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Google honors painter Bob Ross by featuring him on its search page. Oct. 29 was his birthday, and he would have been 70 this year.

Soft-spoken painter Bob Ross is honored Monday in a Google doodle that celebrates his life and the encouragement he gave to so many in his PBS show, "The Joy of Painting," on TV for more than a decade. Monday, Oct. 29 would have been his 70th birthday.

Ross taught us not only about painting, but his encouraging, calming and reassuring approach pushed even the most reticent of viewers to pick up a paintbrush or piece of wood or any tool to use to paint. The show aired from 1983 to 1994. It could have gone longer, but Ross was battling lymphoma, and canceled the show to deal with the illness. He died on July 4, 1995.

The painter with the large hair and large heart had a pretty simple philosophy: that the ability to paint comes from the heart, and if you have one, you, too, can do it.

His work included landscapes — trees, clouds, mountains, lakes — and the oil painting technique he used is known as "wet on wet." The painter keeps adding painting on top of paint that is still wet instead of letting each layer of paint dry.

But it really wasn't so much his technique of painting that connected with viewers; it was the emotion he conveyed about it. When he showed viewers how to paint trees, they weren't just trees, they were "happy little trees." Clouds weren't just clouds, they were "happy little clouds." Painting, he once said, let him "create the kind of world that I want, and I can make this world as happy as I want it."

You can see some archived Bob Ross shows on YouTube. And if you want to see previous Google Doodles, here's a sortable archive of all of them. But first, take a moment to enjoy this remix of Ross's show, lovingly presented by PBS:

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Potomack Company via AP

This undated image provided by the Potomack Company shows French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir's "Paysage Bords de Seine," which was purchased for $7 at a flea market in West Virginia.

The Renoir painting that caused a sensation when it was bought at a flea market for $7 may have been stolen from a museum six decades ago, and an auction house has put its sale on hold.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir's painting "Paysage Bords de Seine" was due to go to auction through the Potomack Company on Saturday, but its sale was put on hold after a Washington Post reporter discovered documents in the Baltimore Museum of Art's library showing it was on loan there from 1937 until 1951, when it was stolen.

The Impressionist work, whose title translates as "Landscape on the Banks of the Seine," was purchased two years ago at a West Virginia flea market.

The buyer, a Virginia woman who has not revealed her name, took it to auction house The Potomack Co. in July, and experts there confirmed it was by the French master Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The frame of the painting includes a "Renoir" plaque.

"I originally bought it for the frame," the buyer admitted to NBCWashington.com earlier this month. "I was trying to rip it apart... I was like, well, maybe I should wait." The buyer's mother encouraged her to get it appraised.

It was expected to fetch $75,000 to $100,000 at auction. 

"The rest of the auction will go on, but the Renoir has been withdrawn," said Lucie Holland, a spokeswoman for The Potomack Co.

Read the story on NBCWashington.com

Potomack said that the London-based Art Loss Registry had said that the painting had never been reported stolen or missing and the FBI's art theft website did not list it as stolen either. There was also no police report from the theft.

The FBI is now investigating.

'Caught by surprise'
The Renoir came to the Baltimore museum through one of its leading benefactors, collector Saidie May. Her family bought it from the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in 1926.

The Washington Post found records in the museum's library on Tuesday that showed May had lent the paintings and other works to the museum in 1937, Potomack said.

After the newspaper told it of the findings, the Baltimore museum checked its files and found a loan record showing the Renoir had been stolen on November 17, 1951. What happened to it after the theft is unknown.

Doreen Bolger, the museum director, said the museum's probe into what happened to the painting was in early stages.

May died in May 1951 and the art collection was willed to the museum. As its ownership was going through legal transfer, the painting was stolen while still listed as on loan.

"We were caught by surprise," Bolger said on Thursday.

"At this point we just want to make sure that the painting winds up where it belongs and that we provide all the information we can to law enforcement about this issue," Bolger said. 

She said that she would be happy to show the painting again if it is ultimately returned to the museum.

NBC News staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Most people would walk by a lone penny on the sidewalk. Why bother? But to Jacqueline Lou Skaggs, it's a canvas -- and an inspiration.

Jacqueline Lou Skaggs

"The Still Life, 1976"

The New York-based artist has been working on meticulous mini-masterworks on the common one-cent coin since the 1990s.

"Of all coins, it is the penny that is so neglected and blatantly discarded," she said in an email interview. "It was only this intrinsic 'valuelessness' that interested me. I wasn't interested in painting miniatures -- I was interested in painting on pennies."

She has created 12 of the small works (all viewable here) and has sold two so far, both last year. They are an extension of her other art interests; Skaggs has been working with found objects -- "mainly banal, utilitarian things," she says, for years. As a penny-from-the-street collector, she was fascinated by discarded coins and recognized that by painting on them, she'd skirt the edge of kitsch.

"I knew when I conceived of the work that it would border (on) 'novelty,' but classical realism and miniature works tend to as well -- styles throughout art history often take on a language of their own.... I knew that I would be embracing those ideas, too," she said. "I was so interested in the discourse between the images and the coins that the novelty simply became part of the language."

She places emphasis on each work's title, noting that each work has a particular meaning. "Kisses and Ghosts" comes from a portrait of her mother as a child and reflects a report she once read asking what children were most afraid of -- the top answers being "kisses" and "ghosts." "The Still Life" is "too still," and "Venus Dreams" is simply a dreaming Venus. "Give me wings for arms any day," said Skaggs.

Slideshow: Quirks of art: Creators who work in madcap media

Launch slideshow

She's received a lot of attention since the penny art went viral recently, but has mixed emotions about how that's come about. For one thing, she does not do commissions and feels the set of 12 pennies is complete. But most troubling, she said, is that her images have been distributed around the Internet without the titles attached.

"People are predictably and generally wooed by the scale and skill," she writes. "It's the risk an artist takes with their craft. Which is quite ironic, annoying and fulfilling at the same time to me, because this work has so much, if not everything, to do with that kind of carelessness and oversight."

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