IT could be a toss up between a Matisse and another Picasso for the downstairs lobby.

The thing is, we’ve already got Pablo’s Blue Nude in the living room and three of his line drawings in the bedroom so another could be overkill.

Maybe the Matisse, then? Or a couple of Toulouse Latrec’s?

I had three or four possibles marked down as I went through the online catalogue of a company that sells quality reproductions of great art before I realised what I was doing.

This search among the vibrant sunflowers of Van Gogh, the sunsets of Monet and the vagaries of Turner had been inspired not by a desire to adorn my home with inspiration, but because I had found two spare frames I had forgotten I had behind a filing cabinet in my office.

And because I was trying to match art to the frames, not any old great master would do. It had to be 40 centimetres by 30. I was buying art by size instead of inclination.

This was as bad as having a reproduction of the Green Lady in the 1970s. Do you remember? The strangely tinted portrait of a Chinese girl hung in every living room, just above the lamp made out of a Chianti bottle.

Actually, those were the days when art started to become accessible to ordinary people, either through reproductions of classic Lowry or the pre-Raphaelites or posters of a nun showing a stocking top, a nubile lady tennis player showing her bottom or Frank Zappa sitting on the loo. We had all those.

Classics of their kind, just like the Green Lady, and providing different types of inspiration that reflected egos, ambitions, sensibilities and dreams. They still do, of course.

Not everyone can afford original works of art or signed limited editions, but we can all usually manage a poster or two to put on the wall as a preference to plain emulsion or red flock that provides a window through which our imaginations can take a brief respite from daily stress.

Never mind the chagrin of choosing art by size, two more pictures will do very nicely whether they are of a sunflower or a can can dancer. We all need as many windows of imagination in our lives as we can get.