Paintings for the Dining Room

Why still life owns this room

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which are either natural or human-made. Put that on a wall above a sideboard and the artwork is doing the same thing the room is doing: presenting food and objects on a table. No other genre matches a dining room so directly, which is why fruit, bread, fish, wine and flowers have hung where people eat for four hundred years.

The Basket of Apples is the piece to start with. Paul Cezanne painted it around 1893, and it rejected naturalistic representation in favour of distorting objects to create multiple perspectives, an approach that went on to influence Fauvism and Cubism. It belongs to the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago. Cezanne was a French Post-Impressionist whose work formed the bridge between late nineteenth century Impressionism and early twentieth century Cubism, and a tilted tabletop of apples is where you can see that happening.

Basket of Fruit by Caravaggio is the other end of the same idea, two centuries earlier: one basket, one ledge, black background, every leaf described. In a dark dining room it is the most effective small canvas here, because the black ground disappears into the wall and the fruit floats.

Choose by the wall you have

Three shapes of wall come up in this room and each one wants a different piece of dining room wall art. A long wall behind the table takes one wide canvas or three smaller pieces in a row, hung with the centre of the images 57 to 60 inches from the floor. A short wall above a sideboard takes a single vertical or square canvas, and the bottom of the frame should sit 6 to 12 inches above the surface so the arrangement reads as one thing. An alcove or a wall between two doors takes a small still life at eye level, where people see it while sitting.

Size is easier here than in a living room because the viewing distance is short. Measure the free width, take two thirds of it, and do not go larger: a canvas that fills the wall behind the table crowds the people sitting at it. If you want scale without bulk, a pair of medium canvases in the same frame does more than one oversized piece.

Before you order a dining room painting

What kind of painting is best for a dining room? A still life with food, fruit or wine, or a meal scene with people in it. Both echo what the room is for, which is why they look right where a landscape can feel out of place.

How high should I hang art above a sideboard? Leave 6 to 12 inches between the top of the sideboard and the bottom of the frame, and centre the image on the furniture rather than on the wall.

Are these dining room paintings prints? No. Each one is hand-painted in oil on canvas by a studio artist in seven sizes, with an optional frame, and you see a photograph of the finished piece before it is packed.