Arranging pictures: groups, spacing, scale and the wall plan

A group is hung as one object. This chapter draws the wall to scale with every frame on it, settles the spacing on one rule, names who publishes each convention, and says plainly where we found no source.

1. A group is one object Understand

This is the one thing the museum sources agree on, and it is the most useful idea in the chapter.

An arts commission presenting with an art museum puts it directly: if you have lots of pieces together, treat them as one big artwork, still use a center line, and keep gaps between artworks small and consistent. A university art school's gallery sheet says the same in its own terms, that the center of each piece or grouping is 58 inches from the floor. An art museum's own how-to says a salon-style display is not a rigid grid, and that pieces should look like they are nestled in together.

What follows from treating the group as one object:

• One center line for the whole block, not for each frame. The bounding rectangle of the group gets the center height; individual frames fall where they fall.
• One spacing figure, kept throughout. Whatever you choose, do not vary it. Inconsistent gaps read as a mistake from across a room even when each individual gap looks fine.
• Anchors first. An art museum's method: choose your anchors, the largest pieces you know you want to hang, and fill in the blanks around them. A gallery says the same as "start big".
• Balance checked at the block level. The arts commission's slides warn against one artwork with a giant gap on one side and a tiny sliver on the other, and say to check the overall balance of the wall.
• Decide the rules before making holes. The same slides list the rules to fix in advance: center line, label position, spacing between works, and spacing between the art and the wall's edge. And the line worth keeping: eyeballing will betray you.

Two facts this chapter needs from elsewhere, stated here so you do not have to leave. The group works to a center height, which Height explains and the hook box computes; and every frame's hardware is chosen from its own weight against a published rating, which Hardware by published rating covers. A group is one object for composition and fourteen separate objects for hardware.

2. The center line, and the honest state of it

Four institutions publish a center height and they disagree with each other, and the one body whose guidance is of standards character publishes different figures again, lower, for a reason the conventions do not consider.

The accessibility guidelines are worth reading rather than summarizing, because they explain themselves. They say that objects placed above 40 inches will be seen only from below by most seated and short viewers. They give a 6-to-9-year-old wheelchair user's eye level as about 41 inches, and children's eye level as 8 to 12 inches below an adult's for pre-kindergarten and 12 to 17 inches below for kindergarten and older. They are not about pictures in houses, and they are the only figures in this research produced by a body that writes design standards.

So this manual makes the center height an input rather than a rule. The hook height box takes whatever you choose and prints the accessibility figures beside the result. If the room is used sitting down, or by children, or by someone in a wheelchair, the accessibility band is the better guide and 57 inches is the thing to adjust. If it is a hallway people walk through, the gallery convention is reasonable. Either way it is a choice you made rather than a number you inherited.

And the arithmetic, which is not in dispute: hook height equals half the frame's height, minus the drop from the top of the frame to the taut wire or D-ring, plus the center line. Two institutions publish it in that shape.

3. Spacing

Three institutions publish a spacing figure and they do not agree either, though they are at least in the same range.

The wall plan's default gap of 3 inches is ours, chosen because it sits inside the one museum-published range and because a grid at that spacing reads as deliberate. It is not anyone's finding, and the calculator prints the published figures beside whatever you choose.

What matters more than the number is consistency. One figure, applied everywhere in the group, is what makes a wall look arranged rather than accumulated. Two figures, even good ones, read as an error.

One practical point for mixed sizes, which is the usual case. Keeping a constant gap between frames of different sizes means the outer edges of the block are ragged; keeping the block's edges straight means the gaps vary. Both are legitimate, and the first is what the museum sources describe when they talk about a salon wall nestled together. Choose one, and say which you chose.

4. Scale, furniture and the wall

Here the published record almost runs out, and the manual is going to be explicit about where.

What is published: an art museum says that if you are hanging artworks over a piece of furniture, you will likely need to adjust the height upwards. That is the whole of it. No figure.

What is not published: the two rules everyone repeats.

