Thomas Kinkade

Based on Wikipedia: Thomas Kinkade

The Most Collected Artist You've Probably Been Told to Dismiss

At the peak of his career, one in every twenty American homes owned a copy of a Thomas Kinkade painting. Let that sink in for a moment. That's not gallery attendance or museum visits—that's actual ownership. Prints hanging on walls in living rooms and bedrooms across the country, glowing cottages and misty streams keeping watch over family dinners and Sunday mornings.

And yet, ask anyone in the contemporary art world about Kinkade, and you'll likely hear the word "kitsch" delivered with a slight curl of the lip.

This is the strange paradox of Thomas Kinkade: a man who achieved almost unprecedented commercial success as a painter, whose work resonated with millions of ordinary Americans, and who was simultaneously dismissed by critics as a purveyor of sentimental schlock. When he died in 2012 at just fifty-four years old—from acute intoxication caused by alcohol and the sedative diazepam—the obituaries couldn't resist the backhanded compliments. Susan Orlean called him a "kitsch master." Laura Miller described his paintings as "garish cottage paintings."

But here's the thing about Thomas Kinkade: whether you find his work beautiful or saccharine, his story reveals something profound about American culture, the business of art, and the uncomfortable gap between what critics value and what ordinary people want hanging on their walls.

Placerville Dreams

Kinkade grew up poor. Not romantically poor, not "struggling artist" poor, but actually poor—the kind of poor where you can't afford heating or lighting in your home. He was raised by a single mother in Placerville, California, a Gold Rush-era town nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The name "Placerville" comes from the placer gold deposits that drew fortune seekers in 1849. By the time Kinkade was growing up there in the 1960s and 70s, the gold was long gone, but the town retained its historic character—Victorian buildings, tree-lined streets, the kind of small-town American scenery that would later become his signature subject matter.

That childhood without light may explain everything about his art.

His paintings are, above all else, about light. Warm light spilling from cottage windows. Golden sunlight filtering through forest canopies. The glow of streetlamps on rain-slicked cobblestones. He trademarked the phrase "Painter of Light"—actually legally protected it—and while that might seem like marketing excess, it also describes exactly what he did. Every Kinkade painting is essentially a meditation on illumination, on the warmth and safety that light represents.

Think about what light meant to a child who sometimes didn't have any. It meant warmth. It meant security. It meant someone was home, someone was cooking dinner, someone was waiting for you. The glowing windows in his paintings aren't just decorative—they're promises of refuge.

The Education of a Controversial Artist

Kinkade's artistic education was serious and classical. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley, and then at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena—one of the most prestigious art schools in the country, known for producing commercial artists, industrial designers, and illustrators who work at the highest professional levels.

A mentor named Glenn Wessels encouraged him to pursue Berkeley, and their relationship was significant enough that it became the basis for a semi-autobiographical film in 2008 called "Christmas Cottage." Before college, Kinkade also studied under Charles Bell, absorbing the technical foundations that would make his later work possible.

In the summer of 1980, he and a college friend named James Gurney traveled across America—the kind of formative road trip that young artists have been taking since the invention of the automobile and probably long before. They sketched their way across the country, eventually landing in New York with a portfolio good enough to secure a contract with Guptill Publications. The resulting book, "The Artist's Guide to Sketching," became one of Guptill's bestsellers in 1982.

That book led to Hollywood. Both Kinkade and Gurney were hired by Ralph Bakshi Studios to create background art for an animated film called "Fire and Ice" in 1983. Bakshi was known for pushing the boundaries of animation—he'd made the controversial "Fritz the Cat" and an ambitious attempt at adapting Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings." Working on fantasy backgrounds gave Kinkade something crucial: practice at depicting light in imagined worlds, experience creating atmospheric environments that existed only in the imagination.

Gurney, incidentally, went on to create "Dinotopia," a popular illustrated book series about a world where dinosaurs developed civilization alongside humans. Both artists took their fantasy background training in different but wildly successful directions.

The Business of Light

After his film work, Kinkade returned to painting and began selling original works through California galleries. But what made him famous—and what made him controversial—wasn't the originals. It was what came next.

Kinkade understood something that most fine artists either don't understand or refuse to acknowledge: most people cannot afford original paintings. A canvas that takes weeks to complete, created by skilled hands using expensive materials, necessarily costs thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. The people who loved Kinkade's glowing cottages and peaceful streams—working-class and middle-class Americans, many of them religious, many of them drawn to his unironic celebration of simple pleasures—couldn't write checks for original art.

