Which Famous Paintings Actually Fit a Frame TV?
A Samsung Frame TV is 3840 x 2160 pixels. That is 16:9, or 1.78:1 — a shape almost no painting has ever been.
Nearly every shop selling Frame TV art shows you a mockup of a wide landscape sitting neatly edge to edge, and says nothing about what happened to everything else. So we measured the source file of every work we sell, all 100 of them, and sorted them by how their real proportions meet a 16:9 screen.
5 of 100 are wider than the screen. 44 are square or taller. The rest sit somewhere in between.
| Shape | Works | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Wider than the screen (ratio 1.78 : 1 or more) | 5 | 5% |
| Nearly a fit (1.50 to 1.78 : 1) | 13 | 13% |
| Landscape, but not landscape enough (over 1.00 to 1.50 : 1) | 38 | 38% |
| Square or taller than wide (1.00 : 1 or less) | 44 | 44% |
Why this matters more than resolution
Every listing you will read leads on 4K. Resolution is the easy part — a museum scan has pixels to spare, and downsampling to 3840 wide is not where a picture is won or lost. Shape is. A 4K file of a portrait, cropped to fill a 16:9 screen, is a 4K file with the top of somebody's head missing.
There are only two honest answers to a painting that is the wrong shape. Crop it, and lose part of it. Or set the whole thing inside a mat, and lose some screen. Which one is right is decided entirely by the ratio, and it is different for 82 of the 100 works here than it is for the other 18.
How to measure your own
Divide the image's width in pixels by its height. Above 1.78 and a 16:9 crop costs you nothing but the far edges. Below 1.00 and you have a portrait, and no crop will keep it whole. Our free Frame TV resizer does the arithmetic and lets you place the crop yourself rather than letting the television choose — it runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Wider than the screen — 5 of 100
The clean 3840 x 2160 file is the right one. Cropping to 16:9 trims the far left and right, where these compositions have the least going on.
| Work | Artist | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| The Creation of Adam | Michelangelo | 2.20 : 1 |
| Water Lilies (Agapanthus) | Claude Monet | 2.15 : 1 |
| The Water Lily Pond | Claude Monet | 1.95 : 1 |
| The Last Supper | Leonardo da Vinci | 1.92 : 1 |
| The School of Athens | Raphael | 1.83 : 1 |
Nearly a fit — 13 of 100
A shallow trim off the top and bottom and the composition survives intact. Either file works; the clean one fills the screen.
| Work | Artist | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| The Garden of Earthly Delights | Hieronymus Bosch | 1.76 : 1 |
| Grainstacks at the End of Summer, Morning Effect | Claude Monet | 1.70 : 1 |
| Reflections on the Thames, Westminster | Atkinson Grimshaw | 1.68 : 1 |
| The Gulf Stream | Winslow Homer | 1.62 : 1 |
| Final Study for Bathers at Asnières | Georges Seurat | 1.60 : 1 |
| The Birth of Venus | Sandro Botticelli | 1.59 : 1 |
| The Monk by the Sea | Caspar David Friedrich | 1.57 : 1 |
| Abbey among Oak Trees | Caspar David Friedrich | 1.56 : 1 |
| The Sleeping Gypsy | Henri Rousseau | 1.54 : 1 |
| Primavera | Sandro Botticelli | 1.52 : 1 |
| The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild | Rembrandt | 1.52 : 1 |
| A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884 | Georges Seurat | 1.50 : 1 |
| Night Snow at Kambara | Utagawa Hiroshige | 1.50 : 1 |
Landscape, but not landscape enough — 38 of 100
This is where the damage happens. These read as wide paintings and are not: a 16:9 crop takes sky, foreground, or both. The matted file is usually the better buy.
