It’s Been Framed: Looking More Earnestly at the Picture Frame
Gustave Leonhard de Jonge (French, 1829-1893) Widow in Mourning. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
In viewing or buying a painting it is easy to overlook its frame. The right frame with the right painting can make an enormous difference, just as the wrong frame on a painting can distract from what would be considered a great work.
Gustave Courbet (French, 1828-1885) Boskage. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
To my frustration, when paintings are photographed, their frames are almost always omitted. This is despite efforts by the artist to design or pair a painting with a frame to create a complete work of art. Whistler, Seurat, and Alma-Tadema, all went to great effort to design and, sometimes, make their own frames. As a result, their frames can be considered part of the overall work and, consequently, the painting without the frame considered incomplete.
Henry Bouvet (French, 1859-1945) The Artist’s Wife Reading. Oil on canvas. Private collection.
The connoisseurship of frames has become increasingly important, with auctions and collections dedicated specifically to period and rare frames. The art collector Samuel H. Kress (American, 1863-1955) bequeathed a large collection of painting and an even larger collection of frames to the National Gallery in Washington, DC. He often bought frames without a painting, seeing them as works of art in their own right.
Pierre Charles Comte (French, b. 1823) Reception of the Boy King. Oil on panel. Private collection.
In an effort to bring more attention to frames and to learn more about them myself, I would like to dedicated a few posts over the coming weeks to specific kinds of frames.
Elatia Harris
What a great topic!
It’s important to consider, too, that a the experience of seeing a photo of a framed painting is not the same as standing in person before a framed painting — even when the artist has lavished attention on the choice of a frame. Frames which set off a painting beautifully can easily photograph as distracting and busy and heavy. Lighting a painting for photography — with care taken to eliminate hot spots on the surface of the canvas — can involve lighting the frame too brightly, even shifting hot spots to the frame. This is a real problem with a gold leaf frame, since the brightness of the frame, or certain areas of it, can interfere with the way the images in the painting read.
For example, in the painting by Comte shown here, the eye regarding the unframed version has no difficulty selecting the boy king in his black/gold diagonal stripes and the kneeling woman to his right in her high contrast gold, red and black-trimmed costume. In the framed version, the gilt frame — especially the lower right hot spot — exceeds in brightness anything in the painting. Few things are less compelling than a narrative painting that leaves you feeling you don’t know where to look. In real life, the frame might be “just right” for the painting — opulent, with horizontal and vertical lines drawing the eye inward to the focus of the work. To my eye, however, the framed version in the photo detracts from the coherence of the work. This is not deeply psychological, but retinal — and the retina may be faster than the emotions.
Looking forward to more on this topic — thanks!
Aug 25, 2008 @ 10:03 am