Landscapes Wall Art

Landscape Wall Art for Real Rooms

The first question almost everyone asks about a landscape is how wide it needs to be, and there is a usable answer. Over a sofa, bed or sideboard, aim for something running to roughly two-thirds the width of the furniture below it. Narrower than that and it looks stranded; much wider and it starts to overhang. Landscapes suffer from being undersized more than any other subject, because a long view squeezed into a small rectangle stops working as a view at all.

Choice of terrain sets the mood more than the palette does. Mountains and dramatic coast are active pictures; they carry energy and they suit rooms where people talk. Flat country, marsh, still lakes and long empty beaches are calm pictures, and they do better where people read, work or sleep. Putting an alpine storm above a bed is a common mismatch that nobody notices at the point of buying.

Where the horizon sits inside the frame matters as much as where you hang the thing. A low horizon gives you sky and lift, which helps a room with a low ceiling. A high horizon gives you land and depth, and it settles a room that already feels tall or draughty. Hang either so the horizon line falls near the eye level of somebody standing, and the picture behaves like a window rather than a poster.

Light direction is the detail people skip. If the room has one strong window and the picture is lit from the opposite side, the illusion quietly breaks and you never quite work out why the image looks flat. Matching the direction is a small thing that does a surprising amount of work.

Before committing, cut a sheet of newspaper to the size you are considering and tape it up for a day. Almost everyone who does this goes one size larger than they had planned, and almost nobody who skips it is glad they did.