Even German Bidders Can Now Pitch In to Support US Public Television, with the Country’s First Auction of a Bob Ross Painting

For the first time, a Bob Ross painting will come to auction in Germany.

The painting comes to the block on December 5 at auctioneer Ketterer Kunst in Munich, from the collection of American Public Television (APT). Proceeds will benefit the organization as part of a charitable initiative dreamed up by Joan Kowalski, president of Bob Ross, Inc., to support public television stations in the US following cuts of $9 billion to previously approved government funding by a Republican-dominated Congress, at the behest of Donald Trump’s presidential administration.

Mountain Splendor (1986) bears an estimate of €40,000–€60,000 ($46,800–$70,200). Ross painted it live on television during season seven, episode eight in of his beloved show The Joy of Painting. Ross typically created three versions of his compositions, the auctioneer points out: one in preparation, one on live television, and one for his instructional books, with the live-painted ones the most coveted. The painting has been in storage for decades and emerges in “exceptionally well-preserved condition,” says Ketterer Kunst in press materials.

Mountain Splendor will be on show at the house’s showrooms in Frankfurt, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and Munich between November 8 and December 4.

“Bob Ross has inspired millions of people to take up painting and has long since been an icon of pop culture,” says Robert Ketterer, owner and auctioneer. “With Mountain Splendor, we’re auctioning off a piece of television history. What makes it so special is the fact that people can still watch the artist create this painting today. The fact that we’re able to offer an original for the first time in Germany—and at the same time support public television in the U.S.—makes this auction particularly special to us.”

Ross’s paintings have sold for as much as $1 million at benefit auctions, when late-night comedian John Oliver last year sold Cabin at Sunset, painted for a 1986 episode.

As far as public auction houses listed on Artnet’s price database, Ross’s auction high stands at $787,900, achieved with the 1990 painting Change of Seasons at Bonhams Skinner in January against a $60,000 high estimate. The auctioneer raised some $1.3 million for APT that night with the sale of three Ross paintings, with the record painting going for more than thirteen times its high estimate. Last November, Bonhams brought three of a planned 30 of his canvases to auction; they sold for a total of $600,000, all of which went to APT.

One private seller is trying to smash even the $1 million high, with Minnesota art gallery Modern Artifact asking $9.85 million for A Walk in the Woods, painted on the show’s very first episode.

“Bob Ross is one of America’s most beloved cultural exports, and audiences across the globe love his work as much as viewers here in the States do,” said Jim Dunford, CEO and president of APT, in press materials. “These auctions turn that worldwide affection for Bob into real support for local public television stations, and we are deeply grateful to Bob Ross Inc. for making it possible.”

Indeed, Ross is a hit in Germany; his show debuted on German television in 2001 and continues to air regularly. Samsung TV Plus Germany also features the Bob Ross Channel auf Deutsch, which launched this year.

The American public, too, can’t get enough of Ross, whose show aired some 403 episodes and ran from 1983 to 1994. Comic actor Owen Wilson played a fictionalized version of him in the 2023 feature Paint (which Shanti Escalante-de Mattei, writing for ARTnews, called “a flaw-filled film”). His estate has been at the center of a legal battle, depicted in a 2021 Netflix documentary that the estate called “inaccurate and heavily slanted.”