution original file you have, not a messaging-app copy. Soft daylight, eyes clearly lit, face not in deep shadow, no motion blur, no phone portrait-mode background blur. A good studio will tell you if a photo is unusable before taking your money; that conversation is itself a vendor test.

Can the artist change things — remove someone, change the background, merge two photos?

Yes, and it's a priced, ordinary service — +$50 at an atelier for custom modifications. Merging two photographs into one composition, changing clothing, removing a background or combining people who were never photographed together are all routine. Ask to see the mock-up before painting starts.

Will my painting arrive varnished?

It shouldn't, if it's genuinely oil and genuinely recent. Oil is touch-dry in 24–72 hours but cures for 6 months to 2 years, and final varnish before cure traps solvent in the lower layers. Reputable studios ship unvarnished or lightly retouch-varnished and say so. Varnishing later is a twenty-minute job.

Is a commissioned portrait a good investment?

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

What's the deposit, and is it refundable?

Ateliers commonly take 20% at order with the balance after you approve the finished painting (PaintYourLife's structure), or full payment against a 30-day money-back guarantee (OriginalUniqueArt's). Independent artists typically take a 10–50% non-refundable deposit — which is fair, because their time is committed the moment you're in the queue.

Which paintings do people commission most often?

Across 18 years and 2,595,509 hand-painted oil orders, the top three are The Starry Night, the Mona Lisa and Girl with a Pearl Earring. Nineteen of the top twenty-five have zero or one face — buyers gravitate to compositions that read at a distance and that a print reproduces badly, which are also the ones a copyist can execute best. See §8 for the full ranking.

Related on OriginalUniqueArt.com

• Want the full mechanics of how a photo becomes a canvas, start to finish? Turn Your Photos into Custom Oil Paintings walks the whole commissioning process.
• Order your own Mona Lisa at the exact Louvre scale — the size math in §5 above, ready to buy: Mona Lisa (La Gioconda).
• Still deciding between a rendering of your photo and a print of it? Giclée Prints vs. Hand-Painted Oils is the honest breakdown.
• Nervous about committing before you've seen the paint dry? Read the returns policy before you order, not after.
• Van Gogh out-orders everyone for a reason — see why in The Starry Night, the single most-commissioned painting on the ledger.
• If a portrait isn't the point and you just want a masterpiece in the room, browse an artist like Monet instead of a photograph of your own living room.

Sources

• 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 marketplace
• Commission Oil Art — Etsy marketplace
• Custom Painting For Sale — SINGULART
• SINGULART FAQ
• How are public prices calculated? — Artmajeur
• Custom Portrait Painting Cost: 2026 Pricing Guide — Acousart
• How Much Does Portrait Painting Cost? — Acousart
• Commissioning a Painting: Cost Guide and Price Range 2026 — Design Transition Studio
• Commission Pricing for Custom Paintings — Katie Peña
• Custom Portrait Price Calculator — WhataPortrait
• Portrait Commission Process and Pricing — Mark Lovett Studio
• FAQ: Portrait Commission Process and Pricing — Sonia Hale
• How Long Does a Custom Oil Painting Take? — Katie Peña
• How Long Does a Pet Portrait Take to Be Painted? — Petworks
• How Long Should an Oil Painting Dry Before Shipping? — Sustain The Art
• Commissioned Portraits — Talya Johnson
• F.A.Q. Custom Paintings from Photos — OriginalUniqueArt
• Order a Custom Hand-Painted Portrait from Your Photo — OriginalUniqueArt
• Mona Lisa — Wikipedia
• Order a copy of Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) — OriginalUniqueArt
• France's long history of copying Old Masters at the Louvre — The Connexion
• A stroke of genius: the copyists recreating the Louvre's masterpieces — CNN
• Copyists at the Louvre / Centre Pompidou-Metz — Wallpaper*
• Mona Lisa replicas and reinterpretations — Wikipedia
• The 5 most popular reproduction artworks of all time — Global Artists Guide