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Reading the Frame on an Antique Painting
The frame is half the object. An antique gold frame adds four to eight inches across an oil painting, it decides how the picture reads on a wall, and on a small canvas it can be worth as much as the painting inside it. Most antique paintings have been reframed at least once, and a frame that matches its picture in date is the exception rather than the rule.
A frame is furniture. It follows fashion, it takes knocks, it gets sold separately, and it wears out faster than the painting inside it. Over three centuries a picture may have passed through four or five of them. The nineteenth century reframed almost everything, because moulded composition ornament made rich gilt frames affordable for the first time and collectors put their older paintings into them by the thousand. A seventeenth-century panel in a heavy gilt frame with moulded palmettes is not a contradiction. It is the ordinary history of the object.
Original is a strong claim. Period is the honest one.
A frame described as original needs evidence, usually a documented provenance or an unbroken family history. A period gilt frame, one of the same era but not necessarily made for that picture, is what most good antique frames on the market actually are.
Five ways a frame is made
Carved, Moulded, Gilded, How to Tell |
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| Carved wood | The ornament is cut directly into the timber. Look at repeated motifs along a length of moulding. If each one differs slightly, a hand cut them. A hand carved antique frame is the most valuable kind, and the least common. | |
| Moulded ornament on wood | A paste of chalk, glue and resin pressed into moulds, applied to a plain wooden carcass, then gilded. Repeated motifs are identical because they came from the same mould. Nineteenth-century gilt frames are overwhelmingly of this kind, and they can be very fine. | |
| Plain gilt moulding | No ornament at all, just a profile. Water gilding on a red bole ground gives the warm depth that shows through where the gold leaf has rubbed. It ages quite differently from a modern gilded finish, which stays flat and even. | |
| Swept and carved | The profile itself curves and the corners open out. A swept frame is cut rather than moulded, and it belongs to the eighteenth century or to the revivals that followed it. | |
| Painted | Less common and often the most interesting. A painted frame is usually a decision by the artist or the first owner, which means it may be the only frame the picture has ever had. |
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| The quickest test is the corner | |
| Carved | Moulded |
| The ornament runs continuously through the mitre, because a hand cut it there. | The moulded elements stop and start, and after a century the paste has often cracked and lifted at exactly that point. |
Four frames from our own walls
Four Antique Frames, Four Decisions |
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Moulded ornament, 15 x 12 in framedWhen the frame is wider than the pictureTwo registers of ornament, an outer frieze of palmettes and rosettes and an inner run of gadroons and beading, with a plain gilt hollow between them. The frame adds six inches across a panel of nine. On a very small painting this is not excess. It gives a cabinet picture the presence to hold a wall. |
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Plain moulding, eighteenth centuryThe frame most often thrown awayNo ornament of any kind. A concave profile, a few fine fillets, an even gold. It adds barely three inches and asks for no attention at all. On a dark still life crowded with detail this is the better choice, and it is the frame most often removed and replaced because it looks like nothing on its own. Removing it would be a mistake. |
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Carved wood, Paris between the warsThe corner test, in practiceCut by hand in wood, with a scalloped profile and a running motif of shells and lattice, finished in cream lacquer over a red ground that shows at the edges. Frames of this kind were made in Paris between the wars for the painters who lived there, and collectors now buy them for themselves. Look at the corners. The carving runs through the mitre, which no moulded ornament ever does. |
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Painted, late twentieth centuryThe only frame it has ever hadBright green, painted by hand, with a foliage pattern in gold and sienna running across all four sides and a flat profile. It picks up the greens of the picture and continues them outward, so that frame and canvas read as one object. A painted frame of this kind is almost never a later addition. It was chosen for this painting and it belongs to it. |
Three normal, one serious
Reading Condition on a Gilt Frame |
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| Rubbing on the high points | Normal, and desirable. Where gold has worn through on an edge or a raised motif, a warm red often shows underneath. That is the bole, the clay ground laid before the gold leaf, and its presence tells you the frame was water gilt rather than sprayed. |
| Losses at the corners | The commonest fault. Moulded ornament shrinks at a different rate from the wood beneath it, and after a century it cracks and lifts at the mitres. Small losses are expected on any nineteenth-century gilt frame and are not a reason to walk away. |
| The back of the frame | Old nails, old wire, dust in the joints, the marks of previous hanging systems. A frame with a clean modern back and an aged front has been rebuilt. |
| A flat brassy gold | The warning sign. It usually means the frame has been regilded with modern materials or, worse, sprayed with gold paint. It is the one fault that genuinely reduces value. |
The same principles apply to the painting itself, and they are set out in our guide to relining, restoration and craquelure.
Six rules
Buying an Antique Painting in a Period Frame |
Read the frame as part of what you are paying for. On a small oil painting in an antique frame, a good period gilded moulding is a real part of the object, and rightly so.
Ask whether the dimensions given are framed or unframed. The difference is four to eight inches across, and it decides whether the picture fits the wall you bought it for.
Measure against the wall, not against the canvas. On a mantel in particular the framed width decides everything, which is the subject of our guide to choosing an antique painting for above the fireplace.
Prefer honest wear to a fresh regild. A rubbed antique gold frame with its original surface is worth more than the same frame made to look new.
Treat an unframed painting as an opportunity. A canvas sold without a frame lets you choose, and a well chosen new frame is better than a bad old one.
Do not assume the frame is original. And be wary of any seller who says it is without saying how they know.
