Renoir Wall Art by Room: Which Painting Goes Where
Renoir’s catalogue is not one mood. Putting the wrong group in the wrong room is the most common mistake, and it has nothing to do with the quality of the painting.
The dance halls and the boating parties
Bal du Moulin de la Galette, Luncheon of the Boating Party, Dance at Bougival. These are crowded, warm, full of movement and conversation. They belong where people gather and talk: a dining room, a kitchen you eat in, a wide living room wall. They do not belong in a bedroom or a study, because they are noisy pictures and they keep talking after you have stopped looking.
They also need room. See the sizing guide; below roughly 30 inches on the long side the faces in a crowd scene stop resolving.
The theatre boxes and the single figures
La Loge, Girls at the Piano, Two Sisters, the portraits. One or two figures, close to the picture plane, looking out or absorbed. These are the pieces that reward a quiet wall and close viewing: a hallway you walk past daily, the wall beside a bed, a landing. Hang the principal face at eye level; about 145 to 150 cm to the centre of the face, not the centre of the canvas.
The bathers and the late nudes
Warm, ample, pearly. They are also frankly nude, which is a decision about the room rather than about the painting. They suit a bedroom, a dressing room or a private study; most people do not want them facing the front door. In a room with cool north light they glow. In a south-facing room already painted terracotta they can tip into heaviness.
The flowers and the still lifes
The most forgiving group in the whole catalogue. They work at small sizes, they suit narrow walls, kitchens, bathrooms and stairwells, and they carry Renoir’s colour without any of the social noise. If you want one Renoir in a room that already has a lot going on, buy a flower piece.
The southern landscapes
Cagnes, the olive trees, the Mediterranean coast. Cooler and airier than the Paris pictures, and the only part of the catalogue that behaves like a conventional landscape: it can hang anywhere, at any height, and be admired from across the room.
Wall colour and light
Renoir’s palette is overwhelmingly warm; rose, coral, gold, warm greens. Two practical consequences. On a warm wall (cream, sand, terracotta) the painting merges with the wall and loses its glow; a cooler wall, or a white one, gives it back. And in a north-facing room, where the daylight is blue, a Renoir does what almost nothing else does: it warms the room. That is the single best argument for putting one in a room you had written off as cold.