| Work | Artist | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| Under the Wave off Kanagawa (The Great Wave) | Katsushika Hokusai | 1.49 : 1 |
| The Ninth Wave | Ivan Aivazovsky | 1.49 : 1 |
| Strawberry Thief | William Morris | 1.48 : 1 |
| Kajikazawa in Kai Province | Katsushika Hokusai | 1.46 : 1 |
| Fine Wind, Clear Morning (Red Fuji) | Katsushika Hokusai | 1.45 : 1 |
| The Hay Wain | John Constable | 1.45 : 1 |
| Cut Sunflowers | Vincent van Gogh | 1.42 : 1 |
| Study from Pont Royal in Paris | David Jacobsen | 1.41 : 1 |
| Hunters in the Snow | Pieter Bruegel the Elder | 1.41 : 1 |
| Interior. Artificial Light | Vilhelm Hammershøi | 1.39 : 1 |
| Luncheon of the Boating Party | Pierre-Auguste Renoir | 1.39 : 1 |
| View from Dosseringen near the Sortedam Lake | Christen Købke | 1.38 : 1 |
| The Jewish Bride | Rembrandt | 1.37 : 1 |
| The Tower of Babel | Pieter Bruegel the Elder | 1.37 : 1 |
| The Fighting Temeraire | J. M. W. Turner | 1.35 : 1 |
| Bal du moulin de la Galette | Pierre-Auguste Renoir | 1.34 : 1 |
| Rain, Steam and Speed | J. M. W. Turner | 1.34 : 1 |
| A Bar at the Folies-Bergère | Édouard Manet | 1.34 : 1 |
| Bathers on a Summer Evening | Félix Vallotton | 1.34 : 1 |
| Jalais Hill, Pontoise | Camille Pissarro | 1.31 : 1 |
| The Potato Eaters | Vincent van Gogh | 1.31 : 1 |
| Paris Street; Rainy Day | Gustave Caillebotte | 1.31 : 1 |
| The Third of May 1808 | Francisco Goya | 1.29 : 1 |
| Starry Night Over the Rhône | Vincent van Gogh | 1.29 : 1 |
| Impression, Sunrise | Claude Monet | 1.29 : 1 |
| Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe | Édouard Manet | 1.29 : 1 |
| La Blanche et la Noire (The White and the Black) | Félix Vallotton | 1.28 : 1 |
| The Bedroom | Vincent van Gogh | 1.28 : 1 |
| Almond Blossoms | Vincent van Gogh | 1.26 : 1 |
| Wheat Field with Cypresses | Vincent van Gogh | 1.26 : 1 |
| The Card Players | Paul Cézanne | 1.26 : 1 |
| The Basket of Apples | Paul Cézanne | 1.25 : 1 |
| Liberty Leading the People | Eugène Delacroix | 1.25 : 1 |
| Self-Portrait with Physalis | Egon Schiele | 1.24 : 1 |
| Mont Sainte-Victoire | Paul Cézanne | 1.23 : 1 |
| The Night Watch | Rembrandt | 1.23 : 1 |
| View of Delft | Johannes Vermeer | 1.20 : 1 |
| Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1 (Whistler's Mother) | James McNeill Whistler | 1.12 : 1 |
Square or taller than wide — 44 of 100
No 16:9 crop exists that keeps these whole. Something is always cut, and on a portrait it is generally a head. Use the matted file. Square counts here too — Klimt's Kiss is 180 x 180 cm, and reaching 16:9 would cost about a third of it.
