Painting valuation
What an oil, watercolour or work on paper is likely to make, and where it would do best. Valued from photographs, at no charge.
Paintings are the thing people most often own without knowing what they own. A picture that has hung in the same room for forty years arrives with no paperwork, a signature that may or may not be the artist's, and a frame that tells its own story. Almost all of that can be read from photographs, and the reading is free.
What moves the value
Signature against attribution
A signature is evidence, not proof, and the two are priced very differently. A work catalogued as by an artist, one catalogued as attributed to them, and one bearing a signature nobody has tested sit in three separate places in a saleroom. Establishing which of the three a painting belongs to is usually the largest single step between a guess and a valuation.
Oil, watercolour or work on paper
The same hand in three media produces three markets. Oils generally lead, watercolours are judged far more harshly on fading and foxing because the damage is irreversible, and works on paper carry the additional question of whether a sheet is a finished work or a study — which the artist's own market decides, not the sheet.
Relining, restoration and overpaint
Old restoration is normal and not in itself a problem; undisclosed restoration is. A relined canvas, retouching under ultraviolet, or repainted sky and background all read through to the estimate, and a specialist will find them. Finding them ourselves at the photograph stage is a great deal cheaper than a saleroom finding them after consignment.
The stretcher and the reverse
The back of a painting is where its history is written: colourman's stamps on the canvas, exhibition labels, old gallery stickers, inscriptions, and the stretcher itself, which dates a work as reliably as anything on the front. This is the part people most often forget to photograph and the part that most often settles the question.
What to photograph
The front square on and in daylight, the whole of the reverse including the stretcher, the signature close enough to read, and any labels or stamps on the back. If the surface is uneven, one photograph taken with light raking across it from the side shows craquelure and restoration that a straight-on shot hides.
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.