Print and edition valuation
What a print is likely to make, and which edition and printing it actually belongs to. Valued from photographs, at no charge.
Prints are where the gap between what a work looks like and what it is worth is widest. Two sheets carrying the same image can be separated by a factor of many times over, and the difference is almost never visible in a photograph of the picture alone — it is in the margin, the paper and the pencil line along the bottom edge.
What moves the value
Signed, numbered, or a proof
The first question, and the one that divides the market in half. A signed impression and an unsigned one of the same image are catalogued separately and bought by different people. Artist's proofs, printer's proofs and the other designations outside the main run sit differently again — scarcer than the edition beside them, and also where misdescription is most common.
Which edition, and which printing
Popular images are frequently printed more than once, in different sizes, in different years and sometimes by different publishers. A later printing of a famous image is a legitimate object and is not the same object as the first. Identifying which one is in front of us is routine work and it is the step most online valuations skip.
Blind stamps, paper and margins
The publisher's blind stamp, where it sits, the weight and make of the paper, and whether the margins are full or have been trimmed to fit a frame. Trimming is common, permanent, and costs real money. These are the details a specialist checks first when something about a sheet does not sit right.
Prints against posters and reproductions
Exhibition posters, offset reproductions and open editions circulate alongside original prints and are often framed identically. Several markets — Hockney's especially — turn on this distinction, and it is settled by the printing method and the paper rather than by the image. We would rather tell you at the photograph stage than after anyone has paid a consignment fee.
What to photograph
The full sheet including all four margins, not just the image. The pencil line along the bottom edge close enough to read — numbering, any proof marking, the signature. Any blind stamp, which usually sits in a lower corner and may need light across it to show. And the reverse.
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.