It is early afternoon at a tasteful four-star hotel in Harpenden and the turgid after-lunch air is fractured by a genteel tappety-tap sort of hammering. Nichol Wheatley, master painter, is installing artwork in a corridor of the hotel annexe.

“This is based on a lovely little painting by Cézanne but we have changed the composition,” he explains as he hangs a picture opposite the fire door. “It has got three clumps of trees, which is slightly different to the original. We’re re-inventing something but basing it on an established, beautiful work.”

“Remember Nice biscuits?” he continues. “In one hotel I visited they had Nice biscuits glued on to a bit of card painted white and I really didn’t get that at all. It’s great that they’ve got art on the wall but… well!” Wheatley tuts disapprovingly. “We’re frightful snobs about art, really.”

Forget the million-dollar thrills of art auctions at Sotheby’s, forget the edgy excitement of Brit Art in Hoxton – this is the other side of the art world. All those semi-luxurious places like hotels, restaurants, private hospitals, health clubs and conference centres need to decorate their walls – hundreds of thousands of walls – with inoffensive pictures and prints. Supplying artwork of all types to the hospitality trade is big business. Stay at a five-star boutique hotel and there’ll be one-off paintings and sculpture created by “proper” artists and individually sourced by a fancy-pants art consultant. Check into a budget motel and you’ll be lucky to get a couple of cheap prints on your bedroom wall – the sort of generic “art” that can be ordered from a catalogue like fast food from a takeaway menu (“I’ll have 250 Poppies in a Cornfield please, and 130 of the Grey Splodge on Red”).

In the middle of the market are the really quite nice hotels and restaurants with pictures that look vaguely familiar, almost as though they might be original. This is where Wheatley comes in. His company, Perfect Circle Art, is a group of young Glaswegian artists who create bespoke artworks to order. One of their specialities is painting “in the style of” famous artists, though always with a difference.

“We’d look at Monet’s Haystacks, for example, and think, ‘Do we do something else other than the haystacks? Do we do a field? What else are we going to do? How are we going to compose it?’” says Wheatley.

Each year they turn out several hundred oil paintings, plus a host of prints and other artworks for the hotel and hospitality industry. Their work hangs all over the UK and also in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Argentina and the USA. To keep costs low they create paintings in sets of three – the composition differs slightly in each picture but the colours are the same, which enables them to work from the same palette. This economy of scale allows them to turn out original oil paintings on board for £120-£150 plus framing costs.

Wheatley’s proud claim is that his studio is structured along classical Renaissance lines. Nowadays most art is conceived and executed by solo artists, but during the Renaissance period paintings were created by many hands. Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and any other Old Master worth his salt would have a small army of assistants and apprentices. Wheatley operates in a similar manner today.

It is rather like a factory production line. At the bottom of the artistic pecking order are the blockers, who are employed purely to paint the background. An experienced blocker can do five or six pictures a day. Once the background paint has dried the picture is handed on up to the next level where more accomplished artists “work it up”, painting in the structure, creating depth and beginning to add detail. Finally the painting is “finished off” by master painters Stef Gardiner or Nichol Wheatley. “We titify it,” says Wheatley. “…I know that’s a terrible word.”

His studio is tucked away behind a tenement block in the Partick district of Glasgow. An unmarked archway leads to a yard bordered by back gardens where clothes hang listlessly on washing lines. Perfect Circle HQ crouches at one end, in a long low space over a disused garage. Inside the air is tangled with noise – there is music, chatter and the harsh intermittent roar of a compressor used in making frames.

The headcount waxes and wanes according to the workload, but there is a hardcore of regulars. The long and lanky Stef Gardiner met Wheatley when they both worked in a video store in the Nineties. Gardiner went on to write and present the cultish Channel Four TV series, Vids, before eventually coming to work for Wheatley as studio manager and “lieutenant”. Project manager Adam Squires met Wheatley at art school. He left his old life as a London art director to become Perfect Circle’s “straight man”, fluent in corporate-speak.

Former Ralph Lauren model Matthew Thompson runs the in-house framing operation, Strange Frames, while painting in his free time. Then there’s “Big Fergus” Russell who used to play in a band and paint film sets, and the newest recruit, Matthew Burns, aged just 19.