Buying art for a blank wall does not have to start with an original. Editioned photographic prints, framed and ready to hang, sit at around three hundred to four hundred dollars and solve the problem properly, which is more than most decorative alternatives manage. What you are buying is a numbered print from a fixed run, usually framed to a standard size, and the value of that is that it is a real image rather than a mass-produced motif. Two things to check. The edition size, since a run of twenty five is a different object from a run of five hundred, and the frame specification, because a print sold framed at this price is almost always in a standard moulding with acrylic glazing rather than glass. Acrylic is lighter and safer and slightly less crisp. Measure your wall and buy larger than instinct suggests: the most common mistake on a blank wall is a picture that is too small for it.

An original painting on canvas can be had for five hundred to two thousand dollars, and that surprises people who have only priced contemporary galleries. The market for unattributed and lesser-known nineteenth and twentieth-century work is genuinely affordable, and a signed etching by a major name can sit in the same bracket as a decorative print. What you give up is certainty. Read the listing for the words attributed, after, in the manner of and school of, each of which means the attribution is an opinion rather than a fact. Ask about condition in the terms that matter for paintings: craquelure, relining, overpainting and whether the canvas has been cut down. Ask whether the frame is original, since period frames carry real value and are frequently sold separately. And ask for a photograph in raking light, which shows surface damage that a flat catalogue image hides completely. Auction and dealer listings also price framing and shipping separately, so add both before comparing. A stretched canvas travels well and cheaply, while anything already glazed needs specialist packing and can double the delivery cost.

Sometimes a wall does not want a picture. A narrow hall, a wall broken up by doors, a chimney breast already carrying a mirror: in all of those, a sculpture or a strong object on a shelf does the job a painting cannot. The range here runs from a couple of hundred dollars for a small bronze or glass piece to several thousand for a documented one, and the criteria are different from wall art. Weight and footprint first, because a heavy bronze needs a shelf that can hold it and a base wide enough not to be knocked. Then the view from behind, since a shelf piece is seen from more angles than a framed print and many sculptures have one good side only. Ask for photographs from all sides. And place it at or slightly below eye level, because sculpture above eye level reads as trophy rather than art.

We would buy one large thing rather than three small ones. Gallery walls are harder than they look and a blank wall with a single well-scaled image on it is finished, whereas a blank wall with three small frames on it is a project you have started. We would also spend on framing before we spend on the next print, since a good frame makes a modest image look considered and a bad one undoes a good image entirely. On originals, we would take the attribution language literally and pay accordingly. And we would rather live with an unattributed painting we like than a documented one we do not. If you take one thing away, measure your wall, then buy something whose longest edge is at least half the width of the wall it is going on.