About Encore Galerie

Encore Galerie sells reproductions and reinterpretations of famous paintings that are out of copyright.

Our house style

The painting as it looked the week it was finished.

A painting that has hung for a hundred years carries the hundred years. Varnish goes amber, the surface cracks, dirt settles into the texture, and a museum scan flattens whatever light is left. Those are facts about an object, not about the picture the painter made. We take them off and leave the painting.

So the composition is reproduced exactly. Colors go back toward what the pigments were before the varnish turned. Signatures and inscriptions stay, because the painter put them there. Nothing is invented: no brushstroke that was never made, no flower added to fill a corner, no edge cropped to suit a frame. If it was not in the painting, it is not in the print.

What we do not claim

Nothing here is hand-painted. Nothing here is an original oil. No named artist touched it. Galleries that sell hand-painted reproductions take weeks per piece and charge accordingly, and that is a real thing worth paying for. It is not what we sell, and we would rather say so plainly on the About page than let a buyer work it out after the parcel arrives.

Why the catalog is smaller than you might expect

Copyright is territorial. A painting can be free to reproduce in one country and protected in another, and the honest way to run a store that ships worldwide is to let the strictest market decide the whole catalog. So a work has to clear two tests before we will sell it:

• The EU term: the artist died in 1955 or earlier.
• The US term: the work was first published before 1930.

Both, not either. That rules out artists we would like to carry and some we have queued for the year their copyright expires. Every product page states which test the work passed and when.