4.9/5
An office wall gets looked at in a way a living room wall never does. People walk past it on the way to a meeting and sit under it all day, half looking at it during every slow call. The best art for office walls survives that. It reads from across the room and still has something left to find on the hundredth look.
Below are ten paintings that pass that test, grouped by the room they suit. Companies fitting out a whole floor at once usually plan office paintings room by room, and that's the right instinct, because a lobby and a corner office want very different things from a picture.
What is the best art for an office?
Paintings with a clear composition that reads from a distance, a steady mood, and enough detail to reward a closer look. Landscapes and quiet interiors do best, with the odd city scene. Then match the picture to the room: bigger and more open where visitors wait, smaller and more personal where one person works.
Most art in office buildings fails for a simpler reason. It's too small. A modest print floating in the middle of a long wall looks like an afterthought, and people stop seeing it within a week. Go bigger than feels comfortable, or hang nothing.
Subject matters too. Goya's firing squad is a great painting and a strange thing to put behind the chair where you negotiate a contract. Save the drama for home.
Reception and lobby
This is the wall visitors judge you by, and they usually see it while standing, waiting, a little bored. Give them something with people in it or a story they half know.
1. Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884–86
A waiting room full of people, painted as a riverbank full of people. Seurat put Parisians of every age and class on the banks of the Seine, then built them out of dots of complementary color laid side by side. The canvas is more than ten feet wide (121 1/4 inches), and he came back to it two years later to sharpen the silhouettes and add a monkey on a leash. The painted border came later still, in 1888–89.
Visitors recognize it, often from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and that's useful in a lobby: a familiar picture puts people at ease. Nobody needs a ten-foot wall, though. Seurat's riverbank scene at a smaller scale still holds up behind a front desk.
2. Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872
Monet painted it from his hotel window in Le Havre, around November 1872, looking at the outer harbor in the mist of an autumn dawn. When it went into the 1874 group show he simply called it "Impression," and a critic's mocking review on April 25, 1874 turned the word into the name of a movement. The whole story is in its catalog entry in Paris.
For a company that likes a founding story, it's hard to beat a painting that named Impressionism by accident. The original is only 50 × 65 cm, about 20 by 26 inches, so it suits a narrow reception wall better than a vast one. The orange sun is the only strong color in the picture, and Monet's harbor at dawn pulls the eye straight to it from across a room.
3. Vincent van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night, 1888
Van Gogh wanted a night painting made of color instead of black and gray, so he set up outside a gas-lit café in Arles and painted it on the spot, in the dark, around September 16, 1888. The stars are placed as they actually stood on the night of September 16 or 17. Yellow and orange under the awning, deep blue above.
It's a vertical canvas, 80.7 × 65.3 cm, which makes it the right shape for the tall strip of wall beside an elevator or between two doors. And it has a café in it. People waiting for a coffee meeting notice.
Meeting rooms
A meeting room painting gets stared at by people who are thinking. It should be calm and horizontal, like the table, and it shouldn't pick a side.
4. John Constable, The Hay Wain, 1821
An empty wagon crosses a shallow millpond at Flatford Mill on the River Stour, near the Suffolk village where Constable was born. The farmhouse on the left belonged to a tenant farmer named Willy Lott, and it's still standing. Constable painted the picture in his London studio from years of oil sketches, and when he showed it at the Royal Academy in 1821 under the title Landscape: Noon, it didn't sell.
A dealer bought it and sent it to the Paris Salon of 1824, where Constable received a gold medal from Charles X. The canvas measures 130.2 × 185.4 cm, more than four feet by six, and it hangs in London's National Gallery today.
Put Constable's Suffolk millpond at the end of a long table and it does exactly what a meeting room needs. Lots of sky, slow water, nothing urgent.
5. Paul Cézanne, The Card Players, 1890–92
A painting of men sitting around a table, concentrating. It almost feels like a joke to hang it in a conference room, but it works. Cézanne built the scene from studies of local farmhands in Provence and kept adjusting the figures until each one, like the four pipes on the wall behind them, fell into place. The New York canvas is the first of five card-player paintings he made.
At 25 3/4 × 32 1/4 inches it's a mid-size picture, good for a smaller room with one feature wall. The browns and ochres are warm without being loud, and Cézanne's quiet table of players won't fight the glare of a screen on the opposite wall.
