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Large Renoir Wall Art: A Practical Sizing Guide

With Renoir, size is not a matter of taste. It is a matter of whether the faces work.

The rule that actually matters

A face has to be big enough to read as a face from where you stand. In a crowd scene like Bal du Moulin de la Galette there are more than a dozen heads across the canvas; each one occupies a small fraction of the width. Reproduce that canvas at 16 inches wide and the heads are the size of a fingernail; they become dabs, and the painting turns into pleasant wallpaper.

As a working guide, for the crowd scenes: 30 inches on the long side is the floor, 39 inches is comfortable, and 59 inches is where the picture finally behaves the way it does in the museum. For a single-figure piece; La Loge, a portrait, Girls at the Piano; you can go much smaller: 20 to 24 inches is entirely satisfying, because there is only one face and it is already large within the frame.

Viewing distance

Stand where you will normally stand; not where you stand when hanging it. A useful check: the long side of the picture should be roughly a third to a half of your viewing distance. Four metres back, that is a canvas of 130 to 200 cm. Two metres back, 65 to 100 cm.

Wall width

A single picture should occupy somewhere between half and two-thirds of the wall or furniture it hangs above. Above a sofa, measure the sofa, not the wall. Anything narrower than half looks marooned, and no frame rescues it.

Where large stops being a good idea

Two limits. The first is the source: enlargement cannot invent detail that the museum photograph does not contain, and a canvas printed far beyond its source goes soft; we cap the sizes we offer for exactly this reason, which is why the largest option is not the same for every painting. The second is the room: a picture that leaves less than about 15 cm of wall on either side reads as cramped however good it is.

Rolled or stretched at large sizes

Above roughly 40 inches, a stretched canvas becomes an awkward object to carry up a staircase and an expensive one to ship. Rolled costs less to send and travels safely, but you will need a framer at the other end. If you already have a framer you trust, rolled is the sensible choice at large sizes. If you do not, order it stretched and be done.