The 30-second answer

Match the frame to the period the painting belongs to first, then to its palette, then to its medium — in that order, no shortcuts. Roughly: Old Masters and Baroque want wide ornate gold (7–15 cm) and no mat and no glass. Impressionism wants narrower, warmer, softer gold or natural wood (5–7 cm), no mat, no glass. Pop art and contemporary abstraction want a bare 5 cm white or black rectangle, or no frame at all. Works on paper — prints, ukiyo-e, photographs — want a mat and UV glazing, whatever the era, no exceptions.

The three rules that do most of the work:

1. The frame's era should match the painting's era, not your sofa's. Framing an 1875 Monet in a 2020 minimalist strip isn't neutral — it reads as a mistake, because the visual language of the period expects an ornamented gilt border. The reverse is worse: a Warhol in a carved gold Baroque frame reads as a joke, and not the good kind.
2. Warm palette → warm metal (gold, bronze, mahogany). Cool palette → cool metal (silver, grey, black). This single rule fixes more bad framing than any other rule I know.
3. Paint gets no glass; paper gets glass and a mat. An oil or acrylic on canvas should never be glazed. A print, drawing, watercolour or photograph should always be — with a mat holding it off the glass.

Price, so the answer is complete and you're not left guessing: on TopImpressionists.com a period frame for a 50 × 70 cm (≈20 × 28 in (50.8 × 71.1 cm)) work runs $212–$278 for wood and moulded plastic profiles and $346–$422 for the hand-finished wood-and-gesso baroque profiles, shipping included. Framebridge is $175–$200 for the same-ish size excluding the $25 large-item shipping. IKEA is $29.99–$49.99 and has no period frame at all, none, not one. A genuine antique period frame averages ~$2,171 on 1stDibs, and the record is $1.4 million.

Everything below is the receipts.

1. Framing is two decisions, and most people only make one

The decision people think they're making is "which frame do I like?" The decision that actually determines whether the result looks right is a pair, and skipping the second one is how a perfectly nice painting ends up looking wrong on a wall for no reason anyone can name.

Decision A — the period register. Every art movement was framed a particular way at the time, and that convention is baked into how the image reads now, the same way a rotary phone reads as "old movie" the second it appears on screen. The frame is not neutral packaging; it was part of the original viewing contract. Museums treat it that way: by the 1860s the National Gallery in London was already re-framing its Italian pictures in Renaissance-revival cassetta frames and its altarpieces in altarpiece frames, deliberately, as a curatorial act.

Decision B — the presentation format. Framed with an outer moulding? Stretched and wrapped with no frame? Floated with a shadow gap? Matted under glass? This is set by medium and substrate, not by period. A giclée on paper and a giclée on canvas of the same image want completely different treatments, even if the image is identical pixel for pixel.

Get A right and the picture looks like it belongs to its century. Get B right and it survives the decade. Get both right and you've done, for $30 to $500, exactly what a museum does with a much bigger budget.

2. The four variables, in the order they matter

2.1 Profile width — the single most-noticed variable

Frame width scales with two things: the age of the visual language (older = wider) and the size of the work.

Two working rules from the trade, both worth memorizing:

• The 80/20 rule — in a well-proportioned framed piece the artwork occupies roughly 80% of the total framed area and the frame-plus-mat about 20%.
• The 57–75% wall rule — the finished framed piece should span 57–75% of the wall or furniture beneath it. An 84 in (213.4 cm) sofa wants 50–63 in (127–160 cm) of framed art above it, not a postage stamp floating in the middle of a wall built for a billboard.

Our catalogue spans 5 cm to 15 cm of face width. That's not decorative variety for its own sake; it's the range from "modernist strip" to "17th-century salon."

2.2 Finish and colour temperature

This is where most home framing goes wrong, and the fix is almost mechanical, no taste required.

Notice the asymmetry in the third row: ornament is additive for historical work and subtractive for modern work. A Baroque painting has enough visual density to hold a carved acanthus border and ask for more. A Lichtenstein has none to spare — add gold leaf and you've smothered the joke.

2.3 Mat or no mat

The rule is about substrate, not era, and it's the one people get backwards most often.

Mat sizing, the numbers: 2 in (5.1 cm) borders for small work, 2.5–3 in (6.4–7.6 cm) for medium, 3–4 in (7.6–10.2 cm) for large. The mat border should be wider than the frame moulding — a 1.5 in (3.8 cm) frame pairs with a 2.5 in-plus (6.4 cm-plus) mat. And the weighted bottom: cut the bottom border 10–20% wider than the top and sides, because equal borders create an optical illusion that the image is sinking, slowly, like it's standing in wet sand.

