Cowboy Wall Art

Cowboy Wall Art and Where It Belongs

This suits a study, a snug, a games room, a bar corner or a hallway with a bit of nerve, and it rarely suits a nursery, a small pale bathroom or a formal dining room. The reason is tone: cowboy imagery brings dust, leather, distance and a certain amount of swagger into a room, and rooms with no other rough materials in them have nothing to answer it with.

Materials matter more than colour here. Exposed brick, worn leather, dark timber, an old rug, a metal lamp — any one of these gives the subject something to belong to. In a room of gloss white units and chrome, the same image reads as a costume drama, and the mismatch is obvious to everyone but the person who hung it.

Within the subject there are two quite different registers. One is wide and landscape-led — a rider small in open country, dust, a big sky — and behaves like any other landscape, calm and easy to live with. The other is close and figure-led: hat brim, hands, rope, a horse's eye. The second is far more demanding and needs a wall of its own.

Palette is dependable, which helps. Sepia, ochre, sun-bleached blue and dark brown sit comfortably with tan leather, oak, olive green and unpainted plaster. They fight cold greys and anything with a blue-white cast, so if your walls are the fashionable pale grey, expect the artwork to look slightly orphaned unless something warm sits nearby.

One caveat before committing to a themed wall: two or three cowboy pieces together stop reading as taste and start reading as a set. Hang one, let it be the loudest thing on that wall, and put something entirely unrelated next to it. The subject is strong enough that it does not need reinforcements.