Here’s What 8 Buildings From Famous Paintings Might Look Like In Real Life

From Vincent van Gogh’s painting of an old cottage beneath the red evening sky to Edward Hopper’s eerie image of a grand Victorian home by the tracks of a railroad, architecture in famous paintings can be a great source of design inspiration. But there’s just one problem. It’s somewhat difficult to imagine what a structure painted decades or centuries ago might look like in the real world. 

By producing realistic renderings, designers at HomeAdvisor, an online home improvement resource, have brought iconic paintings of buildings to life, giving a newfound appreciation and understanding of the qualities of famous artwork.

1. “Evening Snow at Kanbara” (Utagawa Hiroshige, circa 1833–1834)

Utagawa Hiroshige is considered the last great master in Japanese traditional ukiyo-e woodblock printing. “Evening Snow” is from a series of woodcut prints that Hiroshige created in response to his first journey along the historic Tōkaidō road in 1832.

Interestingly enough, it rarely snows in Kanbara, and Hiroshige used a deal of poetic license in his design, possibly even working from guidebook images of a completely different town called Kanbara. 

2. “The Cottage” (Vincent Van Gogh, 1885)

Vincent Van Gogh painted “The Cottage” as part of his series of works called Peasant Character Studies. The building with two front doors and a split chimney is shared between two families. Van Gogh was careful to note the hues of “green soap and the copper-color of a worn 10-centime piece” that caught his imagination.

He was also fascinated by Emile Zola’s trailblazing fiction novel Germinal at the time. Echoing the novel, Van Gogh’s interpretation of this “human nest” of a house is both an uncompromising social comment and an affectionate tribute to the human spirit. In a letter to his brother Theo, the post-impressionist wrote: “those two cottages, half decayed under one and the same thatched roof, reminded me of a couple of worn-out old folk who make up just one single being and whom one sees supporting each other.”

3. “House by the Railroad” (Edward Hopper, 1925)

The Victorian mansion in Edward Hopper’s painting cuts a lonely, forgotten figure, bypassed in time by the arrival of the railroad. The tracks create a visual barrier that seems to block access to the house, which is isolated in an empty landscape. Hopper claimed his compositions were drawn plainly from the world in front of him, but it is hard not to see the juxtaposition of elements in “House by the Railroad” as a reflection on the disharmony between tradition and progress.

4. “Houses At Falaise In The Fog” (Claude Monet, 1885)

Claude Monet was a key figure in the Impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the 19th century. “Houses At Falaise In The Fog” illustrates Monet’s attempt to capture the uniqueness of the movement of light in a landscape rather than depend on his imagination. 

5. “Little House By The Road” (Bob Ross, 1986)

The legendary late painter Bob Ross created “Little House By The Road” for Season 9, Episode 8 of The Joy of Painting. During the instructional TV show, in which he taught techniques for landscape oil painting, he completed a painting in each session. Each painting would start with simple strokes that appeared to be nothing more than the smudges of color. As he added more and more strokes, the blotches transformed into intricate landscapes.

The house in the painting appears to be in a settler-era limestone home common among European colonists in the 18th and 19th centuries.

6. “Taos Storytellers” (Rudolph Carl Gorman, 1993)

Referred to as “the Picasso of American Indian artists” by The New York Times, Rudolph Carl Gorman’s paintings are primarily of Native American women and characterized by fluid forms and vibrant colors.

Gorman grew up in a traditional Navajo hogan and began drawing at age 3. His grandmother helped raise him, recounting Navajo legends and enumerating his genealogy of artist ancestors. She kindled his desire to become an artist.

“Taos Storytellers” portrays two women outside traditional pueblo buildings in Taos, New Mexico, where Gorman opened the first Native American-owned gallery in 1968.

7. Palmeiras (Tarsila do Amaral, 1925)

Tarsila do Amaral was a central figure in the development of Brazil’s modern art who studied in Paris in the company of celebrated artists such as Fernand Léger and André Lhôte. Tarsila, as she is affectionately known in Brazil, brought back the then-fashionable influence of African and primitive art to Brazil and adapted it to her native heritage.

“Palmeiras” is from her “Metaphysical/Oneiric Pau-Brasil” period, which was inspired by a sketch she made on a trip to either Rio de Janeiro or Minas Gerais. Its geometric forms and bold colors are exemplary of Tarsila’s minimalist style. Tarsila gives nature and the built environment equal prominence. In fact, the farmhouses weren’t featured in her original landscape sketch, suggesting she conjured them from her memory or imagination.

8. Hungarian Village Church (Amrita Sher-Gil, 1932)

Amrita Sher-Gil has been called one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century and a pioneer in modern Indian art. While studying at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Hungarian-born painter would vacation in the medieval village of Zebegény, near Budapest on the Danube. However, the church in the painting was actually built around 1908 by Hungarian-Transylvanian architect Karoly Kós, who was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement and Finnish and Eastern European folk art.

A comparison of the painting, the realistic rendering of the painting and a photo of the actual church demonstrate how Sher-Gil softened and simplified the form of the building. It also reveals Sher-Gil’s own preoccupation with the organic human form, the primitive and centuries of European mythology.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.