Rita Notes: Picture Hanging and Framers
Rita Konig shares her advice on effective picture hanging and recommends her favourite framers
Read: how to hang pictures | The art world recommends...
The single most impactful thing that you can do on moving into a new place is to hang your pictures. It can take people months, even years, to get around to this, but really it should be one of the first things on your list.
I am always happy to smother walls in pictures, treating them like a form of wallpaper. If you do not have a large art collection, there are ways to cheat it. I once bought a couple of books of cartoons by Jean-Jacques Sempé for a client, cut them up and framed them to cover the cloakroom walls from skirting to cornice. For another client, I hung his cartoons in the dining room to create visual interest against the neutral painted walls of her house in New York.
Hanging what seems to have become known as a 'salon wall' is such a random science that it is difficult to give hard and fast advice. But there are a few rules I tend to follow. First, always break a line: I like the edges to be castellated (for want of a better word) rather than a neat frame around a jigsaw puzzle. This is much more forgiving; I don't like lining things up anyway. People often want to line things up along the top of a door, for example. Secondly, watch out for tramlines; you don't want a map of Manhattan appearing on your walls, so just nudge a picture left or right to stop long avenues appearing. Finally, I often hang things in pairs - for example two matching pictures side by side or two pictures that are not connected, but that look good together one above the other.
While I love salon walls, they are not for every room. When I am hanging single pictures, I like to bring them quite low to the piece of furniture they are above. I hate seeing pictures drifting, lonely, across the wall. They are always better when they feel associated with the things around them - either a sofa, a chest of drawers or another picture. I have even hung a small illustration over the light switch in my daughter Margot's bedroom. For children, it is really nice to hang to the ground so that they can actually see the pictures. Margot's godmother gave her blocks of letters spelling her name, which hang between the radiator and the windowsill.
I almost always stack a couple of pictures on a wall and am happy with the large above or below the smaller one. One of the most important things is to choose the right picture for the scale of your wall; it is very satisfying when a picture sits well in a space. Rather than hanging something too small in pride of place over the mantelpiece, it is much better to put it somewhere that it will have some impact. There are lots of walls in a house that do not need filling with a vast Canaletto; these are the easiest places to start and hone your eye for picture hanging. These are also the spaces to use when you don't have many pictures, even if it means leaving the larger walls bare.
If you have a lot of pictures that need to be hung, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you get a picture hanger to come and do it for you. Husbands (and wives, for that matter) tend to either never get around to it or make so many errors that they leave the wall looking like a firing squad has been in. To save yourself from either of these fates, give Paul Carter at Phoenix Fine Art (020-8319 3527) a call. He will come and do a beautiful, secure and tidy job for you.
Rita's Picks
When it comes to framing, I have a few places I go to, depending on the amount of money I want to spend and the finish I am after:
Lacy Gallery in Westbourne Grove, W11, deals in antique frames and has three floors of them to choose from, all collated by style and age. I have put modern prints in frames with antique glass, bought from here, with great success.
The Rowley Gallery in Kensington Church Street, W8, makes its frames on the premises and has an extremely knowledgeable team, who take great care to help you get the various elements right.
J White Framing in Latimer Road, W10, supplies excellent frames at good prices. Embarrassingly, my husband kept telling me to go there for years and I didn't until an art dealer friend of mine told me it was where he got all his framing done.
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