Artist: Bob Ross
Title: Little Home in the Meadow
Medium: Oil on Canvas
Dimensions: 18" x 24"
Date: 1991
Documentation: Includes a Certificate of Authenticity from Bob Ross, Inc.
Provenance: Filmed during Season 24, Episode 4 of "The Joy of Painting"
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"Little Home in the Meadow" is an original oil painting executed by Bob Ross during the production of Season 24, Episode 4 of The Joy of Painting. Measuring 18" x 24", the work is accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity from Bob Ross, Inc.
Painted live on camera, this episode piece belongs to a rare category of Ross’s oeuvre: works completed in real time for broadcast. For each episode, Ross typically produced three versions of a subject—a reference painting, a preparatory instructional guide, and the demonstration painting seen on air. The on-air versions, including "Little Home in the Meadow", are scarce and represent a direct record of Ross’s instructional process and landscape technique.
The composition depicts a rustic cabin set within a meadow, framed by naturalistic trees and sky. Ross employs his characteristic alla prima, or “wet-on-wet,” method, which allowed him to complete a fully realized landscape within the span of a television episode. In this work, Ross utilizes an oval compositional structure, one of his most distinctive and rare approaches, guiding the viewer’s eye in a continuous, harmonious flow around the central motif. This structural choice contributes to the painting’s balance and cohesion while enhancing the sense of depth and focus on the central home.
As a documented episode painting, "Little Home in the Meadow" carries both artistic and historical significance. The combination of live execution, verifiable provenance, and formal certification highlights its rarity within Ross’s body of work. Episode paintings like this provide a tangible connection to the production of The Joy of Painting, offering insight into Ross’s techniques and serving as important examples of his contribution to contemporary American landscape painting.
About Bob Ross
Bob Ross was an American painter renowned for his serene landscape paintings, executed primarily in oil on canvas using the wet-on-wet technique. While widely recognized for his television program The Joy of Painting, Ross's artistic practice reflects a disciplined engagement with color, light, and atmosphere. His landscapes often depict tranquil natural settings, including forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers, capturing an idealized vision of the American wilderness. Ross employed a palette dominated by natural greens, blues, browns, and warm earth tones, applying paint with brushes and palette knives to create texture, depth, and the illusion of three-dimensionality.
Ross's work is characterized by its accessibility, demonstrating a mastery of composition and perspective that conveys a sense of spatial harmony and visual balance. Through his distinctive wet-on-wet method, he was able to achieve layered effects of clouds, water reflections, and foliage in a single session, producing images that appear both immediate and timeless. His paintings frequently embrace the motif of the solitary tree, cascading waterfalls, or misted mountain peaks, reflecting an aesthetic sensibility rooted in calmness and natural beauty.
Although Ross's public persona as a television host brought widespread attention, his body of work is valued for its technical proficiency and consistency in exploring landscape as a subject. His paintings are included in private and public collections worldwide and continue to influence contemporary approaches to oil painting, landscape representation, and instructional art media. As an artist, Ross bridged the gap between accessible instruction and serious studio practice, leaving a lasting legacy in American landscape painting and the field of educational art.
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