African Oil Paintings

A continent is not a genre, and this collection does not treat it as one. A weaver at a kente loom in Ghana works in a different world from a funeral procession in ancient Egypt or a hillside in Kigali at blue hour. What they share is that each was worth painting on its own terms.

What is in this collection

Around a hundred and twenty paintings in four groups. Craft and ceremony holds the kente weaver at his loom and the chiefs at a durbar in Kumasi, regalia painted with the detail it deserves. Land runs from the dunes of Erg Chebbi to savannah and highland light. Cities covers Kigali at blue hour and the modern skylines that rarely make it into painting at all. And a historical group reaches back to ancient Egypt and to figures such as Shaka Zulu.

The palette is warm and high-contrast, because so much of this light is. Cloth, skin and stone are painted to hold their own colour rather than be flattened by it.

How each painting is made

Nothing here is printed. Each canvas is painted in oils after you order it, by an artist working from the reference on the page, which is why the lead time runs in weeks and no two are identical.

You set the dimensions rather than choosing from a fixed list. Three finishes are available: Simple for a clean, even surface, Texture for visible brushwork, and Museum for the heaviest impasto, which suits woven cloth and beadwork particularly well.

Choosing one for a room

Ceremony and craft subjects are dense with pattern, so they want a plain wall and enough size to be read: below about sixty centimetres the detail that makes them worth having disappears. Landscapes and city scenes work wider and lower, above a sofa or a sideboard.

Tell us where the painting will hang and how far back a viewer will stand, and we will suggest a proportion.

A place or a person of your own

If the city, the ceremony or the family portrait you want is not here, send us what you have. An artist will look at it before anything is agreed. Shipping is free worldwide.