VAN GOGHS, Turners, Da Vincis and Klimts pour off the easels of China’s most unusual assembly line.

The owner of New Century Oil Painting is in high spirits. A day earlier, Si Gong packed up her latest shipment of oil paintings, dozens of replicas of works by Joshua Reynolds and of John Singer Sargent, for a customer in London.

British buyers favour what Ms Si calls the romantic classics and she is sure they cannot find better value for money than in her shop in a grimy corner of the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.

Ms Si gestures to the walls of her shop where replicas of Canalettos jostle for space with a large canvas of Napoleon by David. “Our biggest customers are in America and Italy. The British don’t want so many, but they want the best,” she said.

In a back street, a painter peers carefully at a postcard-sized Mona Lisa before dabbing his next brushstroke to a virtually identical copy taking shape on his easel. More than 8,000 painters are crowded into the tenements of the Dafen Oil Painting Village. Some are trained artists, others are young peasants who paint by numbers and turn out Van Gogh’s Sunflowers by the score.

Ms Si bristles at the suggestion that the copies — she prefers to call them replicas — are painted in oils on to computer-generated images of the original. Each picture is individually painted by hand with bigger canvases of the highest quality taking as long as two weeks to complete.

She leafs through a file of photographs of her most popular orders from clients in London and Liverpool. Spaniels and horses by Stubbs and portraits by Reynolds are particular favourites.

Other businesses eye much higher turnover. Chen Ting’s shop is in the newly-built Dafen Louvre, a four-storey building housing dozens of little galleries with a life-size statue of David at the door. Mr Chen says that he ships out paintings by the container, mainly to America and Russia. A container can hold as many as 20,000 pictures. Abstracts are the current trend, but Constable remains a staple.

His website offers a choice from hundreds of Old Masters that can be painted to a quality determined by how much the customer will pay. Mr Chen said: “The American market doesn’t demand such high quality.”

That could be the destination for the hundreds of Van Goghs hanging out to dry along with the washing and wind-dried pork at the workshop of Zhang Zhenhai. He has no idea where the paintings end up and is happy just to fill his orders.

He sat on a plastic chair in his tiny office, surrounded by painters brushing blues onto a series of replicas of Van Gogh’s irises. An experienced hand can turn out ten Sunflowers a day, although the irises are trickier. He said: “We are very efficient. I aim for great efficiency, because this lowers our costs and enables us to sell at a good profit margin.” He sells a lot of 50 Sunflowers at £2 per copy. In the workshop, he charges £1.50.

Mr Zhang attended art school before lighting on this business model. Now he recruits young workers seeking their fortune in the city and trains them to be adept Van Gogh artists. He estimates that he turns out 3,000 Sunflowers a year, although his personal favourite is The Starry Night.

He lifted down Sunflower paintings to sell to his visitors and selected a couple with a careful eye to the artistic merit.

“Take this one, you can see the brushstrokes are very fluid. The other one is by a trainee and lacks life.”

Interior design

• Van Gogh painted his first sunflowers in August and September 1888; he was to cut off his ear in December
• In the late summer he had fled Paris in the hope of relieving his ill health and moved to Arles in the south of France, where he was joined by Paul Gauguin
• The paintings were intended to decorate Gauguin's room in the so-called Yellow House that the artists rented together
• The series shows the flowers in all stages of life, from full bloom to withering

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