6. Gustave Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day, 1877
If you have a boardroom with a real wall, this is the one. It's 83 1/2 × 108 3/4 inches: a busy Paris intersection a short walk from Caillebotte's home, with the rain shown through open umbrellas and reflections on wet cobblestones rather than falling drops. The figures in front seem to walk straight out of the frame toward you. It has belonged to the Art Institute of Chicago since 1964.
The palette is all grays and umbrella black, which is why it suits a room of glass and steel. For a city firm the subject needs no explaining.
Open-plan floors
Here nobody stands in front of the painting. People see it sideways from their desks, or at a distance on the way to the kitchen. You need pattern and color that read from far off. Fine detail is wasted.
7. Vincent van Gogh, Irises, 1889
Van Gogh entered the asylum at Saint-Rémy in May 1889 and began Irises within the first week, working from the flowers in the garden. The cropping, with irises spilling past the edges, probably owes something to Japanese woodblock prints. He thought of it as a study. His brother Theo sent it to the Salon des Indépendants that September and wrote to him that "[It] strikes the eye from afar."
That line is the whole case for open-plan offices. At 29 1/4 × 37 1/8 inches, the canvas in Los Angeles is not large, yet the blue carries across a room. Hang the garden irises from Saint-Rémy at the end of a long run of desks and the whole floor has a focal point.
8. John Singer Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 1885–6
Two little girls in white light paper lanterns in a garden thick with lilies and roses, in the last light of the day. It's soft and a little dreamy, which is a relief on a floor of monitors. The original hangs at Tate Britain. Choose it for a break area or a long corridor where people slow down, not for a spot next to the printers.
A private office
One person, one chair, a lot of hours. This is the only room where the painting can be for you rather than for visitors, so pick something you won't tire of. Smaller works, closer viewing.
9. Johannes Vermeer, The Milkmaid, about 1660
A maidservant pours milk, entirely absorbed in what she's doing. The only movement in the picture is the thin stream from the jug. Light from the window on the left falls across the bread on the table in hundreds of small colored dots, and the more you look the more you find, down to the foot warmer on the floor and the tiles along the base of the wall.
It's small, 45.5 × 41 cm, under 18 inches tall, which is right for a wall you sit close to. As a picture of deep, uninterrupted work it's hard to improve on. See the canvas in Amsterdam once in person if you can; on the wall at work, Vermeer's maid at her jug asks nothing of you on a busy day.
10. Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night, 1889
Soon after arriving at Saint-Rémy, Van Gogh described his view to Theo in a letter from late May 1889: "Through the iron-barred window I can make out a square of wheat in an enclosure." By mid-June he had "a new study of a starry sky." The painting passed from his sister-in-law Jo to a collector in Rotterdam, and in 1941 it entered MoMA's collection, the first Van Gogh in a New York museum.
In a lobby it's a cliché. In your own office, where you look up at it when a problem won't give, the swirling sky earns its fame again. If you'd rather start from a longer list, browse the hundred canvases people ask for by name and put each one through the same room test.
One floor, planned together
Here are the ten office artwork ideas side by side, with where each original hangs.
| Painting | Year | Room | Where it hangs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte | 1884–86 | Reception | Art Institute of Chicago |
| Monet, Impression, Sunrise | 1872 | Reception | Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris |
| Van Gogh, Café Terrace at Night | 1888 | Reception | Kröller-Müller Museum, Netherlands |
| Constable, The Hay Wain | 1821 | Meeting room | National Gallery, London |
| Cézanne, The Card Players | 1890–92 | Meeting room | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
| Caillebotte, Paris Street; Rainy Day | 1877 | Boardroom | Art Institute of Chicago |
| Van Gogh, Irises | 1889 | Open plan | Getty Center, Los Angeles |
| Sargent, Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose | 1885–6 | Break area | Tate Britain, London |
| Vermeer, The Milkmaid | about 1660 | Private office | Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
| Van Gogh, The Starry Night | 1889 | Private office | Museum of Modern Art, New York |
A couple of habits keep the plan from falling apart once the paintings arrive. Keep oils out of direct afternoon sun and away from heating vents. And light them, because a painting in a dim corridor is just a dark rectangle.
Don't be afraid to mix centuries on one floor. A Vermeer in one office and a Caillebotte in the boardroom look deliberate, as long as each suits its room.
Painted by hand for your walls
Every painting on this list can be copied in oil by hand instead of printed, which matters on a wall people see every day: brushwork catches the light in a way ink on canvas doesn't. Art & See paints museum reproductions to order, and if you're dressing more than one room, start with paintings for a whole workplace so every room on the floor is planned as one set.
