French standard sizes for oil paintings

Imagine you're painting a picture. How big should your canvas be? Long ago, in France, artists had a special list of sizes!

It was like a menu for canvases, from tiny ones to super big ones. These sizes were decided way back in the 1800s, when your great-great-great grandparents might have been around. Most artists, not just in France, used these sizes because the shops that sold art supplies made them this way.

It helped everyone know what they were getting!

These painting sizes have a cool story! They were invented in the 1800s, a very long time ago. Think of it like a special club for art sizes.

The most exciting part is that the sizes were grouped for different kinds of paintings. There were sizes perfect for painting faces (called 'figure'), sizes for beautiful outdoor scenes ('paysage'), and even sizes for pictures of the sea ('marine'). It was like having different sized boxes for different kinds of toys!

These standard sizes were super important because they made buying art supplies easy. If an artist wanted a medium-sized canvas for a portrait, they could just ask for a 'figure 5' and know exactly what they would get. The shops that sold paints and canvases all agreed on these sizes.

This meant artists could travel to different art shops and still find the same sizes they were used to. It was like everyone speaking the same language for painting sizes!

It might seem tricky, but the sizes were clever! They were numbered from 0 all the way up to 120. The cool thing is that the sizes for faces, landscapes, and seascapes were related.

For example, a size 0 for a face painting was about the same height as a size 1 for a landscape painting. They tried to keep the diagonal line of the canvas similar, which is a bit like making sure different shaped pizzas still had a similar crust length!