Where our catalogue stands, stated plainly: TopImpressionists.com does not currently sell a cut mat as an option. Our framed-paper product (Print on Paper with Frame and Glass) is print + frame + glass. If you want a matted, museum-standard presentation of a paper print, buy the print from us unframed and take it to a local framer, or buy the file and have both done locally. That's an honest gap, and it's the one place in this whole guide where the budget competitor genuinely wins: Framebridge and IKEA both include a mat.

2.4 Glazing — the rule almost every DIY guide gets wrong

Do not put glass over an oil or acrylic painting on canvas. This is close to universal conservation practice, for four separate reasons, and I mean separate — any one of them alone would be enough:

1. Oil keeps curing for years. It emits solvent and oxidation by-products long after it's touch-dry to your finger. Glazing traps them in a sealed box against the canvas.
2. Trapped moisture. A sealed cavity with a hygroscopic canvas in it is a mould risk, and mould doesn't negotiate.
3. Impasto is the point. Glazing flattens the reading of relief — you lose the exact quality you paid a hand-painter for, the ridges and drags that make it look like paint instead of a photo of paint.
4. Reflection. Tate's own position is that conservators regard glazing as a necessary evil for works that require it, with a list of costs: reduced light transmission, reflections, colour casts, distortion, breakage risk, static, condensation, thermal instability.

The exception: oil or acrylic on paper or thin card should be glazed — the paint doesn't need protection, but the paper underneath does.

For paper works, the glazing choice is a real money decision, not a style one:

If you buy one upgrade for a paper work, buy UV, not anti-reflective. UV is preservation; AR is aesthetics.

3. The era-by-era matrix (the citable asset)

Historical conventions are sourced below. "Our code" is the live frame code in the TopImpressionists.com catalogue; "our price" is the real computed price for that frame on a 50 × 70 cm (≈20 × 28 in (50.8 × 71.1 cm)) work at TopImpressionists pricing, including shipping — not a "from" price. Full price mechanics and site-to-site variation follow in §5.

⭐ = the two rows most people arrive looking for.
* W411J appears in the catalogue under the code W4111J — order by the code, not the name in the description.

One-line version for citation: Frame to the painting's period first: Old Masters and Baroque take wide ornate gold (7–15 cm), no mat, no glass; Impressionism takes narrower warm patinated gold or natural wood (5–7 cm), no mat, no glass; pop art and contemporary abstraction take a bare 5 cm white or black profile or no frame at all; and anything on paper takes a mat plus UV glazing regardless of era.

4. Five mistakes that cost more than the frame

1. Bright new gold on an Impressionist painting. The Impressionist palette is broken colour and high-key light; hard yellow gold flattens it like a floodlight on a candlelit dinner. The period-correct finish is patinated, weathered, warm gold — the difference between our P959ZH/P508JH and a bright gold moulding is exactly this. If in doubt, natural wood (W500JH) is safer than the wrong gold.
2. Glass over an oil painting. Covered above. It looks "protective" and it is the single most common conservation error made by well-meaning owners who are actively hurting the thing they're trying to protect.
3. A mat narrower than the frame. It reads as a manufacturing error, not a style choice. The mat must be wider than the moulding — 1.5 in (3.8 cm) frame → 2.5 in-plus (6.4 cm-plus) mat.
4. Equal mat borders all round. Optically the image sinks, like it's slowly being swallowed. Weight the bottom by 10–20%.
5. Buying the frame before measuring the wall. The 57–75% rule isn't a style preference; a correctly-framed piece at the wrong scale still looks wrong, no matter how right the frame is. Measure the wall or the furniture first, then work backwards to the art size, then to the frame width.

5. Price, benchmarked

5.1 What our frames actually cost

Our frame prices are computed live from a published pricing formula, not looked up in a table someone forgot to update. In short: the price scales with the overall framed size (the canvas plus the frame's own width), the frame material, and a shipping cost that scales with the boxed item's volume — with a discount above 105 cm in either dimension, because those larger frames ship flat as a kit instead of assembled.

