Irish Wall Art — How to Choose, Frame and Hang It
A Guide · Irish Wall Art
Irish Wall Art
How to choose it, how to frame it, and where in the house each kind belongs.
Shades of Evening — Mildred Anne Butler, framed in black.
A wall in an Irish house has usually earned its picture. It is the chimney breast that has held the same landscape for thirty years, the hall where the first thing anyone sees is a face, the bedroom wall you look at before you look at anything else. Choosing for it is less about taste than about fit — the right subject, at the right size, in the right frame, for one particular wall.
This guide works through that in order: room, size, style, frame, and how to hang more than one. Every print in the catalogue is open edition and made to order on 250gsm archival matte paper, framed or unframed, so the choice is yours at each step.
By room
The living room carries one large picture better than several small ones. Hang it so the frame is roughly two-thirds the width of the sofa or sideboard beneath it, and let the subject set the temperature of the room — a landscape calms it, a portrait gives it a focus. Mildred Anne Butler, born at Kilmurry in County Kilkenny in 1858, spent most of her working life painting the garden there; her evening light suits a room that is mostly used after dark. The living room selection is narrowed down already.
The hall is a corridor of short looks. It suits a row — three prints at one size — rather than a single statement, and it suits strong graphic images that read in a glance: travel posters, the writers, the Irish word prints. Wall Sets gathers the groups in the catalogue that genuinely hang together, with the reason each one does.
The bedroom wants quiet: soft palettes, water, a single word in Irish over the bed. See the bedroom selection, and for a desk wall, the study. For a fuller room-by-room walk-through, read How to Choose an Irish Art Print for Your Home.
By size
Most works are offered in one of four size ladders, set by the shape of the original:
- Paintings and photographs in a 2:3 shape — 30 × 45, 40 × 60, 60 × 90 and 100 × 150 cm.
- Paintings in a 3:4 shape — 30 × 40, 45 × 60, 60 × 80 and 75 × 100 cm.
- Square designs — 30 × 30, 50 × 50, 70 × 70 and 100 × 100 cm.
- Posters — A4, A3 and A2.
Each product page shows its own sizes and which of them come framed. As a rule of scale: a single print above a sofa reads best at 60 × 80 cm or 60 × 90 cm and up; a hallway row works at 30 × 40 cm or A3; a desk wall rarely needs more than A4. On a 2:3 work such as Shades of Evening, an unframed 30 × 45 cm print is €72 and a framed 60 × 90 cm is €440 — and two framed 30 × 45 cm prints at €165 each cover more wall than the one large frame, for less.
By style
Landscape. Two centuries of Irish weather — Romantic storms, Kilkenny gardens, the Antrim coast, and the western lakes of BÓM, the house artist. Start with Irish landscape and seascape.
Black and white photography. One tonal range, so monochrome hangs together where colour argues. The Ha’penny Bridge opened in 1816 as Wellington Bridge, its iron cast at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire; at night, over the Liffey, it is one of the most recognisable shapes in Dublin. See black and white Irish wall art.
Vintage and travel. Flat colour and clean lettering, made to be read across a room. The Giant’s Causeway — some forty thousand basalt columns on the north Antrim coast — was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. Browse Irish posters and vintage prints.
Celtic. Knotwork and interlace, which suit a hall or a stairwell where pattern matters more than story. Owen Jones included his Celtic plates in The Grammar of Ornament, published in London in 1856. See Celtic designs.
Abstract. Mainie Jellett trained in Paris under André Lhote and then Albert Gleizes, and brought Cubist abstraction home to Dublin in the 1920s. Her work holds a modern room the way a landscape holds a traditional one. See Irish abstract art.
Six to begin with
Framed or unframed
Framed arrives ready to hang: solid FSC-certified timber in black, white or natural wood, shatter-resistant glazing, hanging hardware fitted. It is the simple choice for a gift, or for anyone who would rather not visit a framer. The full range is in framed Irish art prints.
Unframed costs less, reaches the largest sizes — up to 100 × 150 cm on many works — and lets you match a frame you already own or have a framer add a mount. Black suits photography and posters, natural oak suits landscape, white suits a pale room and lets colour come forward. Which frame for which wall is covered in How to Frame Irish Art Prints.
How to hang a gallery wall
- Pick one thread. One artist, one place, one palette, or one frame colour. A gallery wall holds together when something repeats.
- Lay it out on the floor first, or cut paper to each frame size and tape it to the wall for a day.
- Hang to a centre line about 145–150 cm from the floor — the height galleries use — and treat the whole group as one picture.
- Keep the gaps even, roughly 5–8 cm, about the width of a hand. Even spacing matters more than matching sizes.
- Above furniture, leave 20–25 cm between the top of the sofa or sideboard and the bottom of the lowest frame.
Three at one size in a row is the easiest arrangement to get right; six in two rows of three is the next. The groups in Wall Sets are chosen to be hung exactly this way.
Find the one for your wall
Over seven hundred prints — painting, photography, posters and design — framed or unframed, made to order.
Living room · Framed · Landscape · Black and white · Wall sets