Radha Krishna canvas, 48 × 24 inch

Four feet wide is a living room piece, not a mandir one. It wants a sofa or a bed beneath it and a wall with nothing else on it, and it will fight anything hung within a couple of feet either side. Hung too high it stops being looked at, which is the usual mistake; the centre of a piece this size wants to sit at about eye level for somebody standing.

It arrives stretched on a wooden frame with the fittings already attached, so hanging it is a matter of two wall plugs and a spirit level rather than a trip to a framer. That is most of what you are paying for at this size, because getting a four foot canvas framed after the fact usually costs more than the canvas did.

The subject is the raas rather than a portrait: Radha and Krishna with the gopis around them. It is a scene from the Bhagavata that Braj has painted for centuries, and a devotional image rather than a decorative one, which is worth knowing before it goes above a television.

Large devotional prints have replaced the painted cloth hangings that used to do this job in north Indian houses, and the reason is entirely practical: a hand painted piece at this size costs many times more and cannot be replaced if a monsoon wall damages it. What has been lost is the surface, and what has been gained is that an ordinary household can have something four feet wide on the wall at all.

If the wall you have in mind is in the same room as the mandir, think about whether the two compete. A large image pulls the eye, and a household that gathers at a shelf in the corner may find the shelf harder to settle at with something this size on the adjacent wall. Many people hang it in the living room for exactly that reason.

What to look for before buying

Where four feet actually fits. Forty eight inches is wider than most people picture. It needs a clear wall with nothing within a couple of feet either side, which in practice means above a sofa or a bed. Measure the wall before ordering rather than judging by eye, because a canvas this size cannot be moved to a smaller wall once it is up.

Frame and fittings included. The value at this size is largely in the stretching and the frame, because framing a four foot canvas afterwards usually costs more than the canvas did. Check the listing says ready to hang and that the fittings are attached, not supplied loose in the box.

Print quality at size. A canvas this large shows its resolution. Look at whether the seller states the print quality, and look at the detail in any close photograph: faces and hands are where a low resolution file falls apart first, and they are exactly what you will be looking at.

Keeping it, and where it sits

Hang it so the centre sits at about eye level for somebody standing, which usually means lower than instinct suggests. The commonest mistake with a large piece is hanging it too high, where it stops being looked at and becomes part of the ceiling.

Keep it off a wall that gets direct afternoon sun. Canvas prints fade, and a four foot piece fades unevenly because the light falls across it at an angle, which shows far more than an even fade would.

Dust it with a dry cloth or a soft brush, never a damp one. Water marks canvas and the mark does not come out. Two minutes with a brush once a month is the whole of the maintenance.

It is a devotional image rather than a decorative one, which is worth deciding about before it goes up. The raas is a scene from the Bhagavata, and a household that treats the wall it hangs on as a devotional space will want to think about what else shares that wall. Nothing about hanging it is asked for by the teaching, which needs no picture of anything.

One more thing to settle before ordering: what the wall is made of. Four feet of framed canvas is not heavy, but the fittings still have to go into something that holds. A plasterboard partition needs proper anchors rather than the plugs that come in the box, and a hollow flush door panel will not hold this at all. It takes five minutes to check and saves the piece, which is not repairable once the frame has come down on a floor.

None of this is required. What Maharaj Ji actually asks for is set out on the teachings page, the sayings he repeats most are on the quotes page, and the stotras are free to download as PDFs. If you are planning to visit Vrindavan, read how to meet Maharaj Ji first.