So Kinkade created an empire of reproductions.

The Thomas Kinkade Company produced prints of his paintings in enormous quantities. But these weren't simple posters. The prints came in different tiers of elaboration. Base-level prints were just that—reproductions. Higher-priced versions featured what the company called "highlighting"—skilled craftsmen (not Kinkade himself) would add painted touches to the prints, enhancing the light effects with actual brushstrokes. This created the illusion of an original work while keeping prices accessible. The most elaborate versions might sell for hundreds or low thousands, far more than a poster but far less than an original oil painting.

At its peak, this operation supported a national network of several hundred "Thomas Kinkade Signature Galleries"—dedicated retail stores selling only his work and licensed products. His images appeared on Hallmark cards, calendars, jigsaw puzzles, CDs, and eventually Walmart gift cards. Between 1997 and 2005, court documents show Kinkade earned $53 million from his artistic work.

To the art world, this was a betrayal of everything fine art was supposed to represent. He sold his work on QVC, the home shopping network. He licensed his images so extensively that they became ubiquitous, appearing in contexts that seemed to cheapen them. He turned himself into a brand, a corporation, a franchise operation.

Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club captured the critical consensus: "Perhaps no other painter has been as shameless or as successful at transforming himself into a corporation as Kinkade." Critics called him a "mall artist" and a "chocolate box artist"—the latter referring to the decorative paintings that once adorned boxes of assorted chocolates, beautiful but disposable, pleasing but without depth.

What the Critics Saw

The essayist Joan Didion, one of America's sharpest cultural observers, offered a particularly memorable critique of Kinkade's aesthetic:

A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

That phrase—"insistent coziness"—captures something real about Kinkade's work. There's nothing subtle about his paintings. They don't suggest warmth; they insist upon it. They don't hint at peace; they demand that you feel peaceful. For critics trained to value ambiguity, complexity, and interpretive openness, this directness registered as cloying, even threatening.

Didion went further, comparing Kinkade to Albert Bierstadt, the nineteenth-century painter who made his name with dramatic landscapes of the American West. Bierstadt painted Donner Lake—yes, that Donner Lake, where the Donner Party famously resorted to cannibalism during a snowbound winter—as a scene of pristine, unthreatening beauty. The comparison implied that Kinkade, like Bierstadt, was in the business of erasing troubling history to produce comfortable images.

Specifically, Didion objected to Kinkade's Sierra Nevada painting, "The Mountains Declare His Glory," which included an imaginary camp of Miwok Indians. The Sierra Miwok were violently displaced during the Gold Rush—the same Gold Rush that gave Kinkade's hometown of Placerville its reason for existence. To include them as a harmonious element in a peaceful landscape struck Didion as obscene whitewashing.

There's something to this criticism. Art that refuses to acknowledge tragedy, that airbrushes suffering out of beautiful places, can function as propaganda for forgetting. But it's worth asking: is this really what Kinkade's audience was seeking? Were they looking for his paintings to teach them California history? Or were they looking for exactly what he offered—images of peace, of warmth, of a world where every window is lit and someone is always home?

What the Defenders Saw

Not everyone dismissed Kinkade. Jeffrey Vallance, an artist and Guggenheim Fellow—prestigious credentials that establish him as someone the art world takes seriously—offered a different perspective:

This is another area that the contemporary art world has a hard time with, that I find interesting. He expresses what he believes and puts that in his art. That is not the trend in the high-art world at the moment, the idea that you can express things spiritually and be taken seriously... It is always difficult to present serious religious ideas in an art context. That is why I like Kinkade. It is a difficult thing to do.

This is a crucial point. The contemporary art world is deeply uncomfortable with sincere religious expression. Ironic religious imagery? Fine. Critique of religion? Celebrated. But genuine, unironic faith presented without the protective shield of postmodern distance? That's almost impossible to exhibit in prestigious galleries.

Kinkade was a devout Christian who saw his work as a form of ministry. He gave all four of his children the middle name "Christian." Many of his paintings include hidden references to specific Bible verses, Easter eggs for viewers who share his faith. His country scenes often feature crosses and churches. He wasn't hiding his beliefs or presenting them ironically—he was expressing them directly, and millions of American Christians responded.

