Article: The 9 Art Prints Holiday Gift Guide 2026: Art for People With Specific Tastes
The 9 Art Prints Holiday Gift Guide 2026: Art for People With Specific Tastes
This article is part of our Ultimate Fine Art Print Buyer's Guide.
An art print is one of the best gifts you can give someone with real taste, and one of the easiest to get wrong. The trick is not to buy "art" in general but to buy for the thing they already love: Japan, design, books, buildings, maps. This guide is organised that way. Each section names one or two prints we would give ourselves, and the collection to browse if you want to choose something else in the same spirit.
In brief: Start from the person, not the picture. Choose a size that fits a wall you have actually seen. If you are unsure about the room, choose a framed print in black or natural oak. If you are unsure about everything, give the gift card.
For the Japanese art lover
Japanese woodblock prints are the safest gift in our catalogue: quiet, beautiful and at home in almost any room. Kawase Hasui's Spring Snow at Kiyomizu Temple, at the top of this page, shows a pagoda and temple roofs heavy with snow under a deep blue night sky, with a small figure under an umbrella on the veranda. For someone who loves walking or the mountains, Hiroshi Yoshida's Mount Rainier is a snow-capped peak above dark fir trees, reflected in a still pool edged with pink flowers.
Not sure which Japanese artist they would like? Read our Kawase Hasui guide, then browse Japanese Woodblock Prints.
For the design lover
For the friend with the good chair and the well-chosen lamp, choose Bauhaus. László Moholy-Nagy's Kestnermappe (Komposition) is a tall arrangement of black and cream shapes balanced on thin crossed lines, on a soft olive-grey ground — architecture drawn as abstraction. For warmer colour, Paul Klee's Polyphonic Architecture is a grid of glowing orange, rose and deep blue squares, presented as an exhibition poster with Klee's name above and the title below.
More in our Paul Klee guide and the Bauhaus & Geometric Modernism collection.
For the reader
Book lovers like pictures with a story in them. Gustave Doré's Perched upon a bust of Pallas is the raven from Edgar Allan Poe's poem, sitting on a helmeted bust above a chamber door, drawn in soft silver-grey. For colour, Ivan Bilibin's Pushkin's Fairy Tales, Front Cover sets ornate Cyrillic lettering between curling blue waves, under an oak tree with a black cat walking along its chain.
Read our Gustave Doré guide and Ivan Bilibin: Russian Fairy Tales for Grown-Up Walls, or browse Literature & Theatre.
For the architecture lover
Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Carceri d'invenzione, Plate VII (The Drawbridge) is an imaginary prison of towering arches, staircases and walkways crossing in every direction, etched in black line in the 1700s. Architects have loved it ever since. For something lighter, John Singer Sargent's Staircase in Capri is a narrow white stair climbing between sunlit walls towards a glimpse of green.
Browse Architecture Art Prints.
For the traveller and the stargazer
Maps are personal without being sentimental. Andreas Cellarius's The Copernican Planisphere, from his 1660 atlas of the heavens, puts a golden sun at the centre of rings of planets and zodiac signs, with Latin titles in decorated corners and two astronomers at work below. For someone who loves a particular city, the Vintage Amsterdam Map shows the old city's rings of canals with each district picked out in pink, yellow, blue and green.
Browse Vintage Map Art Prints.
For a statement
When the gift is for a new home or a big birthday, a set of two or three prints makes more of an impression than a single picture. The Paul Klee Statement Trio — On the Current, Six Thresholds and Polyphonic Architecture — hangs as three square prints in a row and fills a sofa wall. See all our Statement Art Sets, and for how to hang them, How Do I Pair Two or Three Art Prints Together?
Framed or unframed?
If you are giving a print to someone else, framed is usually kinder: it arrives ready to hang and nobody has to make a trip to a framer. Our framed prints come in black, white, natural oak and brown walnut — black and natural oak suit almost any room. The full reasoning is in Should I Buy Framed or Unframed Art Prints?, and for size and choosing without seeing the room, read How to Buy Art Prints as a Gift Without Getting It Wrong.
Every print is made on Hahnemühle fine art paper with archival pigment inks — the kind of present that will still look good in twenty years.
The gift card: let them choose
Sometimes you know someone loves art but you cannot picture their walls, or you know their taste is too particular to guess. That is what the 9 Art Prints Gift Card is for. It never expires, and it can be spent on any print in the shop, in any size, framed or unframed, so they get exactly the piece they would have chosen for themselves.
The card itself is a small work of art. Choose one of eight designs, each carrying a picture from our collection: Hokusai's The Great Wave, Shibata Zeshin's Tiger tumbling down a pale scroll, John William Waterhouse's The Soul of the Rose, with a woman in a blue-green robe leaning into a climbing rose, Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo's Artichoke, Birds and Squirrels, Tom Thomson's Black Spruce and Maple in blazing autumn reds and yellows, Joaquín Sorolla's Returning Fishermen, a vintage gold butterfly and the Tughra of Sultan Suleiman. Your recipient sees the design you chose.
How it works
- Delivered by email on the date you choose, with your own message, so it arrives on the day even if you are buying at the last minute.
- Choose the amount by the print you have in mind, from an unframed print in our smallest size up to a large framed print.
- Never expires. They can take their time and choose the piece they will actually live with.
Summary: Hasui or Yoshida for the Japan lover, Moholy-Nagy or Klee for the design lover, Doré or Bilibin for the reader, Piranesi for the architect, Cellarius for the stargazer — and the gift card when you cannot decide.
