Between art and frame, the picture mat is often relegated to afterthought. But when carefully considered, it becomes more than a mere buffer: From enhancing the image within to making a colorful statement all its own, creative matting can be the difference between pretty and powerful.
Pattern Play
Casa Gusto’s artfully painted double mat matches the maximalist verve of a painted and shell-bedecked frame surrounding an early-19th-century mezzotint engraving of a Turkish sultan.
Color Theory
A suite of botanicals with mauve linen mats enlivens a Palmer Weiss–designed mudroom swathed in a palette of subdued neutrals.
À la Française
French matting—in which precisely inked lines, watercolor washes, gilt tape, and strips of marbled paper are used to create intricate borders—elevates a pair of prints in the late Mark Hampton’s Park Avenue dining room.
Scaling Up
In Thomas O’Brien’s Bellport, New York, home, an oversize mat draws the eye to a quiet sepia-toned photograph, proving the power of negative space.
All the Trimmings
At the Dorothy Draper–designed Greenbrier resort, a richly layered combination of picot-edged silk ribbon and hand-marbled undermats takes a grouping of 19th-century English botanical prints to fanciful new heights.
Rainbow Connection
A kaleidoscopic array of colored mats surround a treasure trove of avian prints in Carolina Irving’s pattern-happy Parisian apartment, creating a vignette that takes masterful mismatching to a whole new level.
Gilt Trip
The addition of a gold fillet—or narrow piece of molding—adds dimension to a formal silk-wrapped mat surrounding an old master engraving in the home of Kate and Odom Stamps of design firm Stamps & Stamps.
Connect Four
Beata Heuman uses alternating colored mats to energize a quartet of engravings—and create a visual tether to the neighboring cabinet’s red interior.
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 16 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
