Framing is sold as a matter of taste, which is convenient for the people selling frames, because taste can't be wrong and can always be upgraded.
Most of it isn't taste. Most of it is four rules, and two of them aren't negotiable.
Match the age of the moulding to the age of the picture; match the metal to the temperature of the paint; never put glass over paint; never use bright new gold. Those four fix the overwhelming majority of bad framing, and the last two are not preferences.
The Received Wisdom: A Better Frame Is A More Expensive Frame
Walk into a framing shop with a painting and you will be walked up a price ladder, and the ladder is real — better mouldings do cost more.
But the commonest framing disasters are not cheapness. They're mismatch: an ornate gilt frame on a flat block of colour, a slim black edge on a Baroque altarpiece, a canvas sealed behind glass by somebody trying to protect it.
Every one of those can be, and frequently is, the expensive option.
Decode The Eras, In Order
| Period | Frame | What it looks like | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1300–1450 | Tabernacle | Architecture — columns either side, pediment on top. The widest, most sculptural profile there is | A Madonna stepping out of a doorway. Somebody built this as a building before they built it as a frame |
| 1450–1600 | Cassetta | Flat frieze between matched inner and outer mouldings. Gold, or gold over a dark ground. Wider than you'd guess | The Italian portrait standard. Holds a face at a formal distance without arguing with it |
| 1600–1680 | Dutch ebonised ripple | Black, wave-moulded pine standing in for ebony nobody could afford | Rembrandt's paint looks colder and better for it. Restraint as a flex |
| 1610–1774 | Louis XIII to XV | Running carved leaf, then asserted corners, then gesso pierced clean through | Escalating French excess. Say what you like — it's held for three hundred years and most of what replaced it hasn't |
| 19th century | Weathered gold | Soft patina worked into the high points, red bole showing at worn edges, 6–9 cm | The right answer for Impressionism. Reads as handled rather than manufactured |
| 1877 onward | Plain white, fluted | No gilt at all | Degas's own design, made because the Salon's gold requirement had started to feel like a costume |
| 1910–1945 | Modernist flat | Flat white, flat black or plain wood, 4–5 cm | Ornament removed. The frame becomes a boundary line rather than an event |
| 1945–1970 | Welded aluminium strip | No visible corner joint | Commissioned by a museum in 1956 for travelling shows. A joint is a thing to notice, and noticing was what those painters didn't want any more |
| 1955–1975 | Frameless, or the thinnest possible edge | Clean white to make saturated colour read; clean black for contrast | Pop. Ornament here steals presence rather than adding it |
| 1965 onward | Float mount | Held from behind, ~1 cm shadow gap, nothing overlapping the image | The default for canvas and panel. Tells you the object is discrete without bordering it |
The Key: The Gold Was A Regulation, Not A Taste
Here's the fact the framing trade never mentions, and it reframes every recommendation above.
The Paris Salon required gold. Not preferred — required. No picture hung without one.
So when dealers pushed gilt onto Monet and Renoir, they weren't expressing a view about the paint. They were complying with a building's dress code.
Degas answered by exhibiting from 1877 in plain white frames of his own design, and by 1879 he and Pissarro were tinting frames to argue with the canvas — green against a red sunset, yellow against violet.
He sent paintings to America in those white frames. They came back regilded, without his permission, because somebody decided a painting couldn't be taken seriously in white.
He was furious. History has taken his side. The trade has not caught up.
The Two Rules That Aren't Negotiable
Never put glass over paint.
Oil doesn't dry, it cures — reacting with oxygen for months after it feels hard, and slowly for years after that. Seal that behind glass in a closed rebate and you've built a small humid box around a surface that needs air. Eventually you get a milky bloom at the centre, caused by exactly the thing meant to protect it.
Glazing also flattens impasto into reflection, deleting the one property a painting has that a print doesn't.
Works on paper both need and deserve glass, held a hair off the surface by the mat's bevel. Canvas does not.
