A whole new feeling for the room.
It was in a countryside farmhouse, when John and I were just married, that I discovered the magic of art in sets. How had no one told me? Two images together could do something quite different from one. Four could turn a forgotten wall into a place I wanted to linger. The relationship between the pieces gave me somewhere to begin, and then my imagination went galloping off with the rest.
It felt as though I had been shown a secret handshake. Suddenly I wanted them everywhere.
Two above the bed. Four marching down a hallway that previously had all the personality of a loading dock. Six in the dining room, holding their own beside the long table, old cupboards and whatever else I had hauled home that month.
Sets gave all my wonkiness a little rhythm. A place for the eye to rest before it wandered off again.
If you are choosing art for your home and wondering what belongs together, or what might make sense on that wall you keep walking past, an art set can be a delicious place to start. The pieces already have a relationship. You get to enjoy that relationship, then decide how it lives among your things.
And there is quite a lot of freedom in that. More than the word set might suggest.
The pleasure of finding pieces that already belong together
Sometimes you find one piece of art you adore and immediately begin looking for its companion. Something with enough in common to feel connected, enough difference to keep you interested. You open another page. Then another. Eventually you have seventeen possibilities and have forgotten which one made you giddy in the first place.
A thoughtfully considered set takes that particular search off your hands.
You can look at the works together from the beginning. Notice how your eye moves between them. Whether one makes you want to return to the other. Whether the whole grouping gives you a feeling you would enjoy bringing home.
The connection might come through the subject, the color, the way the images are composed, or a mood that travels from one work to the next. They can belong to the same little world while giving you different things to discover inside it.
With a pair such as Keepers of the Small Hours, you can begin by considering two works together rather than asking one image to explain an entire wall.
That is part of the appeal for me. One piece catches you; its companion keeps you looking. You begin noticing the space between them, too. The arrangement becomes part of the pleasure.
You are still choosing with your own eye. You have simply been given something more complete to fall for.
When the wall wants more than one image
There are walls that make choosing art feel unnecessarily dramatic. A long stretch above a table. A broad expanse in the living room. Somewhere you have imagined one enormous piece, although every image you actually love seems to be smaller.
A set offers another way into that space.
Four works arranged in a square can have a substantial presence while allowing each image to remain intimate. A row can travel along a wider wall. A pair hung vertically can make use of a narrower stretch that has been waiting patiently for someone to notice it.
You can choose the individual works for the pleasure of looking closely and let the grouping provide the larger shape.
This is especially lovely when you enjoy detail. From across the room, you see the arrangement. As you come nearer, there is more to enter. Your attention moves from the whole wall to one image, then another. A set gives you several places to land.
Imagine The Birds of Bramblewick as a starting point for a wall you want to spend time with. Before deciding where each work goes, look at the set together and notice what makes you want another glance.
The wall does not need to be filled to its edges. Often, the air around a grouping is part of what lets you enjoy it. But if you have been waiting for one giant artwork to arrive and settle everything, you might find that several smaller works are much closer to the feeling you wanted.
A beginning for the gallery wall you keep imagining
A gallery wall can be wonderfully personal. It can also spend an impressive amount of time existing only in your head.
You have the antique piece. The photograph. Something small you bought on a trip. You like all of them, but bringing them together feels like a separate undertaking, and the undertaking keeps getting postponed.
A set gives you a beginning you can actually see.
Hang it on its own and enjoy it that way. Or let it become the center of a wall that gathers other things over time. The relationship within the set gives your eye something to recognize while the surrounding pieces bring their own histories.
I love building around sets with antique art, plates, small mirrors, old letters, postcards and odd little things I have framed because they mattered to me. There is such pleasure in seeing something you chose years ago find new company.
A postcard might be too slight to carry a wall by itself. Beside a group of art, its smallness becomes part of the charm. You come closer to read it. A little mirror catches a glimpse of the room. An old piece of art introduces another time entirely.
The set can be the heartbeat. Everything else can dance around it.
And you do not have to know every future addition before hanging the first works. That would rather spoil the treasure hunt. Leave yourself somewhere to put the thing you haven’t found yet.
A little rhythm for a room full of different loves
Some of us have gathered things with great enthusiasm and very little interest in making them resemble one another.
An old cupboard. A table from another chapter of life. Something inherited. Something hauled home because leaving it behind was simply out of the question.
I understand this approach very well.
A set can bring a repeated shape or a steady rhythm into that mix. The frames give the eye a pattern to follow. The works acknowledge one another. Around them, the rest of the room can continue being wonderfully itself.
You don’t have to replace the things you love to make the art feel at home.
This is one reason sets can be so satisfying in a collected room. They offer a little order without requiring a general evacuation of everything interesting. The room still has its odd corners and accumulated affections. There is just somewhere for your eye to gather itself.