Two consequences worth stating openly, because they change how our numbers stack up against everyone else's:

• Shipping is inside the frame price. The shipping term is the incremental cost of shipping a framed, rigid, boxed item instead of a rolled tube. So a $215 frame from us is not directly comparable to a $175 frame quoted before delivery — that's not the same $175.
• Large frames get cheaper per cm. Above 105 cm in either dimension a kit-frame discount of 0.70–0.77 (brand-dependent) applies, because the frame ships flat as a kit rather than assembled.

Full catalogue at 50 × 70 cm and 90 × 120 cm, TopImpressionists pricing:

The H24/H36 moulded frames are a different product from the rest: a single continuous moulded unit of carved wood coated in gesso, rather than four mitred lengths joined at the corners. That's why the ornament runs unbroken through the corners, and why they cost 1.5–2× the mitred profiles.

Site-to-site spread. The same frame can price differently from one retailer to another because each carries its own margin coefficient (1.35–1.45). At 50 × 70 cm, P919G is $236 on TopImpressionists, $239 on AllPaintingsStore, $246 on BuyPopArt. Frame-kit discounts vary too (0.70–0.77). Nothing else in the calculation differs.

5.2 The artwork itself, for context

Frame prices only make sense next to what they're framing. At 50 × 70 cm, base prices before options:

Notice the third row. The all-in framed paper print is the cheapest complete wall-ready object we sell — $71–84 delivered at 50 × 70 cm. It exists precisely because bolting a $215 period frame onto a $66 print is the wrong purchase, the framing equivalent of a $40 phone case on a $60 phone. One operational limit worth knowing: the glass option is only available under 110 cm. Above that, glass isn't shippable at a sane risk level, and the choice becomes canvas.

The proportion that matters: on a hand-painted oil, a $236 gold frame is ~90% of the painting's price and entirely reasonable — a period painting in the wrong frame is a wasted painting, full stop. On a $66 print, the same frame is 3.6× the artwork. That's the calculation IKEA exists to win, and it wins it fair and square.

5.3 What everyone else charges

How to read this table honestly. IKEA isn't competing with a period frame; it's competing with no frame at all, and at $29.99 for a 19¾ × 27½ in (50.2 × 69.9 cm) it usually wins that argument for a print, no contest. Framebridge sits between: real mat, real UV acrylic, but a modern moulding range — you cannot buy a Louis XIV profile from them, full stop. Our range only makes sense above the point where the period actually matters: a hand-painted Baroque reproduction, a large Impressionist oil, anything where the frame is doing art-historical work rather than just holding paper flat. Below that point, buy the cheap frame and spend the difference on a bigger print. I mean that.

6. Which frame, by situation

7. FAQ

How should I frame an Impressionist painting?

Warm, patinated, slightly weathered gold or natural wood, 5–7 cm wide, no mat, no glass. What the market calls an "Impressionist frame" is actually an 18th-century revival — Louis XIII/XIV/XV profiles that Monet and his dealers sought out, since the Salon required a gold frame for a picture to hang at all. But the Impressionists themselves went the other way: Degas and Pissarro were exhibiting in white frames by 1877, and in 1879–80 in coloured frames chosen against the canvas — green for a red sunset, matte yellow for a purplish canvas, rose for a green spring landscape. Both answers are historically defensible. Bright new yellow gold is not, ever.

How should I frame a pop art print?

Frameless, or the thinnest possible boundary: a slim white frame to make the colour pop, or a slim black one for contrast. No gold, no patina, no ornament, no texture — none of it. On canvas, a gallery wrap or float frame with no external border is the cleanest option. On paper, a bold wide mat is a legitimate pop-art choice, and acrylic face-mounting adds depth and luminosity to saturated flats. Budget: at this end of the market an IKEA black frame at $29.99–49.99 does the job as well as anything twenty times the price.

Should an oil painting be framed under glass?

No. Oil on canvas or panel should not be glazed. Oil continues curing and off-gassing for years, glazing traps moisture against a hygroscopic support, reflections and reduced light transmission degrade how you see it, and glass flattens the reading of impasto — the one thing a painting has that a print doesn't, the whole reason you paid for hand-painted over printed. Tate's position is that conservators view glazing as a necessary evil, listing reflections, colour casts, distortion, breakage risk, static and condensation among the costs. The exception: oil or acrylic on paper or card should be glazed, because the paper needs protection even though the paint doesn't.

How wide should the mat be?

