Bob Ross painted 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting. At least one tree appeared in 361 of them.

Between 1983 and 1994, Bob Ross painted 403 episodes of The Joy of Painting on PBS. FiveThirtyEight coded every episode for 67 distinct elements — trees, mountains, lakes, cabins, clouds — creating a complete record of what Ross actually painted across 31 seasons.

The results confirm the intuition: Ross was a painter of nature, and within nature, a painter of trees. Trees (as a category) appeared in 90% of episodes. Deciduous trees specifically appeared in 56%, conifers in 53%. Clouds appeared in 44% of episodes, mountains in 40%, lakes in 36%.

Less common elements tell a different story. Cabins appeared in only 18% of episodes. Steve Ross (Bob's son, a recurring guest) appeared in 30 episodes — 7.4%. Diane Andre (another frequent guest) in 6 episodes. The show felt intimate, but Ross worked mostly alone.

Each episode averaged 8 distinct elements. The most complex episode had 15. Three episodes had none of the coded elements at all — pure abstract compositions, unusual for Ross.

A note on this data. FiveThirtyEight published this dataset in 2014 alongside their analysis of The Joy of Painting. Every episode was individually coded by hand for the presence or absence of each element. The series ended in 1994, so the dataset is complete — no future episodes exist to add. Trees and "Trees" are counted separately because the original show used both terms.