Mike McGee, director of the Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton, offered perhaps the most intellectually provocative reading of Kinkade's work:

Looking just at the paintings themselves it is obvious that they are technically competent. Kinkade's genius, however, is in his capacity to identify and fulfill the needs and desires of his target audience... If Kinkade's art is principally about ideas, and I think it is, it could be suggested that he is a conceptual artist. All he would have to do to solidify this position would be to make an announcement that the beliefs he has expounded are just Duchampian posturing to achieve his successes. But this will never happen. Kinkade earnestly believes in his faith in God and his personal agenda as an artist.

This is a fascinating argument. Marcel Duchamp, one of the founders of conceptual art, famously submitted a urinal to an art exhibition in 1917 and called it "Fountain," challenging the art world to grapple with questions about what art is and who gets to define it. McGee suggests that Kinkade's entire operation could be read as a similarly challenging conceptual project—except that Kinkade actually believes in what he's doing, which somehow disqualifies him.

The implication is unsettling: sincerity itself is what the art world can't accept.

The Factory and the Forgeries

Kinkade's production method was, critics noted, "semi-industrial." He would create the original painting—the concept, the composition, the initial execution. Then that original would enter a process of mass reproduction, with low-level studio assistants handling the "highlighting" that transformed prints into pseudo-originals.

This wasn't entirely different from how the Old Masters worked. Rembrandt, Rubens, and countless others maintained studios full of apprentices who did much of the actual painting on works that bore the master's signature. The difference was scale. Kinkade wasn't producing dozens of paintings with studio assistance; he was producing hundreds of thousands of reproductions enhanced by anonymous workers.

His success created its own problem: counterfeiting. Kinkade became one of the most counterfeited artists in the world, partly because advances in digital photography and printing made high-quality reproductions increasingly easy to produce. Mass-produced hand-painted fakes flooded in from China and Thailand. In 2011, Kinkade's studio claimed he was the most collected artist in Asia—but received no income from that region because virtually all the "Kinkades" there were forgeries.

There's an irony here that borders on the philosophical. Kinkade built his empire on the idea that reproductions could be almost as good as originals—that you didn't need to own the one-of-a-kind painting to enjoy the beauty it represented. The counterfeiters simply extended this logic one step further. If a licensed reproduction with factory-applied highlighting was worth owning, why not an unlicensed reproduction with similar enhancement? Where exactly was the line between authentic Kinkade product and fake?

The Darker Picture

The franchise network that made Kinkade rich also generated lawsuits and accusations of fraud. Gallery owners who bought into the Thomas Kinkade system claimed they were pressured to open additional locations that weren't financially viable, forced to accept expensive inventory they couldn't sell, and undersold by discount outlets whose prices they weren't allowed to match.

In 2006, an arbitration board awarded two former gallery owners, Karen Hazlewood and Jeffrey Spinello, $860,000 in damages (later increased to $2.8 million with interest and fees) after finding that Kinkade's company had "failed to disclose material information" that would have discouraged them from investing. The FBI reportedly investigated these issues, with agents conducting interviews across the country.

Most damning were the accusations about how Christianity was used in franchise sales. "They really knew how to bait the hook," said one anonymous ex-dealer. "They certainly used the Christian hook." Another dealer's lawyer put it more bluntly: "Most of my clients got involved with Kinkade because it was presented as a religious opportunity. Being defrauded is awful enough, but doing it in the name of God is really despicable."

By 2005, the network of independently owned Kinkade franchises had more than halved from its peak of around 350. In June 2010, Pacific Metro, Kinkade's production company, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy—one day after defaulting on a million-dollar court-ordered payment to Hazlewood and Spinello.

The Man Behind the Glow

The Thomas Kinkade who painted glowing windows and peaceful streams was not, by many accounts, a particularly peaceful man.

The Los Angeles Times reported that former colleagues, employees, and even collectors described a long history of what the paper delicately called "cursing and heckling other artists and performers." At a sales event in South Bend, Indiana, he allegedly groped a woman. At the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, he allegedly urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure while saying, "This one's for you, Walt."

A company executive, John Dandois, described an incident at a Siegfried & Roy magic show in Las Vegas where a drunk Kinkade began shouting "Codpiece! Codpiece!" at the performers until his mother calmed him down. "Thom would be fine, he would be drinking, and then all of a sudden, you couldn't tell where the boundary was, and then he became very incoherent, and he would start cussing and doing a lot of weird stuff."

