Applause

Applause follows the standard Pictures on Walls structure of the period: a signed edition of 150 and an unsigned edition of 500, with no colourway complications and no competing variants to untangle.

That is genuinely useful. Where an image has one clean structure, comparable results mean what they appear to mean, and a valuation can be argued from evidence rather than hedged. Most of the difficulty in this catalogue comes from variants and misidentification; this print has very little of it.

With the structure settled, condition does nearly all the work of separating one sheet from another.

Margins, fading, tape staining, mount burn and trimming are the whole list, and the first four can often be improved by a paper conservator while the last cannot. On an image with no scarcity premium to hide behind, a clean impression is worth conspicuously more than a tired one.

A print with a clean structure and a reasonable flow of comparable results is a good candidate for auction, because the estimate can be argued and the outcome is reasonably predictable.

That is not true of every print here — the scarce colourways and the confrontational images often do better privately. Applause is one where the saleroom route is usually the straightforward answer, though it still depends on timing and on which sale it would go into.