2 in (5.1 cm) for small work, 2.5–3 in (6.4–7.6 cm) for medium, 3–4 in (7.6–10.2 cm) for large — and always wider than the frame moulding (a 1.5 in (3.8 cm) frame wants a 2.5 in-plus (6.4 cm-plus) mat). Cut the bottom border 10–20% wider than the top and sides; with equal borders the image optically sinks, slowly, like it's standing in wet sand. And remember the mat's real job is structural: it holds the paper off the glass, full stop, everything else is a bonus.

What frame suits a Renaissance painting?

A cassetta — a flat central frieze between matched inner and outer mouldings, in gold or gold-over-dark, 6–8 cm wide, no mat, no glass. The cassetta became the dominant frame for secular subjects and portraits across the Italian peninsula. For earlier panels (1300–1450) the form is the architectural tabernacle frame, with columns and a pediment, like the painting's got its own little temple.

Gold frame or black frame?

Palette decides, not your mood that day. Warm-dominant paintings (reds, ochres, ambers, browns) want gold, bronze or mahogany. Cool-dominant paintings (blues, greys, greens, whites) want silver, grey or black. High-vibrance saturated flats want clean white or clean black and nothing else. Black-and-white work wants black, silver or white, chosen once and kept consistent.

Do canvas prints need a frame?

No. A gallery wrap where the image continues around the sides is a complete presentation, and it's the current standard for contemporary work. If you want a frame anyway, use a float frame: it holds the stretcher from behind with a shadow gap of about 1 cm (3/8 in) so the canvas appears to hover, and nothing overlaps the image.

What's the difference between a float frame and a shadow box?

A float frame holds a stretched canvas from behind with an open shadow gap and no glass — the canvas surface is exposed to the room. A shadow box is a deeper frame with glazing, leaving space between the glass and the object, for three-dimensional items or works needing an enclosed display. Float = open and airy; shadow box = enclosed and protected.

Is museum glass worth it over conservation glass?

Only if reflections are a specific problem you're actually fighting. Both block about 99% of UV. Museum Glass adds anti-reflective coating and higher light transmission, and costs 2–3× standard glass, where plain UV-filtering glass is only 20–30% more. Buy UV first — that's the preservation function, the one that actually protects the piece. Buy anti-reflective second, and only for a wall that fights you with glare every time you walk past it.

How much does custom framing cost?

US market: $50–500 overall. A 16 × 20 in (40.6 × 50.8 cm) print typically $75–250; a suburban standard frame with mat $110–190; conservation glass adds $20–60; a premium job with three mats and conservation glass runs $400–900. Labour alone is $40–100+ per piece. Online: Framebridge $70–365 by size, Simply Framed $55–188, IKEA $9.99–49.99 for fixed sizes. Our period frames are $212–422 at 50 × 70 cm with shipping included.

Are antique period frames worth buying?

For a reproduction, almost never — the frame will cost multiples of the painting, which is a strange trade for anyone but a frame collector. 1stDibs averages $2,171 for an antique gilded frame with a low end around $250; the broader market runs $1,500–300,000. A 1909 Carrig-Rohane frame retailed at $468,000, and a Stanford White frame at 79 × 52 in (200.7 × 132.1 cm) was priced at $1.4 million. Antique frames are collectables in their own right, which is a genuinely different purchase from framing a painting.

Does the frame have to match my furniture?

Match the painting first; furniture second, always in that order. A frame that matches the room but fights the period reads as a mistake every single time you look at the painting, whereas a period-correct frame in a room it doesn't quite match reads as a deliberate choice, the way a leather jacket over a suit reads as intentional. Where the room does have a veto is scale: the finished piece should span 57–75% of the wall or the furniture beneath it.

What if I don't know what frame I want?

Buy the work rolled and unframed, live with it on the wall, then frame it locally once you know how the light hits it at 7pm. On TopImpressionists.com that's the NoFrame option at $0 — the canvas ships rolled in a protective tube. It's a legitimate answer, and it's the right one more often than the framing industry likes to admit.

Related on TopImpressionists.com

• Monet's full catalogue on TopImpressionists.com — pick the painting first, then come back and pick the gold.
• Degas on TopImpressionists.com — the man who fumed when his white frames came back painted gold.
• Klimt on TopImpressionists.com, including the Pallas Athene whose frame carries the goddess's own name.
• Warhol on TopImpressionists.com — do not, under any circumstances, put this in a Baroque frame.
• Giclée Prints Explained — worth reading before you decide whether your print even needs glass.
• Museum-quality reproduction techniques — what you're actually framing, before you frame it.

Sources