“Buying the painting is pretty simple: if it speaks to you, it will bring you joy. Hanging it when you get home is the real art,” says interior designer Adrienne Chinn.
Chinn started visiting art fairs a couple of years ago. Her latest purchase, a massive painting of a rose on a bar-code background by Yasmin Seaman, was bought at last year’s London Art Fair. “I live in an ordinary Victorian house, not ideal for displaying large contemporary canvases,” she says. “I thought, ‘Where on earth am I going to put it?’ ” Her advice to clients is to take down all their artworks whenever they acquire something new, and start afresh.
“There is no need to display everything at the same time. I keep a lot in storage, and taking out something different every six months keeps the look fresh.” She found her rose was thriving when allowed to ramble across the living room wall and, after pruning other furnishings and artworks that threatened to engage in an aesthetic brawl with the newcomer, she declared the new ensemble a great success.
“Never be afraid to play with scale and introduce something oversized,” Chinn says, triumphantly. “On the other hand,” she concedes, “we can’t have the plasma-screen TV in that room now.”
Hanging the smallest pictures often produces the largest headache. Designer Paul Warren specialises in makeovers that bring a breath of fresh air to a scheme. Clients often present him with a host of diminutive photos and paintings, gathered over decades. “What you can’t do is put one tiny picture in the middle of a wall in a vast loft space: it will look like a postage stamp. I tend to group a handful together to make a composition.”
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Warren recommends choosing pictures that harmonise in some way. A group of framed embroideries of all shapes and sizes will always look good together; a line of oval silhouettes dotted down a narrow upright section of wall is a tried and tested device. Pictures in similar tones or in the same medium will be less inclined towards discord. Groupings should be crisp geometric shapes: four pictures in a crucifix pattern works well. “Lay it all out on the floor and see if your composition works before hammering any holes in the wall,” he counsels.
Rethinking your frames can be one way of bringing harmony to a motley collection. Some canvases are unsuitable for framing: Aboriginal artworks, for example, are traditionally painted right up to the edges, so the design extends past the point where the canvas folds around its stretcher, and adding a frame might hide important features of the work. Most smaller pictures, however, need the structure offered by a frame, but which to choose? “You really don’t want to match frames and mounts to your decor,” advises Chinn. “If you use a blue mount to match a blue carpet, you end up with a hotel look.” Warren takes particularly intractable pieces to John Jones, a picture framer in Finsbury Park, north London, for simple bespoke frames.
There is also a growing trend for buying plainer, vintage frames. Especially popular are the “artists’ frames”, a style that takes its name from frames originally made by 19th-century painters. Reacting against the gaudiness of earlier, elaborately curlicued confections, they gilded straight onto oak, without the traditional layer of gesso, making a feature of the grain, and adding only the most discreet decoration. Frames in the style of those made for paintings by George Frederick Watts are much sought after to complement 19th-century and modern British art. Exquisite examples of these can be found at framers’ such as Arnold Wiggins and Paul Mitchell.
One of the most common mistakes is to hang pictures too high (eye level is the best starting point, for single pictures and the centre of a grouping). Another is to hang them too straight. Declan O’Brien of Arnold Wiggins says: “It’s easy to get something absolutely level with a spirit level, but it has to look right to the eye, rather than be exact. If you are hanging over the mantelpiece, your chimney breast will often vary an inch or so from top to bottom — that ’s how old houses were built. A spirit level might tell you your picture’s exactly straight but, if it still looks crooked, you’ll need to adjust it by eye.”
Most design professionals espouse the less-is-more mantra. But such rules are made to be broken. “I call my style of hanging, When did you last see the wallpaper?” says Martin Miller, antiques collector and proprietor of Miller’s Residence hotel in Notting Hill. He hangs pictures 2in-3in apart, from skirting board to cornice, positioning the odd canvas on an easy chair.
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“What I do isn’t really in fashion. I use the pictures as building blocks, rather than looking at each as an individual work. I use them to make up a tapestry of colours — it could look terrible.” In fact, it looks brilliant, and is part of a decorating tradition that stretches back to 18th-century ensembles such as the charmingly crammed print room at Queen Charlotte’s Cottage, Kew, which features more than 150 engravings. Miller’s paintings, from miniatures to 4sq ft canvases, from seascapes to portraits, are held together by the bold colours of the walls behind them — dark aubergines, reds and Ming yellows — and beautifully flattered, as are their viewers, by his predilection for flickering candlelight.
Lighting is another crucial factor in your hang. With badly positioned or ill-chosen lighting, entire compositions can appear murky or bleached out, oils can acquire the appearance of lunar landscapes, and varnished surfaces gain irritating reflections.
“Changing your lighting is often the equivalent of having a painting cleaned,” says Paul Mitchell, picture framer and conservator. The “appalling lighting” of the collection of paintings in the Old Speech Room at Harrow School had bothered him since he was a pupil there, and he recently offered to clean and restore all the pictures free of charge, if the school would install new lighting. “The transformation was astonishing: you could see every detail, and the pictures seemed to light up the room.”
So what do the experts use? Clive Mills has designed and installed picture lighting for clients ranging from residents of Eaton Square to the Frick Collection in New York. He favours 12-volt halogen bulbs, UV-filtered, set in a shade fitted to the top edge of the picture frame. Mills says: “Lighting from above gets a better spread of light; it needs to be placed far away enough from the top so that there is no reflection of the light source in the glass, and far enough from the canvas so that there is no damage from heat.”
If you own a particularly weighty or valuable picture, it’s well worth getting in the experts to hang it securely for you. Jonathan Kennedy of Martinspeed Ltd, specialist art shippers, is routinely asked to hang the paintings he transports. “We deal with works from 12sq in to 5m long and a couple of hundred kilos in weight — that becomes an engineering job. If something is especially large and heavy, we use a bracket to distribute the weight, hidden behind the work.”
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Paul Carter of Phoenix Fine Art, a professional picture hanger with two royal warrants, is known for making canvases appear to float miraculously, in the most unlikely locations. He recently placed a trio of pictures one on top of each other, on the curve of a spiral staircase, for a client in the Docklands. He says: “For small pictures, up to about 2sq ft, we put two screw rings a third of the way down on each side of the frame and two hooks in the wall, and simply hook them on. Most people hang pictures that size on a piece of wire from a single nail, but we always use two fixings: it’s more secure, and otherwise you’re forever straightening them. For larger pictures, we often put ���plate hooks’ on the back of the frame, a third of the way down, and attach them to picture chains on the wall — the picture can then be safely moved up and down, link by link. Very useful if it’s over a mantelpiece and you want room to rearrange the ornaments.”
Hang right