A title such as A Curious Arrangement feels rather at home in this conversation. Curiosity is a very good starting point when you are bringing art into a room already full of things you chose for reasons of your own.
You might find that a more precise arrangement lets you enjoy the room’s variety even more. Or you might prefer the set tucked into a crowded wall, its relationship still visible among everything else. Both can be lovely. The amount of company you give it is yours to decide.
The spaces between rooms deserve something, too
We tend to give considerable thought to the places where we sit. The stretches we pass through can get whatever attention remains.
Yet a hallway is somewhere you might walk a dozen times a day. A landing meets you on the way upstairs. The little wall between two doorways keeps appearing in the corner of your eye.
A set can make those passages worth looking at.
A row of works gives you something to follow as you move. A compact grouping can give a short stretch of wall its own feeling. You might discover that the place you once hurried through becomes somewhere you pause, even briefly, because one of the images catches you again.
That is quite a lot to ask from a hallway, and quite a lovely thing to receive.
Look at those spaces from the direction you usually approach them. You may see the art from one end of the passage before you ever stand directly in front of it. That view can help you decide whether you like the pieces in a row, in a grid, or gathered more closely.
The aim is to enjoy seeing them in the course of your actual life. You shouldn’t need to move a basket, turn sideways and adopt a special viewing posture every time you want a glimpse.
Above the bed, beside the bed, around the dining table
A pair gives you options that one larger work cannot.
You might hang the pieces together above the bed. Or place one above each nightstand, allowing the relationship to stretch across the room. The images remain connected while occupying separate spaces.
That can be especially useful when the area above the headboard is interrupted, or when you simply prefer the feeling of art beside you rather than directly overhead.
In a dining room, a group can extend along the length of the table or gather above a cupboard. There is room for the art to have its own presence among the useful, substantial things below it.
And then there is the particular delight of choosing art you want people to notice over a meal. Something that rewards a second look while the conversation wanders. Waiting on Dessert is a wonderfully tempting place to begin browsing for that sort of company.
You can also enjoy a set in a room with very little else on the walls. It doesn’t need an elaborate supporting arrangement. Sometimes the works together are plenty, and adding more would dilute the very thing you loved.
I would leave room for that possibility, too. Enthusiasm and restraint can take turns.
Choosing the arrangement is part of choosing the feeling
The same set can feel different depending on how you hang it.
A close grouping encourages you to read the pieces together. More space between them gives each work a little independence. A grid makes the relationship immediately visible. A line invites your eye to travel.
You can try those possibilities before committing. Lay the works out together, or use paper cut to their finished framed dimensions to see the overall shape on the wall. If you are considering a framed set, remember that the frame contributes to the footprint of each piece.
That small bit of looking is enough to answer many of the practical questions. How much wall will the whole grouping occupy? Will the outer works sit where you can enjoy them? Does the arrangement feel too stretched, or pleasantly open?
Then step back to where you usually live in the room.
There is no need to spend the afternoon negotiating a fraction of an inch if the whole arrangement already pleases you. The spacing matters because you see it, not because someone has issued a correct answer.
For a gentler starting point, you might spend a little time with A Quiet Sort of Splendor. Let your response to the works come first. The arrangement can follow the feeling that drew you there.
A set can stay with you while the room changes
One of the most appealing things about art in sets is that the relationship travels.
A grouping that lives in a dining room now might find another home later. A horizontal arrangement can become a grid. A pair can move from one wall to two nearby spaces. You can keep enjoying the works while changing the way they meet you.
You do not have to purchase the whole future room along with the art.
That flexibility matters whether you move often or simply enjoy rearranging what you already own. The art can find new neighbors. A different wall may let you notice something you had overlooked. The works remain familiar, but the experience of them shifts.
Of course, the individual dimensions still matter. A set is made of actual pieces that need actual places. But several works give you possibilities to explore, and there is considerable pleasure in discovering an arrangement you hadn’t imagined when you first brought them home.
The set may be considered already. Your life around it gets to keep developing.
Find the little world you want to live with
Our Collector Sets grew from this love of art in company: works with their own character, brought together so there is more to discover between them.
Each size is limited to twenty sets. The unframed, black-framed and white-framed options draw from that same edition of twenty; once twenty sets in a size have sold, that size closes.
Have a wander through them. Look at what catches you before you begin assigning it a wall. Then allow yourself the lovely part: imagining how it might live among your things.
You may start mentally moving a mirror. You may realize the forgotten stretch beside the doorway is exactly where you would like to see those works every morning. You may find yourself looking at the dining room and thinking, Oh. There you are.
That was the feeling that caught me in our farmhouse all those years ago. The room offered somewhere to hang the art, and the art gave me another reason to love being in it.
I still think there is something delicious about finding several pieces you want to bring home together. You get absorbed in their little world. Then you look up from it, into your own room, and begin imagining.
