4.9/5
Put it on an inside wall of a room you actually live in, where the temperature and humidity stay about the same all year, out of direct sun and well away from anything that blows hot or cold air. That's the short answer to "where should I hang an oil painting," and most homes have three or four walls that qualify. The catch is that the walls people reach for first, the one over the fireplace and the long one facing the big window, are usually the worst in the house.
An oil painting is a stack of materials bonded together: a canvas or wood panel, a glue size, a ground, the paint and a varnish. Each layer swells and shrinks at its own pace when the air changes. The size in a canvas tightens as the air dries and relaxes when it turns damp, while paint that has been drying for years gets too stiff to follow. Repeat that every season and the paint starts to crack and flake. So the real job is finding the calmest air in your home. That holds for a portrait painted three centuries ago and for a hand-painted copy of a museum picture that arrived last month, because the materials are the same.
Start with an inside wall
The inner face of an exterior wall runs cold in winter. Warm room air meets it, moisture condenses, and a canvas hung flat against it sits in a damp pocket that never quite dries out. Drafty spots and outside walls are the first places ruled out in the Canadian guidelines for storing and displaying paintings. An interior partition, with heated rooms on both sides, stays close to room temperature all winter.
If the only good-looking wall is an outside one, you can still use it. Stick small spacers to the lower corners on the back of the frame so air moves behind the canvas. Squares about 10 mm across, cut from cork or smoothed wood, are enough. A painting that sits a little off the wall also collects less dust along the bottom edge.
Room by room
Living room
Usually the best room in the house. It's heated evenly, it's where you spend your evenings, and you'll notice if something changes. Pick the wall with care, though. The wall a window is set in never takes direct sun from that window, while the wall facing it can get a bright stripe for an hour every afternoon. Stand in the room at different times of day before you drill.
Bedroom
Quiet, low traffic, curtains often drawn during the day. A bedroom is one of the safest places for a painting you care about. Keep it off the wall directly above a radiator or a wall-mounted heater, which in many bedrooms is the wall under the window.
Dining room
Fine, as long as it isn't open to the stove. Cooking fumes and grease settle on a varnished surface and dull it, and anything hung low behind the table catches splashes from drinks and food. Splatters from beverages and water from misting nearby plants are on the list of hazards for exactly this reason. Hang it above the sideboard, not above the chair backs.
Hallways and stairs
A wide hall is fine. A narrow corridor or a stairwell is not, because people brush against frames as they pass, and on stairs someone carrying a laundry basket will hit it sooner or later. Skip the wall by the front door too: every time it opens in January, the air around the painting changes.
Home office
Good, with one catch. The space heater under the desk and the laptop vent both blow warm, dry air, so keep the painting on a wall they don't face.
The places to skip
Above a working fireplace
The mantel is the traditional place of honor, and it's a spot conservators warn against. The wall heats up when the fire is lit and cools overnight, the air rising from the firebox is hot and dry, and soot settles on the surface. The National Park Service's handbook chapter on easel paintings goes as far as banning fireplace fires in rooms where paintings hang. A fireplace that's sealed or never used is a different case: then the mantel is just a shelf.
Bathrooms
A hot shower pushes the humidity in a small room close to saturation, then the fan pulls it back down within minutes. Relative humidity over 65% encourages mold, and the daily swing is worse than a steady damp. Put a print in the bathroom and keep the oil painting elsewhere.
Kitchens
Grease, steam and heat from the oven, all in one room. Even a range hood running full time won't keep a fine film of cooking oil off the varnish, and that film holds dust.
Next to radiators, vents and outside doors
Anything that blows air at the painting makes the conditions around it jump. Rising heat from a radiator dries the canvas on one side, while air-conditioning vents chill it in summer. The safest range for relative humidity is a steady 40–60%, with a room temperature of about 64–75°F, and what matters most is that neither changes quickly. The environmental guidelines for paintings also flag walls near water pipes, where damp can build up behind a frame without anyone noticing.
Basements and attics
Damp below, heat above. Neither is a place to hang a painting or to store one. If a canvas has to go into storage, wrap it and stand it upright in a closet toward the middle of the house.
Light you can see by
Sun is the fastest way to ruin a painting. In direct daylight, around 30,000 lux, the most light-sensitive pigments can fade noticeably in a day to two weeks. At 50 lux, a dim but comfortable level, the same colors take 1.5–20 years to show a change, and the fading never comes back. UV film on the glass helps less than people expect, because ultraviolet usually causes less than half of the fading in sensitive colors; the rest comes from ordinary visible light. There is a separate guide to keeping a painting safe in a sunny room, so here is the short version: no direct sun on the canvas at any hour of the day.
Lamps are easier to control. For most paintings 50 lux is enough to see them well, and there's no reason to go above 200. The brass picture light clipped to the top of the frame is a poor choice: it pours light and heat onto the top strip of the canvas, and its weight pulls on the frame. A ceiling spot aimed from farther back spreads the light evenly and keeps the heat away.
What a dining-hall wall teaches about rooms
One of the best-known paintings in the world is on a dining-hall wall in Milan. Leonardo worked on the Last Supper in the refectory between 1494 and early 1498, painting straight onto the dry wall so he could work slowly and revise. Paint laid that way sits on the surface instead of binding into wet plaster, and it didn't last. In 1517 the canon Antonio De Beatis wrote that the picture "is beginning to decay."
The wall painting in Santa Maria delle Grazie is now protected like a patient. The major restoration ran from 1977 to 1999, more than twenty years. Today visitors pass through automatic doors that open and close in turn, and they enter in groups of no more than 40 for 15 minutes, because a crowd's breath raises the humidity and the particles in the air. Your canvas in the living room is far sturdier than paint on a wall. The rule is the same one, though: people, cooking and weather all change the air, and a painting lasts longest where they change it least.
Once you've found the wall
Height is its own question, and the eye-level rule for hanging height covers it. For the hardware, use picture hooks rather than bare nails, and two hooks for a heavy painting so the weight is shared and the frame stays level. Check the wire and the hooks once in a while for rust or looseness. Leave space around the frame so it doesn't touch a curtain, a door or the top of a sofa, and give it a gap from light switches people reach for in the dark.
A painting for the wall you picked
If the calm wall you found is still empty, Art & See paints copies of the old masters by hand in oil, with the same kind of canvas, paint and varnish as the originals, so everything above applies to them. Choose the wall first, then the picture. Measure the space, watch how the light moves across it during the afternoon, and pick a size and subject that suit what you saw.
Sources
- Canadian Conservation Institute, Storage and Display Guidelines for Paintings
- Canadian Conservation Institute, Environmental Guidelines for Paintings
- Canadian Conservation Institute, Basic care: Paintings
- Canadian Conservation Institute, Agents of deterioration: Light
- National Park Service, Museum Handbook, Curatorial Care of Easel Paintings
- British Association of Paintings Conservator-Restorers, Care for your paintings
- Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, The Last Supper
- Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, Backstage
