Mural

A mural is a painting made right on a wall, most often somewhere public. The Getty vocabulary (AAT) uses a wider category of wall decoration that takes in work in any material that dominates a wall or ceiling surface: usually it is made on the surface itself, but a piece made elsewhere and fixed up afterwards counts too, and a Japanese encyclopaedia adds that mosaic and tile decoration can count as murals in a broad sense. Another Japanese encyclopaedia points out that, unlike a framed picture, a mural is a fixed part of the building, and it names the tomb-chamber paintings of Goguryeo among murals that run as one unbroken surface with no windows to interrupt them. Fresco is one mural technique. The painter works on plaster that is still wet, in patches small enough to finish in a day, and the water-based paint soaks in and becomes part of the plaster. The technique took shape in Italy from about the thirteenth century. A whole picture painted on dry plaster, by contrast, tends to flake. Tate dates the popularity of murals in the West to the nineteenth century, when a new community-minded national identity took hold, and names their reach as the advantage: a large audience can see them.

Stand back to see the picture whole against its wall, then go close and follow where it meets the wall's edges, corners, doors or windows.