An exhibition at the National Gallery showed that nearly all of Van Gogh's paintings were displayed in ornate gilded frames borrowed from almost 50 museums and private collections. Framing exerts a substantial visual and psychological impact on how paintings are perceived. Van Gogh preferred simple wooden frames without carved ornament, sometimes painted, and wrote that gilding was unnecessary when a painting looked good in a simple frame. Early 20th-century dealers reframed Van Gogh's canvases to match buyer expectations and to confer established-master status, provoking objections from Paul Gachet Jr. A few surviving or replica simple frames contrast with the prevailing gilded tradition.
With loans from nearly 50 museums and private collections, nearly all the paintings were displayed in ornate gilded frames-which Van Gogh disliked. Van Gogh's The Large Plane Trees (Road Menders at Saint-Rémy) (December 1889) in a typical example of a French Baroque gilded frame-it has been on the painting since it was sold by the dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1947 Cleveland Museum of Art (photograph The Art Newspaper)
Although most exhibition visitors probably do not consciously notice framing, it does have a substantial visual and psychological impact on how we view paintings. It is also a fascinating and relatively little-studied . Van Gogh favoured wooden frames without carved ornament, with a plain design, occasionally painted. As Vincent put it to his sister Wil: "If the painting looks good in a simple frame, why put gilding around it?"
From the early 1900s Van Gogh's paintings were beginning to sell and dealers started framing them to match buyers' expectations, giving him the status of an established "master". This angered Paul Gachet Jr, the son of the doctor who in 1890 had cared for the artist at the end of his life. In 1905 Gachet Jr complained that "it is an act of moral barbarism to put gold frames around Vincent's canvases, that simple, humble man".
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