Where to Hang It, and What Fades It

A portrait is an object before it is an image. It has to live somewhere, on a real wall, in a real room with real light coming into it — and where you put it decides both how it looks and how long it lasts.

None of this is specific to us. It is the same advice a framer or a conservator would give you about any work on paper, and it is worth twenty minutes before you drive the nail.

Height: lower than you think

The centre of the picture wants to sit at about eye level — roughly 145 to 150 cm, or 57 to 60 inches, from the floor. Almost everyone hangs too high. If the room is one people mostly sit in, come down a little further.

Over a sofa or a console, leave about 15 to 25 cm between the top of the furniture and the bottom of the frame, so the two read as one group rather than two unrelated objects.

Light: the thing that actually does the damage

Direct sunlight fades pigment. It is the single biggest threat to any print, and it is slow enough that you will not notice until you move the picture and find the wall behind it a different colour.

• Never hang a portrait on a wall that gets direct sun, even for an hour a day. South-facing rooms in the northern hemisphere are the usual culprit.
• Keep it off the wall above a working fireplace or a radiator. Heat and soot both do their own kind of harm.
• Bathrooms and unheated porches swing too far in humidity. Paper expands and contracts, and eventually it ripples.

North light, or a wall opposite the window rather than beside it, is the safe answer nearly every time.

Glazing: the one upgrade worth the money

If the piece is framed behind glass or acrylic, UV-filtering glazing is the option to take. It costs more than standard glass and it is the only part of a frame that does conservation work rather than decoration. Museum-grade acrylic also weighs far less, which matters for anything large.

For a canvas, there is no glazing at all — which is one reason canvas prefers a wall out of the sun even more strongly than paper does.

Grouping more than one

If the house ends up with several — and it usually does, because a dog gets one and then the horse wants one — hang them with a consistent gap, 5 to 8 cm, and align either their centres or their top edges. Consistency is what makes a group look deliberate. Mixed frame styles are fine; mixed spacing is not.

Cleaning

Dust the frame, not the surface. A dry microfibre cloth on the glazing, nothing on a canvas but a soft brush, and no household spray anywhere near either.

Do that much and the print outlives the wall it is on. Every studio in the house offers archival paper, gallery canvas, and framing — the full list is on the index.