Bob ross family

At some point in my childhood, I believed that Bob Ross was the greatest painter who had ever lived. And for good reason. You couldn’t watch Leonardo da Vinci paint the “Mona Lisa” on television, but you could watch this peculiar man with an Afro paint a shimmering lake framed by snowcapped mountains and “happy little trees” in less than thirty minutes. Toward the end of many episodes of his PBS series, “The Joy of Painting,” Ross would take a palette knife and slash a tree trunk into the foreground—a potentially ruinous move that he would call a “bravery test”—only to create a newborn birch that snapped the whole postcard panorama to life. Voilà!

Of course, the main draw, whether you were painting along at home or not, was Ross himself: that alfalfa-sprout helmet of hair, that gentle sea breeze of a voice, that Buddha-like calm. “We don’t make mistakes—we have happy accidents,” he’d say, nudging us toward our better selves. Like Mr. Rogers, another low-key pastor in the church of public television, Ross came off as wise, warm, and a little too pure for this world. He died in 1

•