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The rules of hanging art, and where they come from

Eight rules, each with a number you can measure – and each with its origin: a book from 1897, a museum habit, a Japanese tea-room, an eighteenth-century palace, and one rule nobody ever wrote down.

episode 1 · watch the film

The Decoration of Houses

Edith Wharton's two ways to decorate a room, 1897 – and why we hang art the second way.

Photographs: Beinecke Library, Yale. Prints: Hiroshige. 63 s.

The eight rules

  1. Decide the whole, not the ornament
  2. Centre it at eye level: 145 cm
  3. Two thirds of what stands below
  4. 15–25 cm above the furniture
  5. A plain wall behind the picture
  6. One picture at a time
  7. Fewer, better
  8. Keep the gaps even, and hang it flat

1Decide the whole, not the ornament

Where it comes from

Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, The Decoration of Houses (1897). Wharton separates two ways of decorating a room: a superficial application of ornament, or those architectural features that are part of the organism of the house. Pictures, she insists, belong to the second.

It must never be forgotten that pictures on a wall, whether set in panels or merely framed and hung, inevitably become a part of the wall-decoration.Wharton & Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 1897

Episode 1 of the film series is about this rule. The seven that follow are what it looks like in practice.

2Centre it at eye level: 145 cm

Where it comes from

A museum habit, not a law. Galleries hang work "on centre" at 57 inches, which is roughly average eye height, and the figure reached living rooms through the interiors press. Nobody signed it. It works because a picture you look straight at is a picture you keep looking at.

How high to hang art

3Two thirds of what stands below

Where it comes from

The rule nobody wrote down. It is in none of the classic books; interior designers have simply used it for decades. But it is visible in Wharton's own plates from Fontainebleau and the Grand Trianon: the painting above the console and the mirror above the mantel are always narrower than the furniture, never wider. The two-thirds rule is a measurement of something people were already doing.

What size art goes above a sofa

415–25 cm above the furniture

Where it comes from

French eighteenth-century rooms. The dessus-de-porte over the door and the trumeau over the mantel were built together with the furniture and the panelling: the painting was part of the piece below it. Wharton's plates of Fontainebleau and of Louis XVI's library at Versailles show it. Our 15–25 cm is the movable echo of that fixed panel.

Art above a sofa, measured

5A plain wall behind the picture

Where it comes from

Pictures should never be hung against a background of pattern.Wharton & Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 1897
The wall is the background of the room, and so must be flat in treatment and reposeful in tone.Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste, 1913

Which wall colour makes art pop

6One picture at a time

Where it comes from

The Japanese tea-room and its alcove, the tokonoma, where one scroll and one flower are shown and then replaced. Edward Morse described the alcove for Western readers in 1886; Okakura Kakuzō explained the thinking behind it twenty years later.

In the tea-room the fear of repetition is a constant presence. The various objects for the decoration of a room should be so selected that no colour or design shall be repeated.Okakura Kakuzō, The Book of Tea, 1906

The tokonoma: one picture at a time

7Fewer, better

Where it comes from

One or two well-chosen prints hung on a background of plain color will give more pleasure than a medley of photographs, colored photogravures, and other decorations of the cotillon-favor type.Wharton & Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 1897

William Morris had said much the same in a lecture in 1880: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful. Elsie de Wolfe put it more bluntly: with one really good picture, you need no other pictures in the room.

One large print or three?

8Keep the gaps even, and hang it flat

Where it comes from

It is also important to avoid hanging pictures or prints too close to each other. Pictures and prints should be fastened to the wall, not hung by a cord or wire, nor allowed to tilt forward at an angle.Wharton & Codman, The Decoration of Houses, 1897

The 5–8 cm figure is gallery practice for a salon hang at domestic scale – like rule 2, a habit rather than a text.

Gallery wall spacing

Why these eight

Four have an author: rules 1, 5, 7 and 8 come from Wharton, with de Wolfe, Morris and Okakura in support. Two are museum habits: the 145 cm centre and the 5–8 cm gap. One is a design convention without an author: two thirds. And one is the echo of fixed eighteenth-century panelling: 15–25 cm above the furniture. That is the point of the title. The rules come from different places, and it is worth knowing which – also when the answer is "nobody knows".

Sources