Old Master valuation
What a pre-1800 painting or drawing is likely to make, and how firmly it can be attributed. Valued from photographs, at no charge.
In this category the name on the label is the valuation, and the label is a scholarly judgement rather than a fact. The distance between a picture catalogued as by an artist and the same picture catalogued as after them is the whole of its value, and that judgement is made by other people — museum scholars, the compilers of catalogues raisonnés, the specialist departments — not by whoever owns it.
What moves the value
The language of attribution
Salerooms use a graded vocabulary and it is not decorative. By, attributed to, studio of, circle of, follower of, manner of, and after each mean something specific about how confident the cataloguer is, and each carries a different price. Knowing which one a picture will attract is the single most useful thing anyone can tell you before you consign it.
Panel or canvas, and what has happened to it
Panels split, warp and get cradled; canvases get relined. Both interventions are normal on pictures of this age and both are assessed rather than penalised outright. What matters is whether the support is stable and whether the work done to it was competent, because an unstable panel restricts where a picture can be sold and how it can travel.
Old restoration, overpaint and cleaning
Very few pictures of this age are untouched, and a sympathetically cleaned painting is worth more than a dirty one. But heavy overpaint conceals condition and sometimes conceals a different hand underneath, and the decision of whether to clean before a sale or leave it to the buyer is a real one with money on both sides of it. We would give a view before anything is done, not after.
Scholarship, literature and provenance
Whether a picture has been published, exhibited, or seen by the scholar whose opinion the market accepts. A certificate from the right person can move a picture up a grade of attribution; provenance that reaches back beyond the twentieth century does similar work, and gaps in the middle of the twentieth century raise questions that need answering before a sale rather than during one.
What to photograph
The front in even daylight with no flash, the whole reverse including the panel back or the stretcher, and the edges of the picture where the paint meets the frame. Any old labels, seals, wax stamps or inscriptions on the back, close enough to read — in this category those are frequently the provenance.
What it costs
Nothing, and there is no obligation to sell afterwards. Most of what we are asked to look at we will never sell — people want to know what they have, and that is a perfectly good reason to ask. If a work is not worth the cost of handling it properly, we will say so at the photograph stage, before anyone has spent anything.
How a valuation is arrived at sets out the method across every medium, and where to sell paintings in the UK compares the routes once you know what you have. When you are ready, send the photographs.