Famous Art Prints

Famous art prints are the safest wall art there is and the easiest to get slightly wrong. Everybody knows Starry Night; fewer people know which room it suits, or that the same painter's wheat fields hang better over a dining table. This is the whole collection of paintings we reproduce, framed or on canvas, made to order in our family-owned shop in the USA.

What We Carry

More than a hundred paintings, filed by painter. Van Gogh and Monet have the biggest shelves. Then Renoir's riverside and dance-hall scenes, Degas's dancers, and Klimt's gold portraits, The Kiss among them. Albert Bierstadt's Sierra Nevada and Yosemite. The Renaissance and the Old Masters: the Mona Lisa, the Vitruvian Man, Raphael's School of Athens, Botticelli's Primavera, Rembrandt's Night Watch, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Bruegel's Hunters in the Snow. And a shelf of classic art for everybody else, from Winslow Homer and Frederic Remington to Cassius Coolidge's dogs at the card table.

Choosing For The Room

Start with the light and the colour, not the name. The blues and the night scenes settle a bedroom. Gold and green landscapes suit a kitchen or a dining room. The Old Masters are dark and want a study, or a hallway with a lamp. Bierstadt's mountains need width and do their best work over a sofa or a mantel. Klimt's gold carries a dim room, which is where people least expect it to work.

Building A Wall

Group by mood rather than by fame. Three impressionist landscapes hang together; the Mona Lisa beside a Degas dancer reads as two separate decisions. If you do want a mix of painters, keep the frame colour the same across all of them and the wall will hold together.

Framed Or Canvas

Framed prints come in four frame colors — Barnwood, Charcoal, Black, and Walnut — with an easel back. Black and Walnut suit the darker Old Masters; Barnwood suits the landscapes. Canvas is a 1-inch gallery wrap that hangs without nails or tools, and the floating frame upgrade finishes the edge for a larger wall, where the brushwork can be read from across the room.

A Gift Note

For somebody whose taste you do not know well, a famous painting is the lowest-risk gift on the wall-art shelf; it has been on walls for a century because it works. For somebody who already owns the obvious one, look one shelf over — the same painter's less familiar work, or a painter they have not been given yet.