What Size Art Above a Queen Bed Looks Best (Western Edition)

The target: about 40 inches wide

A standard queen mattress is 60 inches wide. The usual design guidance is to fill about two thirds of the furniture below, which works out to 40 inches. Anything from 36 to 45 inches looks settled. Narrower than about 30 and the bed looks like it lost its art. Wider than 48 and the art starts to hang past the mattress corners, which feels top heavy.

Width is only half the question. The other half is height, and that comes down to your headboard and your ceiling. Measure both before you pick a size, not after.

Start with the headboard

Measure from the floor to the top of your headboard. Add 6 to 10 inches of gap for the bottom of the frame. Then keep at least 10 inches free under the ceiling. Whatever is left is the tallest frame you can use. Write that number down and shop to it.

On an 8 foot ceiling (96 inches) with a 50 inch headboard, that is 96 minus 50, minus 8 for the gap, minus 10 for the ceiling: 28 inches. A frame 24 inches tall fits. A vertical 24x36 at 36 inches tall does not. It would stop about 2 inches short of the ceiling and the whole wall reads cramped. This is the most common reason art over a bed looks wrong in a standard bedroom, and it has nothing to do with the art itself.

Higher ceilings loosen all of this. If your room is 9 feet, add 12 inches to the middle column and a vertical piece comes back into play. Every size we make, side by side, is in the art print size and frame guide.

Layouts that fit a queen bed

These widths are measured on the art size alone, with a 3 inch gap between frames (2.5 inches for a row of three). A frame adds to each side, and a slim white mat adds more, so check the finished size against your 40 inch target before you commit.

The old version of this article suggested a 30x40. We do not sell that size. The closest single piece is a horizontal 24x36, and two vertical 20x30 prints cover about the same wall.

One horizontal print

The simplest answer for most queen beds is one horizontal 24x36. It is 36 inches wide and 24 inches tall, so it clears a medium headboard with room to spare and still fills the wall. We have two horizontal roadside scenes in sage, teal and gold that sit quietly in a bedroom: Desert Laundromat, with its faded sign and rows of washers glowing in the windows, and Blue Mist Motel, a sun faded motel with orange neon against a teal dusk sky. They pair on a wide living room wall, but over a queen bed pick one and let it be the whole story.

Desert Series

Desert Laundromat

From $40.00

Desert Series

Blue Mist Motel

From $40.00

Both horizontal, both 36 inches wide at 24x36

A matched pair

Two vertical prints side by side read as one wide piece. Keep them the same size, the same frame color, and 2 to 3 inches apart. Pick two that share a palette, or the wall looks like two decisions instead of one. Moonlight Trail, a riderless saddled horse on a desert trail under a full moon, pairs with Keeper of the Dusk, a great horned owl on a weathered fence post at twilight. Both are evening scenes, both are deep blue with a little gold, and both are calm, which suits a room you sleep in.

For a lighter room, Soft Hold is two haltered horses leaning close in soft black and white, a dark coat beside a pale flaxen mane. It holds its own next to another black and white piece from Dust & Shadow, and it is the one most people land on for a bedroom that already has a lot of color in the quilt.

Desert Series

Moonlight Trail

From $40.00

Desert Series

Keeper of the Dusk

From $40.00

Dust & Shadow

Soft Hold

From $40.00

Quiet vertical prints that work as a pair over the bed

A row of three for tall headboards

A tall upholstered headboard leaves a short band of wall. Three 12x18 prints in a row fill 41 inches of width while standing only 18 inches tall, which is the one layout that still looks deliberate up there. A series works best because the three need to look related. The Wild Ones share one style: desert animals drawn down to simple shapes in umber, ochre and cream on solid grounds. The Wanderer, a coyote with its ears up on deep green-black, makes a good center piece, with two of its series mates flanking it.

Hanging art over a bed

• Center the art on the bed, not the wall. If the bed sits off center, the art follows the bed.
• Bottom of the frame 6 to 10 inches above the headboard. With no headboard, about 20 inches above the mattress top.
• For a pair or a row, cut paper templates at the finished frame size and tape them up first. Live with them for a day.
• Mark your measurements on painter's tape rather than the wall, so you are not patching holes later.
• Keep the gaps equal and the tops level. Uneven spacing shows more over a bed than anywhere else in the house.

Framed pieces ship flat in a protective box and arrive ready to hang, so the only work left is the measuring. Our hanging guide walks through it step by step. Everything is made to order, so allow 3 to 5 business days to make an unframed print, or 5 to 7 for a framed piece.

Picking the print itself

A bedroom wants calmer art than a living room. Low horizons, a lot of sky, dusk and night scenes, and horses at rest all work above a bed. Leave the loud rodeo typography and the skeleton cowboys for the den or the bar wall. Match the frame to the wood already in the room: walnut with dark furniture, natural wood with oak or pine, white on a pale wall, black when you want the edges to read sharp.

The Watering Hole, a saddled chestnut horse with its head down at a still desert pool under a gold sunset, is the one we would hang over a bed first. It is warm, it is quiet, and nothing in it is in a hurry. For more rooms and more ideas, see our western wall decor ideas or browse western wall art for the bedroom.

Desert Series

The Watering Hole

From $40.00

Warm and restful, good over a bed at 24x36