• "Art should be about two-thirds the width of the furniture." No publisher. Searching specifically for an originator found none, and one page attributes the proportion to a design body with no citation, on a low-quality domain. This manual does not repeat that attribution, and does not give the rule as a rule. Preference
• "Leave 6 to 8 inches between the furniture and the bottom of the frame." No publisher either; the sources are retailers and decorating pages, variously giving 6 to 8 and 6 to 10 inches. A hanging system maker suggests roughly 6 to 12 inches over a sofa, console or headboard, which is a maker's convention. Preference

What this manual offers instead is the thing the plan can actually tell you. The group box reports the group's width as a percentage of the furniture's width and the clear wall between the furniture top and the bottom row, and leaves both as facts rather than verdicts. The wall plan draws a furniture line you can set and measure to, so you can see the relationship instead of reading a rule about it.

Our practice, offered as ours: a group that is narrower than the furniture reads as related to it; one that is wider reads as related to the wall. Both work. What tends not to work is a group almost exactly the furniture's width, which reads as an attempt at alignment that missed. That is a preference, we have no source for it, and you should trust your own eye over it.

5. Planning the wall before you drill

Three methods, in order of how much authority stands behind them.

The floor layout, with a photograph. An art museum publishes this one: using a tape measure and painter's tape, mark off a space of the same size on the floor, preferably in front of the wall, lay the work out inside it, and take a photograph from above, which is especially helpful for comparing a few different options. This is the only planning method in this research published by an institution, it costs nothing, and it is the step most people skip.

The scaled wall plan. Your wall draws one wall face on, to scale, with every frame at true proportion, a center height line and a furniture line you can set, measurements between any two things, and more than one arrangement saved as options. You can print the one you choose at scale. It does what graph paper does, with the arithmetic already correct, and it keeps the result with the rest of your records.

Paper templates. Trace each frame onto kraft or butcher paper, cut it out, mark the hanger position measured from the back of the frame, label each template, tape them to the wall, step back, adjust, then take them down one at a time and drive the fixing at the mark. The layout half of this is the museum's method; the hanger-mark refinement has no publisher we could find and appears only on retailer and decorating pages. We give it because it works and because the alternative is measuring twice on a ladder, and we label it: our practice, built on a published method.

One useful variant for anyone who likes paper: plan on quarter-inch graph paper with each square equal to one inch of wall. That is the same thing the plan does on a screen, and it is equally good.

Whichever you use, finish the same way. Hang from left to right or radiating out from the center, refer to the layout to measure the spacing between each piece, and level each one as you go. Then check the glass for fingerprints before you leave, which an art museum and an arts commission both think worth saying.

6. Difficult places, written as our practice

Stair walls, hallways, corners, the wall around a television, and above a mantel. No institutional, university, arts-council or named-practitioner source was found for any of them in this research; the only paid course that treats them is a practitioner's, and its content is not reproducible here. So this section is our practice, derived from the parts of the chapter that do have sources, and it says so.

Stair walls. The sourced parts that apply: a group is one object; the center height is a convention you can choose; and the accessibility guidance's point that things above 40 inches to the center are seen from below. On a stair, the viewer's eye height changes continuously, so a single horizontal center line has no meaning. Our practice is to set the group's lower edge parallel to the stair's slope, at a consistent distance from the handrail or the nose of the treads, and to keep the spacing constant along that line. That gives the eye a line that matches the one it is already following. We have no source for it. Glazing has the part of a stair wall that is not a preference: use acrylic, because a fall there reaches someone.

Hallways. People pass close and at speed, so the viewing distance is short and sideways. Our practice: smaller pieces, closer spacing, hung a little lower than a gallery convention because nobody stands back; and nothing with glass at head height.

Corners. Our practice is to stop a group a frame's width short of an inside corner, so the end frame is not seen edge-on, and to treat the two walls of an outside corner as two separate groups rather than as one wrapping group.

Around a television. Our practice: the screen is the largest dark rectangle on the wall whether you like it or not, so treat it as the anchor piece and build around it, keeping the group's bounding rectangle symmetrical about the screen rather than about the wall. The sourced part is the anchors-first method from an art museum, applied to a thing the museum was not talking about.

Above a mantel. The part that is sourced is a prohibition rather than a composition: conservation publishers advise against hanging work above a working fireplace, and a practitioner guide says paintings leaning on mantels should be secured to the wall and advises against display above a working fireplace. If the fireplace is not used, the composition question is the same as any over-furniture question and the same absence of published figures applies.

