The Journal
Plain answers about choosing and hanging art, the stories behind famous paintings and plates, sourced lists, and how a fine-art print is actually made.
Decorate
Rooms, sizes, hanging, framing, colour and style: the practical answers.
The complete guide to choosing wall art for a home
How to read a wall, the size rules worth memorising, one piece or three, framed or canvas, colour, light, and what suits each room.
What size art goes above a sofa?
Two-thirds of the sofa's width, 6 to 10 inches above its back. The table by sofa size, which of our sizes fit, and when the rule bends.
Framed, unframed or canvas: which to buy for which wall
Framed paper for detail, margins and damp rooms; unframed if you have a framer; canvas for big walls, glare and bold edge-to-edge work.
How to hang a gallery wall: spacing, height and layouts
Three layouts that work, 2 to 3 inches between frames, the group centred at 57 inches, one frame colour, and paper templates before any nail.
One big piece or a set of three?
The wall and the furniture decide: one piece at two-thirds of the furniture's width on a calm wall, three matched prints on a long one or a split budget.
Art history
Movements, artists, famous works, series and the techniques behind the prints.
Lists
Rankings and roundups with a reason for every entry.
The most famous paintings in the world and where to see them
Twenty-five paintings almost everyone can picture, ranked by fame, with the museum each one hangs in, why it got famous, and whether you can print it.
The most valuable paintings ever sold
The twenty highest prices ever paid for a painting, auction and private, each one sourced, plus the records they broke and which of them you can legally print.
Collecting & printing
What a fine-art print is, how it is made, what to ask, how to care for it.
How a fine-art print is made: from a 1714 plate to your wall
Where the scan comes from, what restoration does and does not touch, why some plates stop at 16 × 24, and how to check the print that arrives.
How we restore a 200-year-old plate, step by step
Eustachi's 1714 heart plate, from a harsh bitonal library scan to the Wellcome Collection's continuous-tone page: re-centred, cropped, rotated, and never repainted.
Print sizes and ratios explained: 2:3, 3:4 and 4:3
Four size ladders and twelve sizes, in inches and centimetres; why a painting keeps its own ratio; and what 'largest size 16 × 24' on a product page really means.
What is a giclée print, and is it worth it?
A marketing word from 1991 for a pigment inkjet print on archival paper. The word guarantees nothing; the ink, paper and scan do.