Hung floor to ceiling: the salon wall returns

For a century the white cube has won the argument: one work, one wall, acres of breathing room, a hush like a chapel. Lately, though, more galleries are returning to the salon hang — paintings stacked frame to frame from the dado rail to the cornice, on walls of deep, saturated colour.

It's a busier, more democratic way of showing art. Nothing is anointed; everything competes. Your eye has to work, drifting from a small dark portrait to a luminous landscape three rows up, making its own connections rather than obeying the curator's single sightline.

A salon wall doesn't tell you where to look. It dares you to choose.

There's an honesty to it. This is how people actually lived with pictures for most of history — accumulated, overlapping, a little crowded. The pristine isolation of the modern gallery is the historical aberration, not the norm.

Stand back far enough and the whole wall reads as one composition: a quilt of gilt and colour. Lean in and it dissolves into a hundred separate worlds. Few ways of hanging art reward both the glance and the stare so generously.