Most people look at the signature first. That is understandable and most often misleading. These four points will get you further.
Turn the picture round. Old labels from galleries, exhibitions or auction houses, customs stamps, chalk numbers, estate stamps, handwritten notes – this is the biography of the work. A single label with a lot number can make a 1954 catalogue entry findable and thereby close the gap in the provenance.
The support itself speaks too. Hand-forged nails, a stretcher with wooden keys, the weave of an old canvas, worm channels in a wooden panel, a cradle on the back: all of this narrows down the period. A machine-primed canvas from an art shop argues against the 17th century, whatever the front may say.
A signature proves little. It may be genuine, may have been added later, or may have been false from the outset – with sought-after names a great deal was «helped along» in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Conversely, many excellent old paintings are not signed at all, because it was not customary.
More telling is the handwriting of the painting itself: the brushwork, the treatment of hands and eyes, the build-up of layers, the palette. That is why specialists can place a work without a signature – and why a signature alone convinces nobody.
Take a magnifying glass. If you see a regular dot pattern it is a print – however handsome the frame. Some prints are worked over with varnish and an applied texture so that from two metres they look like oil paintings; under a lens it is immediately obvious.
On a real painting the surface texture follows the motif: where light is set, the paint lies thicker. With a printed texture the pattern runs evenly across the whole picture, sky included.
A hand-painted copy is something different from a print – it may well have value, particularly if it is old and good. Copies after famous originals were produced for centuries as training and as legitimate goods. They are not a fraud but a category of their own.
In the art trade the wordings have a fixed meaning, and orders of magnitude in price lie between them. «Giovanni Battista Tiepolo» means: by his own hand. «Attributed to» means: probably by him, not established. «Workshop» means: produced in his studio, under his supervision. «Circle of» or «follower of» means: from his surroundings or in his manner, but by another hand. «Manner of» means: later, in the style.
Anyone selling a picture should know these terms before somebody else uses them. And anyone receiving an offer in which they are missing should ask.
Fine age cracks in the paint layer – the craquelure – are normal and speak for rather than against a work. An old yellowed varnish is no disaster either; it can be removed professionally, and a surprisingly fresh painting often appears beneath.
What is critical: large-scale overpainting, losses in faces and hands, and restorations in which more was added than preserved. A work that is 40 per cent the hand of a restorer is, economically, a different picture.
Important: have nothing restored before an assessment. Cleaning may make sense – but only once it is settled what the work is and whether the outlay is worthwhile. In the wrong order you pay twice.
Send us two or three photographs and the dimensions. Within a few days you receive an honest first assessment – free of charge, without obligation, and also when we decline.
Show us the work