Never bright new gold.
On a soft palette it reads as a wig on a portrait: technically hair, correctly positioned, entirely wrong. The whole point of a weathered finish is that it looks like a hundred years of dust and thumbs rather than a hundred hours of one gilder's Tuesday.
Mats, Sizes And The Bit Everyone Gets Wrong
- Mat wider than the moulding. A frame under two inches (5.1 cm) wants a mat of two and a half inches (6.4 cm) or more. Two inches (5.1 cm) for small work, two and a half to three inches (6.4 to 7.6 cm) for medium, three to four inches (7.6 to 10.2 cm) for large.
- Bottom margin 10–20% heavier than the other three sides. Equal borders make the image look like it's sliding out of the frame — an illusion most people never consciously notice and always feel.
- Don't mat a canvas. Mats are for paper. A canvas either gets a frame that meets its edge, a float mount, or nothing.
- Picture centre at about 145 cm from the floor, not at your own eye level, because you're probably taller than average.
- Two-thirds to three-quarters the width of the sofa. Buying too small is the commonest error in the whole subject.
What It Costs
| Route | Typical cost | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Flat-pack fixed-size frame | Under $50 | Standard-size paper prints. Mat and glazing included — honest value |
| Float mount for canvas | $100–$150 | Modern and pop on canvas. The correct default |
| Slim flat moulding | $120–$230 | Twentieth-century work of any kind |
| Period moulding computed to size | Low hundreds, mid-size | Reproductions and oils wanting a period profile |
| Independent custom framer | $75–$250, plus $20–$60 conservation glass | Odd sizes, valuable work, and a human who'll talk you out of glazing an oil |
| Antique period frame | Averages over $2,000 | A separate hobby. The auction record is past a million |
Which Eras You're Most Likely Framing
From the public visitor statistics: the Renaissance takes about 29% of what people look at, the nineteenth century 27%, the modern period 24% — and everything after 1970 about 1.7%.
So four of the ten rows in the era table above cover roughly eighty per cent of what will ever cross your hallway, and the overwhelming majority of it is oil on canvas from before 1970 — painted in an age whose framing conventions assumed no glass whatsoever.
The glazing habit is imported from photography, which is a century and a half younger than most of what you're hanging.
Three Questions Worth Asking
What frame suits which era?
Match the age of the moulding to the age of the picture and the metal to the temperature of the paint. Cassetta for Renaissance panels, black ebonised ripple for Dutch Golden Age, carved gilt for Baroque, weathered gold or Degas's white for Impressionism, a slim flat edge or nothing for modern and pop.
Should I put glass over it?
Only over paper. Never over paint. Oil cures for months after it feels dry and a sealed cavity traps it; glazing also flattens impasto into reflection.
Gold or silver?
Ask the painting. Warm palette wants gold, bronze, mahogany. Cool palette wants silver or a matte cool wood. Small rule, corrects more bad framing than any amount of taste.
The Verdict
Four rules. Age to age, metal to temperature, no glass on paint, no bright gold.
And if a framer tells you white is what people choose when they can't afford gilt — tell them Degas got there in 1877, on purpose, and somebody regilded his frames without asking, and he never forgave them.
Sources
- Frame-history surveys on tabernacle, cassetta, Dutch ebonised ripple, Louis XIII–XV, nineteenth-century revival gilding, modernist and float profiles.
- Museum of Modern Art — Robert Kulicke's welded aluminium strip frame, commissioned 1956.
- Degas's white and tinted frames, 1877–1879, and the unauthorised regilding of works sent abroad.
- Conservation guidance on oil curing and the risks of sealed glazing cavities.
- Published framing-trade prices for fixed-size, float-mount, custom and period framing; auction records for antique frames.
- Public visitor statistics — period shares.
Verified 8 August 2026. Framing prices are typical market ranges as of 11 August 2026 and vary sharply by size, city and moulding. Visitor figures read 11 August 2026 and move daily.