Matting to unify a group, and mixing frame finishes: also unsourced. A gallery suggests identical frames for a series by one artist and reclaimed or vintage frames for an eclectic mix, which is one practitioner's method. An art museum's caption describes variety through diverse sizes, frames and painting styles while uniting on genre, which is a caption rather than a rule. Our practice, labelled: one mat color and one outside size across a group does more to unify it than matching frames do, and it has the side benefit that the pieces become interchangeable. That is also the practical argument a conservation institute makes for a different reason, that mats cut to standard sizes allow the use of standard-sized frames.

8. See it See it

• Create your own salon wall, an art museum: the floor-layout-and-photograph method, anchors first, the spacing margin, sight lines, and the history of the hang.
• Techniques for hanging and presenting art, an arts commission with an art museum: the group as one artwork, the 2 to 6 inch salon spacing, and the instruction to decide the rules before making holes.
• Guidelines for accessible exhibition design, a national museum: the heights that are not 57 inches, and the reasoning for them.
• Measure and draw the room, from Learn Space Planning: if you want to draw the whole room rather than one wall, that manual does it properly.

9. Practice Practice

Minimum: one wall measured and one arrangement drawn, with a floor layout photographed. Time: about an hour. Materials: a tape measure, painter's tape, a phone, and the frames themselves.

1. Measure the wall and whatever stands under it. Width, height, the furniture's width and the height of its top. Enter them in the wall plan as a wall and a furniture guide line.
2. Enter the frames. If you filled in the frame width and height columns of Your pictures, the plan can bring each one in at its real size.
3. Try at least two arrangements as options, and look at both. Copy an option rather than overwriting it; comparing two is the whole value of drawing it.
4. Tape out the group's size on the floor in front of the wall. Lay the frames inside it, and photograph from above. This is the museum's method and it catches things a drawing does not.
5. Print the chosen option at scale (Go deeper; optional). Check the printed scale bar with a ruler before you trust it.

10. Your pictures Your pictures

11. Check your work Check your work

Criteria

• One spacing figure, used everywhere in the group.
• One center height for the whole block, chosen deliberately, with the accessibility band considered.
• The group's relationship to the furniture and the wall is something you looked at, not something you obeyed.
• A floor layout photograph exists before any hole was drilled.
• Each frame's hardware was chosen from its own weight, not from the group's.

Worked example

Priya Raman (fictional) has one print, not a group, so most of this chapter does not apply to her. What does: the console table under it is 48 inches wide and 30 high, and her framed print is 26 by 32. She sets the center height at 58 inches, which puts the bottom edge at 42 and gives 12 inches of wall between the console and the frame. The group box tells her the picture is 54 percent of the console's width, which is a fact and not a verdict; the two-thirds rule has no publisher, and she decides from the doorway that it looks right. Her whole use of this chapter is one measurement, one height and one look from across the room, which is the correct amount for one picture.

Common mistakes

• Hanging each frame at its own center height. A group has one center line, which is what makes it read as one object.
• Varying the gap. One figure, kept, is most of what separates arranged from accumulated.
• Treating 57 inches as a rule. It is a convention with four disagreeing publishers, and the one standards-grade source puts the useful band lower.
• Drilling before the floor layout. Ten minutes with painter's tape and a phone replaces an afternoon of filled holes.
• Letting the group's weight be a group question. Each frame's fixing is chosen from that frame's weight.
• Repeating the two-thirds rule. It has no publisher, and the one page that attributes it attributes it with no citation.

What is still unresolved

• What holds each frame to the wall: Hardware by published rating.
• Whether that wall is one the pieces should be on: Where it can hang.
• How the group looks once it is up, which only standing in the room settles.
• Lighting the group: Learn Interior Lighting.

12. Knowledge check and scenario

Checklist

• Wall and furniture measured and entered in the wall plan.
• One spacing figure chosen and used throughout the group.
• One center height for the whole block, checked against the accessibility band.
• A floor layout photographed before any hole was drilled.
• Two arrangements saved as options and compared. (Go deeper; optional)