Elle Decor

The Sum of Its Parts

Nothing elevates a room—any room—like the perfect gallery wall.

The year was 1667, and the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris had a problem: How to display the massive amount of art by École des Beaux-Arts graduates all at once? The answer lay in what was reportedly the first-ever salon wall—also known as a gallery wall—an overwhelmingly beautiful bit of controlled chaos, a riotous run-on sentence à la française of artworks, mostly pictures, hung from side to side, floor to ceiling.

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