Painting

Paintings are decorative entities that hang on walls.

Crafting
Paintings can be crafted with any color of wool. The color of the wool used does not influence the picture chosen when the painting is placed. Once placed, it displays a random painting.

Breaking
To remove a painting from a wall, it, break one of its supporting blocks, cover one square of it with a block, hit it with an arrow, egg, ender pearl, snowball, or fire charge, or subject it to an explosion. The painting then drops as an item. Arrows that hit paintings disappear.

Trading
Master-level shepherd villagers sell 3 paintings for 2 emeralds.

Placement
Paintings can be placed on the sides of solid blocks, or signs. The other blocks holding the painting can be almost anything. There are several different sizes of paintings (see below). When placed, a painting checks for the largest amount of space it has. It then chooses a random painting of that size. The player can add blocks around the painting to ensure it is the size wanted. When the supporting blocks are removed, the painting breaks after 20 game ticks (1 second) if no supporting blocks are replaced during that interval.

Properties
Being an entity, paintings can simultaneously exist in the same space as blocks such as water or torches. Specifically, they can share the space with any block whose collision box does not intersect its hitbox.

Players and mobs are able to walk through paintings, as long as the blocks supporting the painting allow it. Light propagates through paintings as well.

Paintings are non-flammable.

Canvases
There are 26 paintings in the game. These are mostly based on paintings by Kristoffer Zetterstrand, who also created the Minecraft versions.

Bedrock Edition
$$, there are four additional 2×2 tile paintings with no clear purpose or use. See for more information.

ID




Entity data
Paintings have entity data that defines various properties of the entity.

Texture sheet
Like with terrain.png, items.png and particles.png , paintings were originally stored on a main texture atlas rather than being separate individual files. Empty slots were filled in with the magenta grid texture as shown.

Trivia

 * On April 26, 2011, Notch stated that the automapping code can be used to share custom paintings and books in the future.
 * If a player is standing behind a painting, other players do not see their name.
 * Paintings are not actually attached to the wall. When looked at closely, there is a visible gap between the painting and the wall.
 * The texture on the back of a painting is the same texture of wooden planks but darkened slightly.
 * The original Herobrine hoax is confirmed to be a painting with custom textures.
 * The "Skull on Fire" painting contains a Minecraft world in the background, which is based on a screenshot taken by the artist in Alpha 1.1.2_01 (or earlier) on October 12, 2010, at 13:22:49 (UTC+2).
 * The seeds for this world are -1044887956651363087 and -6984854390176336655 (both are the same), standing at X=-249.65, Y=91, Z=-29.04.