Rooms have a time of day. A breakfast corner is a morning room no matter what the clock says, a dining room only really exists after seven and a bedroom spends it’s whole life at night. Most people decorate as if this were not true, they buy art to match the sofa, which is backwards, because the sofa will be gone in eight years and a good picture will outlive the house. The eight paintings gathered here sort themselves by hour once you look at them that way and hanging each one at it’s own hour is most of the trick.
The Two Mackintoshes Split The Day Between Them
Charles Rennie Mackintosh painted flowers when the architecture commissions dried up and the two here want completely different rooms even though they came from the same hand a few years apart.
Peonies Goes In The Kitchen Or The Breakfast Nook
This is a morning picture. Kitchen, breakfast nook, anywhere coffee happens. The background pattern comes straight out of the textile designs Mackintosh was selling in London at the time, the fabric work bleeding into the painting and that wave rhythm does at eight in the morning what a radio does, it gives the room a pulse. Hang it where the first daylight lands.
Petunias Goes On The Dining Room Wall
This is the dinner one. Dark grounds are what candlelight and evening lamps were made for, the blooms float forward while the background disappears into the actual darkness of the room. Sideboard height and it will look better at night than it ever does at noon. A dark painting in a bright room just looks like a hole in the wall, which is a framing shop truth buyers rarely get warned about.
The Sociable Pictures Go Where Guests Sit
The Botanists Goes In The Living Room, Facing The Seating
Southall painted this in egg tempera because he belonged to the Birmingham crowd that revived the medieval technique on principle and what he made is a conversation painting. There is a small story happening in it, the red coat, the crawling search through the grass, the sailboats behind and pictures with stories in them belong in living rooms, because that is the room where people have twenty minutes to sit opposite a wall and start noticing things. Above the sofa facing the seating, not behind it where only visitors see it and you never do.
The Tiffany Goes On The Darkest Wall In The House
Hibiscus and Parrots is not a painting at all, it is a leaded glass window from around 1910 and even as a framed print it keeps behaving like glass, it reads as somewhere the wall opens onto. That makes it the answer for the windowless hallway, the stair landing, the dead wall at the end of a corridor. Every home has one wall that faces nothing and this piece is a window that faces somewhere better.
The Depero Goes In The Home Office
The red geometric figure with the moustache is Fortunato Depero, Italian Futurist and the inscription on the work carries his address at 464 West 23rd Street from the stretch at the end of the twenties when he moved to New York and ran a one man studio out of a hotel, designing magazine covers for Vanity Fair and anyone else who would pay. The man in the collage is holding a pencil the size of a rowing oar, which tells you exactly where this belongs, the home office, the desk wall, the room where things get made and it’s flat loud reds and yellows carry the kind of caffeinated energy that would be exhausting over a bed but is exactly right over a monitor at 2pm on a deadline. It is also the one piece here a child would pick first, so a playroom takes it just as well.
The Evening Pair, A Woodcut And The Dunes
August In Big Sur Goes In The Study Or Reading Corner
This is the newest thing on the list, 1982 and the one with a collector’s story attached. It is a reduction woodcut, meaning the whole edition of 130 came off a single block that Mortensen carved away color by color, up to 64 of them, so by the last pass the block was destroyed and the edition can never be printed again. Signed copies still trade around $600, which for an original by the best known reduction woodcut artist in America is honestly modest money. The image itself is dusk on a creek, deep blue shadow with one bank of trees going gold and it wants a quiet wall, a study, a reading corner, the bedroom wall you face from a chair rather than the bed.
Dune Landscape Goes In The Entryway Or Above A Low Dresser
This is 1911 Mondrian, painted in the Zeeland dunes in violets and slate blues in the last year or two before Paris turned him into the grid painter everyone knows and there is something odd and good about hanging a Mondrian nobody recognizes as a Mondrian. Long horizontal format, almost nothing happening, pure horizon. That calm reads best in an entryway or above a low bedroom dresser, wide walls that need width back.
The Sohlberg Goes In The Bedroom And Nowhere Else
A Norwegian field of daisies under a pale midnight sun, painted in 1905, the most hushed image of the eight and the only one I would call a night picture outright. It should be the last thing seen before the lamp goes off. Bedrooms only, opposite the bed.