| Work | Artist | Ratio |
|---|---|---|
| The Kiss | Gustav Klimt | 1.00 : 1 |
| The Swan, No. 1 | Hilma af Klint | 0.99 : 1 |
| Interior in Strandgade with the Artist's Wife | Vilhelm Hammershøi | 0.94 : 1 |
| White Doors, Strandgade 30 | Vilhelm Hammershøi | 0.93 : 1 |
| The Dance Class | Edgar Degas | 0.93 : 1 |
| The Milkmaid | Johannes Vermeer | 0.89 : 1 |
| Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose | John Singer Sargent | 0.89 : 1 |
| The Astronomer | Johannes Vermeer | 0.88 : 1 |
| Las Meninas | Diego Velázquez | 0.87 : 1 |
| Napoleon Crossing the Alps | Jacques-Louis David | 0.85 : 1 |
| Girl with a Pearl Earring | Johannes Vermeer | 0.84 : 1 |
| Woman Holding a Balance | Johannes Vermeer | 0.84 : 1 |
| Self-Portrait as the Apostle Paul | Rembrandt | 0.84 : 1 |
| American Gothic | Grant Wood | 0.83 : 1 |
| The Cradle | Berthe Morisot | 0.81 : 1 |
| The Scream | Edvard Munch | 0.81 : 1 |
| Woman with a Parasol | Claude Monet | 0.81 : 1 |
| Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat | Vincent van Gogh | 0.80 : 1 |
| Irises | Vincent van Gogh | 0.80 : 1 |
| Cypresses | Vincent van Gogh | 0.79 : 1 |
| Wanderer above the Sea of Fog | Caspar David Friedrich | 0.78 : 1 |
| Allegory of the Catholic Faith | Johannes Vermeer | 0.78 : 1 |
| Willow Bough | William Morris | 0.77 : 1 |
| Café Terrace at Night | Vincent van Gogh | 0.76 : 1 |
| Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket | James McNeill Whistler | 0.75 : 1 |
| Chalk Cliffs on Rügen | Caspar David Friedrich | 0.74 : 1 |
| The Arnolfini Portrait | Jan van Eyck | 0.73 : 1 |
| Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe | Albrecht Dürer | 0.72 : 1 |
| Woman at the Window | Caspar David Friedrich | 0.71 : 1 |
| The Star (Dancer on Stage) | Edgar Degas | 0.70 : 1 |
| Job Cigarettes | Alphonse Mucha | 0.70 : 1 |
| View of Mount Fuji from Seven-ri Beach | Utagawa Hiroshige | 0.69 : 1 |
| Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake | Utagawa Hiroshige | 0.69 : 1 |
| Plum Garden at Kameido | Utagawa Hiroshige | 0.68 : 1 |
| Sonnenblumen (Sunflowers) | Egon Schiele | 0.68 : 1 |
| Mona Lisa | Leonardo da Vinci | 0.67 : 1 |
| The Child's Bath | Mary Cassatt | 0.66 : 1 |
| Crow on a Snowy Branch | Ohara Koson | 0.55 : 1 |
| Saturn Devouring His Son | Francisco Goya | 0.54 : 1 |
| Swallows in Flight | Ohara Koson | 0.54 : 1 |
| Owl on a Ginkgo Branch | Ohara Koson | 0.53 : 1 |
| The Tree of Life | Gustav Klimt | 0.53 : 1 |
| Gismonda | Alphonse Mucha | 0.34 : 1 |
| Egrets in a Marsh | Ohara Koson | 0.31 : 1 |
What we do about it
Every work in the collection ships with both files: a clean 3840 x 2160 crop and a gallery-matted version that keeps the painting whole. For the 44 portrait works the matted file is the product and the crop is the compromise, which is the opposite of how Frame TV art is usually sold. Each work's own page says which one we would use and why.
Ratios measured from the source files on 2026-09-15. Anyone is welcome to check them against the museum records — every work here is public domain and every source is named on its page.
Common questions
What aspect ratio is a Samsung Frame TV?
The panel is 3840 x 2160 pixels, which is 16:9, or 1.78:1. Any image that is not that shape has to be cropped, padded or stretched to fill it.
Do most famous paintings fit a Frame TV?
No. Of the 100 works in this collection, measured from the source files, only 5 are wider than 1.78:1. 44 are portrait — taller than they are wide — and cannot be cropped to 16:9 without cutting into the subject.
What is a gallery-matted file?
The whole painting, at its own proportions, set inside a plain mat on a 3840 x 2160 canvas — so the screen shows a framed picture rather than a cropped one. Every work here ships with both that and a clean 16:9 crop.
Is it better to crop a painting or to mat it?
It depends entirely on the shape. A painting wider than the screen loses nothing to a crop. A portrait loses part of its subject. The ratio tells you which case you are in, which is why this page lists it for every work.