The good news is that an oil painting needs almost no maintenance. The bad news is that most of the damage it suffers at home is done by people with the best intentions: someone wants to freshen up a dusty canvas and reaches for whatever is to hand.
The centre of the painting at eye level, which is roughly 145–150 cm from the floor. That is the gallery rule and it works at home everywhere except the dining room and a living room with a low sofa — there it is worth going lower, because people look at it sitting down.
Three places are bad and all for the same reason, namely fluctuation: a wall in direct sun, a wall above a radiator and a wall above a fireplace. Sun changes colours irreversibly within a few years, reds and violets fastest. Heat from below dries the canvas unevenly and swings its tension. Add to that a bathroom, and a kitchen where a lot of cooking happens — not because of the temperature but because of grease and steam, which settle on the surface and bind dust into a layer that is hard to remove.
With a large format the fixing matters too. A 140 × 200 cm canvas with its stretcher has real weight and hangs on two points, not one; in a plasterboard wall an anchor is required, not an ordinary plug. It is also worth leaving a few millimetres of gap from the wall so air can circulate behind the painting — it helps more than you would think.
With a dry, soft brush. A wide natural-hair brush, moving top to bottom, once every few months — that is the entire routine care of an oil painting. A very soft dry brush or a fresh microfibre cloth will also do, if the surface is smooth and has no raised impasto for the cloth to catch on.
If a painting is genuinely dirty — yellowed varnish, kitchen deposit, smoke marks — that is a job for a conservator, not for home. The cleaning there consists of removing the old varnish under control and laying a new one; done at home it usually ends with the paint layer rubbed through at its thinnest points.
It is worth knowing why it is there at all, because it changes how you think about cleaning. Varnish is a replaceable layer: dirt settles on it rather than on the paint, and years later it is removed together with that dirt. A fresh painting does not have it yet, because it goes on only after several months — more on that in the piece on how long an oil painting takes to dry.
A painting on a good stretcher needs no frame and looks well without one; if it is to have one, it is worth reading how to choose a frame. When carrying it, hold the stretcher, never the canvas from behind — finger pressure leaves a permanent bulge. For transport, interleave the painting with paper or bubble wrap with the bubbles facing outwards and set it upright, never flat with anything on top. Stored for a long time it should stand upright, in a dry place, facing the wall and with a separator between works.
That is all. The works that need exactly this kind of care are in the oil painting gallery, and each one sold travels with a certificate of authenticity.
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