How to look after an art print

A print on cotton paper, made with pigment ink, is rated to hold its colour for around two centuries. The rating has a condition attached, and the condition is the whole article: away from direct sun, away from moisture.

Nearly everything that ruins a print is one of those two.

Light is the one that gets them

Direct sunlight will take the colour out of anything, and it does it slowly enough that you do not notice until you take the picture down and see the darker rectangle it was covering.

The fix is not a dark room. It is not hanging a print where the sun lands on it, which in most rooms means anywhere except the wall directly opposite a south-facing window. Walk past the wall at three in the afternoon in July. If there is a bright patch on it, hang something else there.

Where you cannot avoid it, glass does the work. UV-filtering glazing blocks most of what does the damage and costs perhaps fifty percent more than ordinary glass. On a print you intend to keep, it is the cheapest insurance in the room.

Damp is the one that ruins them faster

Paper takes on water from the air. In a room that swings between wet and dry it expands and contracts inside the frame, and after a few years that shows as gentle waves across the surface, called cockling.

Worse, in a room that stays damp, mould finds the paper. Those small brown spots on old prints, foxing, are what that looks like twenty years on.

Bathrooms and kitchens are the obvious ones. The less obvious one is a wall that backs onto the outside of the house in an old building, and the space directly above a radiator, where warm dry air rises across the paper all winter.

Anywhere you would be comfortable sitting for an evening is fine for a print.

The glass, the mount, the back

If you frame it yourself, three things matter more than the moulding.

The print should not touch the glass. A mount, what a framer calls a passe-partout, holds it a few millimetres clear. Where paper touches glass it eventually sticks, and a print stuck to glass is finished.

The mount and the backing board should be acid-free. Ordinary card is not, and over a decade the acid in it burns a brown line into the paper along the edge of the window.

Leave the backing able to breathe. A frame sealed airtight with tape traps whatever humidity was in the room on the day you closed it.

If you are ordering a print framed, all of that is already done. This is for the ones you take to a framer yourself, and it is worth saying out loud to them.

Handling

Hold it by two opposite edges, or by the white border. Fingers leave oil on the surface and it does not come off, it just takes a few years to become visible.

If the print arrived rolled, let it relax flat under a couple of books for a day before framing. Do not fight the curl.

For storage, flat and covered beats rolled. A print left rolled for a year takes the tube's memory and never sits quite flat again.

What actually needs doing

Nothing, most years. Dust the glass, not the paper, with a dry cloth. No sprays on the frame, since the liquid runs down inside the glass.

Every few years, take it off the wall and look at the back. If the backing board has gone soft or smells musty, the wall is damper than you thought, and that is worth knowing before the paper finds out.

A print looked after this casually will outlast the sofa, the wall colour and probably the flat. The prints are here if you are choosing one.