Bob Ross (1942–1995), the soft-spoken painter whose “happy little trees” charmed millions on the long-running The Joy of Painting public television show, is now commanding serious attention from the art market. Bonhams has set a new auction record for the American artist, selling two early-1990s mountain-and-lake scenes for $114,800 and $95,750, more than doubling their estimates. The result, which comes less than three weeks after Ross’s previous record was set, signals a potential reevaluation of the artist’s market, long overshadowed by his status as a permed pop-culture icon.
Both paintings were estimated to fetch between $30,000 to $50,000 each ahead of the Bonhams American Art Online sale that closed August 7. The more expensive of the two pictures, Lake Below Snow-Capped Peaks and Cloudy Sky more than doubled its high estimate, selling for $114,800. (Sale prices include buyer’s fees, estimates do not.) A similar composition, Lake Below Snow-Covered Mountains and Clear Sky, which has fewer pines but boasts more deciduous trees, tripled its low estimate when it sold for $95,750.
The paintings, which both date to around 1990 or ’91, attracted five or six bidders over the course of the sale, with offers from three prospective buyers coming in at the last minute—including one who was actively bidding on both canvases. Bonhams did not confirm if the same bidder won both canvases.
The two works toppled the artist’s previous auction record, which was set at $55,000 just three weeks ago for the sale of another landscape, Snow-capped barn and trees behind a post and wire fence, at Eldred’s Auction Gallery in Dennis, Massachusetts. According to the Artnet Price Database, that result had only just edged out the previous high, of $51,200, set at Bonhams Skinner in Massachusetts last September.
Ross, who died in 1995 at age 53, achieved widespread renown within his lifetime thanks to his hit TV series, which aired from January 11, 1983, to May 17, 1994, producing 403 episodes. It has remained an enduring pop culture touchstone in the three decades since its star’s death and reruns air on PBS to this day. The artist made three versions of each painting featured in the show, or 1,143 in total, according to FiveThirtyEight—and Ross himself estimated he had made more than 30,000 works over the course of his career.
Why Few Works Have Come to Auction
Despite his fame and prolific output, however, very few works have come to auction. Up until 2009, only one work had ever gone under the hammer and it failed to sell then, according to the Artnet Price Database. The artist’s first auction result was recorded in March 2023 for a forest scene accompanied by a signed note and book. It fetched $11,700 at Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills.
Within the last year, seven works have sold at auction for between $30,000 and $55,000 at various regional auction houses in the U.S. The two works sold at Bonhams marks the first time any work by Ross has neared or exceeded $100,000.
“This has been a very exciting trajectory for the market for Bob Ross,” Aaron Anderson, an American art specialist at Bonhams, said in a phone call. He admitted that until this recent surge of interest, the auction house had never considered offering a work by the artist. “We’ve never done anything like this before.”
There are several reasons why Ross’s works have struggled to gain traction in the fine-art market. While he truly excelled at his craft, his everyman approach to painting didn’t necessarily move the needle in contemporary art. As Artnet’s critic Ben Davis observed in 2020, Ross is “an avatar of ‘edgeless culture’—as in, the opposite of edgy culture.” Additionally, while Ross’s commercial empire, Bob Ross Inc., which licenses his work, is lucrative, it doesn’t carry the same prestige of a major museum retrospective.
Read the full article by Sarah Cascone / artnet
