If you’ve ever tried to imagine what it would be like to visit buildings from paintings you know and love, these fun gifs can help you out! Last year, we featured some cool gifs showing real-world versions of interiors from six great paintings. The gifs were commissioned by HomeAdvisor, a company that connects homeowners to home improvement professionals. The aim was to inspire homeowners, but it was also a nice opportunity to imagine living inside your favorite paintings.
Now, the same company has commissioned a second set of gifs, Atelier Architecture, which feature the exteriors of eight buildings from paintings. The choices are diverse, which makes the project visually rich. They range from a snow-covered Japanese village by Hiroshige to a New Mexico Navajo pueblo by R. C. Gorman. HomeAdvisor hopes that these gifs will help people see their own homes in new ways.
Evening Snow at Kanbara by Utagawa Hiroshige
This is definitely my favorite of the buildings from paintings gifs! In Hiroshige’s print, the snow-covered mountain village looks like a wonderful, cozy fairy tale. Seeing it rendered realistically is delightful – like seeing my favorite illustrated character in a live-action movie. Hiroshige (1797-1858) was a celebrated Japanese artist who made now-classic woodblock prints. Celebrating nature was a major theme in his work.
See more winter scenes by Hiroshige here.
The Cottage by Vincent Van Gogh
What a difference a little light can make! While Vincent van Gogh’s painting of a European cottage is dark and slightly ominous, the real-world version appears under a bright and optimistic sky. The original seems dirty and dilapidated, like the peasant outside the door might not have the greatest life inside. By contrast, the real-world version is pretty much the same cottage, but it looks inviting and homey under a bright sky, surrounded by healthy green trees. That makes all the difference. Van Gogh (1853-1890) is best known for his colorful paintings, but he also painted other darkly-lit images of peasant life.
Read about the three versions of van Gogh’s bedroom painting here, or enjoy some other gifs based on his work.
Houses at Falaise in the Fog by Claude Monet
Impressionist master Claude Monet (1840-1926) loved to explore weather effects in his paintings. That’s particularly clear here. In Monet’s original, the fog is so thick that it almost completely obscures the house and surrounding landscape. So, there was a lot of room for creativity and interpretation to come up with a real-world version of the building from the painting. The result is very lovely and inviting. Who doesn’t want to go wandering in that field of pink flowers and visit that stone cabin?
See the world through Monet’s eyes here.
House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (1882-1967) was a 20th-century American realist painter known for evoking isolation in the modern world, like in his famous Nighthawks. An impressive structure, it’s easy to imagine this tall, white house being the grandest landmark in a rural, mid-western American town. However, it definitely captures some of Hopper’s characteristic feeling of isolation. Except for the train tracks running in front of it, the home stands all by itself in a featureless landscape. The occupants – if there even are any – seem to be all alone.
Read about some of Edward Hopper’s drawings here. You can also some of his paintings recreated as photographs here.
Palmeiras by Tarsila do Amaral
Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) was a Brazilian modernist painter who employed aspects of Cubism and Surrealism in her work. Palmeiras, named for one of several Brazilian principalities with that name, has a fun and cheerful quality, with the red roofs against the green hills and simplified landscape elements in front and behind. But even though it makes for a delightful painting, the same scene looks oddly unreal in the life-like rendering.
Learn about Tarsila do Amaral’s life and career here.
Hungarian Village Church by Amrita Sher-Gil
Amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941) is best known as an Indian artist, but her mother was from Hungary. Sher-Gil was born in Hungary, where this church was, and she painted in Europe during her teens and early twenties. This simple, unadorned church is nothing like the grand churches we typically see in European art. Without the title Hungarian Village Church, it would be difficult to guess the building’s location. Sher-Gil felt much more connected to India, where she had grown up, than she did to Hungary. A few years after this painting, she began focusing on Indian themes in her work, and she eventually moved back to India.
Learn more about Amrita Sher-Gil here.
Little House by the Road by Bob Ross
Bob Ross (1942-1995) was an American artist and television personality. He was quite famous for his long-running television show, The Joy of Painting, where viewers could make their own paintings by following along as he painted in front of the camera. He made Little House by the Road during one such television episode. This simple, red-roofed house is a characteristic image of Americana, so it’s not too difficult to imagine it in the real world.
If you want to learn more about Bob Ross, visit YouTube, where you can watch many of his The Joy of Painting episodes.
Taos Storytellers by R. C. Gorman
R. C. (Rudolph Carl) Gorman (1931-2005) was a Navajo artist from Arizona. Many of his paintings feature Navajo women in traditional dress with southwestern landscape elements behind them. The building recreated here is a pueblo, a multi-family adobe housing structure kind of like an apartment building that’s traditional for some native Southwestern cultures. The warm light surrounding the two women really makes this painting special.
NeoMam Studios, a brand content agency, created these gifs as well as the interiors set. Beyond just buildings from paintings, NeoMam has made cool gifs and infographs about everything from cutting watermelons to job interview survival for introverts. Ancient Ruins Reconstructed and Ruined Castles Rebuilt are two more that might be of interest to art lovers.