In June 2010, Kinkade was arrested for driving under the influence near Carmel, California. He served ten days in jail.

In a letter to gallery owners, Kinkade acknowledged that some accounts of his behavior might have some basis in reality, admitting he had "behaved badly during a stressful time when he overindulged in food and drink." But he also called some accusations "exaggerated, and in some cases outright fabricated."

This is, perhaps, the most human element of Kinkade's story. The painter of idyllic cottages and peaceful glades was himself troubled, drinking heavily, acting out in ways that contradicted everything his art represented. The windows in his paintings always glowed with warmth, but the artist who painted them was struggling with demons that all that imagined light couldn't dispel.

The Corporate Commissions

Despite—or perhaps because of—his commercial orientation, Kinkade attracted some remarkable commissions late in his career. Disneyland hired him to commemorate its 50th anniversary. Walt Disney World chose him for its 35th. He painted the Biltmore Estate, the largest privately owned house in America, a 250-room French Renaissance château built by the Vanderbilts in the mountains of North Carolina.

He created commemorative paintings for the 50th anniversary of Elvis Presley's purchase of Graceland and the 25th anniversary of its opening to the public as a museum. He painted Yankee Stadium for its farewell 85th season in 2008, and paid tribute to Fenway Park, the beloved home of the Boston Red Sox.

His 2009 painting of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the Indy 500 race program demonstrated something about his working method. He visited the track when it was empty, stood in the bleachers, and—as he described it—saw the whole scene in his imagination, the crowds, the flags, the energy. He deliberately hid figures in the painted crowd: Norman Rockwell, the beloved American illustrator, and Dale Earnhardt, the NASCAR legend who had died in a racing crash in 2001.

The passion I have is to capture memories, to evoke the emotional connection we have to an experience... I began thinking, 'I want to get this energy—what I call the excitement of the moment—into this painting.'

This was Kinkade's method: not observation of the real, but imagination of the ideal. He wasn't painting what places looked like; he was painting what they felt like, or what he wanted viewers to feel when looking at them.

A Village Called Hiddenbrooke

Perhaps the most ambitious extension of Kinkade's vision was a real estate development. In 2001, his company unveiled "The Village at Hiddenbrooke," a Kinkade-themed community of homes built outside the San Francisco Bay Area.

The idea was to bring his painted world into three-dimensional reality—homes designed to evoke the cozy cottages in his paintings, streetscapes that looked like they could be the subjects of his canvases. It was, depending on your perspective, either the logical culmination of his artistic vision or the ultimate proof that he had abandoned art entirely for commerce.

The development represented something fascinating about Kinkade's relationship with his audience. His buyers didn't just want to look at pictures of idealized homes—they wanted to live in them. The paintings weren't just decorations; they were windows into a world people wished existed, a world of safety and warmth and community that seemed increasingly absent from modern American life.

The Question Kinkade Leaves Behind

Thomas Kinkade died on April 6, 2012. He was fifty-four years old. The coroner ruled his death the result of acute intoxication from alcohol and diazepam—the same troubles with alcohol that had led to his arrest, his erratic behavior, his public embarrassments.

He left behind roughly six thousand unpublished works, of which about six hundred have been released posthumously. He left behind a bankrupt company and former franchisees who felt betrayed. He left behind a wife and four daughters, each carrying the middle name "Christian."

And he left behind millions of paintings—originals and reproductions and forgeries—still hanging in American homes, still glowing with that distinctive warm light.

The question Kinkade poses to the art world remains unresolved: What do we do with art that millions of people genuinely love but critics unanimously dismiss? Is popular success evidence of artistic failure? Is the fact that his work provided comfort and pleasure to working-class Americans somehow less valid than the admiration of gallery visitors for conceptual installations they claim to understand?

In 2001, Kinkade said, "I am really the most controversial artist in the world." It sounds like hyperbole, but consider: other controversial artists provoke arguments about whether their work is profound or pretentious, beautiful or ugly, meaningful or empty. Kinkade provoked a more fundamental argument—about whether what he made was art at all, and whether that question even matters if it brings joy to millions.

The glowing windows in his paintings promised warmth and safety, a world where someone was always home, where light always triumphed over darkness. That the artist who painted those promises couldn't find that warmth and safety in his own life is perhaps the saddest irony of all. But for the one in twenty American homes that hung his work on their walls, the promise was enough. The light was enough.

It still glows there, asking us what we think we mean when we say something is art.