Selling Art From an Estate: Prints, Paintings and Value

What the art in a house is usually worth

Walk through the house and count the pictures. In most homes it comes to twenty or thirty: landscapes, framed prints bought to match a sofa, a portrait somebody painted at a class, a museum poster, and one or two things that came down from a grandparent. Almost all of it will sell at an estate sale for a modest sum, and much of that sum is the frame. That is not a judgment on anyone's taste. Decorative art is made to be looked at, not resold.

The reason to look carefully anyway is that the exceptions are real and they do not announce themselves. A small oil by a listed regional painter, a signed and numbered lithograph, a Japanese woodblock print, a piece of folk art, a drawing bought directly from an artist in the 1960s: any of these can be worth more than the dining set, and every one of them looks, from across the room, like everything else on the wall. An estate sale company prices hundreds of items in a few days, and the wall is not where it spends its time. So the practical question is not "is this valuable?" but "does anything here justify twenty minutes of checking?" If nothing passes the tests below, hang the pictures back up and let the sale do its work.

Print or painting: how to tell

A framed image that looks like a painting is very often a print of a painting, and a print of a painting, however good the frame, is a decorative object. Here is how to tell, in the order that takes the least effort.

1. Look at the surface in raking light. Hold it near a lamp so the light skims across it. An oil or acrylic painting has texture: brushstrokes stand up, edges of thick paint catch the light, and the surface is uneven. A print is flat. Some prints are coated with a textured varnish to imitate brushwork, and the giveaway is that the texture does not follow the image: the "brushstrokes" run across a sky exactly the way they run across a tree.
2. Use a magnifying glass. A cheap loupe, or the zoom on a phone camera, will do. A commercial reproduction shows a regular pattern of tiny dots. A painting shows only pigment. An original print made by an artist (an etching, a lithograph, a woodcut, a screen print) shows no dot pattern either, which is why the next section matters.
3. Look at the edges and the back. A painting on canvas shows paint wrapping around the stretcher bars, or tack holes along a raw edge. A print on paper shows paper, often with a plate mark (a faint rectangular impression around an etching). The back of a painting shows canvas, stretcher bars and sometimes an old gallery label or a chalked lot number; the back of a print shows paper and a framer's label.

A watercolor sits between the two: an original, on paper, with almost no texture. Under the glass, look for the slight unevenness where pigment pooled as it dried, and for pencil lines under the paint. A printed reproduction shows the dot pattern and none of that.

Reading the signature, the edition and the back

A signature is where most people start, and it is the least reliable single thing on the piece. Anybody can sign a canvas. What a signature does is give you a name to look up, and the way it is applied tells you what you are holding.

• On a painting, a signature in paint, sitting in the paint layer, is what you would expect. A signature that is perfectly uniform on a flat surface was printed with the rest of the image.
• On a print, look for a signature in pencil, below the image, outside the printed area. Pencil is the convention for a print the artist signed by hand. A signature in the same ink as the picture is a reproduction of a signature and means nothing.
• An edition number looks like a fraction in pencil at the lower left: 12/150 means the twelfth impression of an edition of one hundred and fifty. A small edition is generally better than a large one; a number in the thousands is a commercial reproduction with a pencil mark on it. Letters instead of a number (A.P. for artist's proof) are normal and do not by themselves add value.

The back deserves as much time as the front. A gallery label, a museum loan label, an exhibition sticker, an inscription that reads "to Margaret from the artist": any of these is a reason to pause before a price sticker goes on.

What is worth checking before the sale

You do not need to research every picture. Pull out the ones that meet any of the following tests and spend twenty minutes on each. Everything else can be priced with the rest of the house.

The list is deliberately generous. It is cheaper to look at ten pieces that turn out to be ordinary than to sell one that was not. Two things do not belong on the list on their own: the frame, and the family's certainty. A heavy gilt frame says nothing about the picture inside, and "grandfather always said it was a real one" is worth recording and not worth relying on; the guide to finding out whether something is valuable shows how to test a family story against the evidence.

How to research a piece without paying anyone

Once you have a name, search it with the word "artist" and see whether anything comes back. A painter with a record of sales at auction is described as "listed", and a listed artist's work has a market you can measure. Look for auction results, not asking prices: what a dealer hopes to get tells you nothing, and what a piece actually sold for tells you almost everything. Compare like with like. An artist's large finished oil and their small pencil sketch can differ in price a hundredfold, so match the medium, the size and the period, and give more weight to recent sales.

If the name turns up nothing, the piece is by an unlisted artist and will sell as a decorative picture. If the results are in the thousands rather than the tens, you have reached the point where a specialist earns their keep. The fine art department of an auction house will look at photographs and tell you within a day whether it wants to see the piece, and it does this free, because it is looking for consignments. The guide to appraisal versus estate sale pricing explains when a paid written appraisal is actually needed.

One caution on famous names. Prints "after" a well-known artist, produced in the tens of thousands and sold through galleries in tourist towns and on cruise ships, are the single most common disappointment in this category. Many carry a pencil signature and a certificate, and the resale market is a fraction of the purchase price. Treat a certificate of authenticity as a document about the seller, and read the guide to spotting fakes and reproductions before you rely on one.

Sale floor, auction house or dealer

By now the walls have sorted themselves into three groups, and each has a natural route. The choice comes down to what the piece is likely to bring, how long you can wait, and how much of the price you will give up for a wider audience.

An auction house takes a seller's commission, usually charges for photography and insurance, and may take months to reach the right sale and pay out. In return the piece is seen by every collector who watches that category. For the middle group, run the numbers both ways: the estate sale company's price against a comparable auction result less the fees. The two are closer than families expect. The guide to estate sale versus auction walks through that comparison for the whole house.

A dealer is the third route and the fastest. A dealer buys outright and pays less than an auction might bring, because the dealer takes the risk and the wait. That trade is fair when you have an auction estimate to compare the offer against. It is not fair when the offer arrives before you have looked anything up.

How estate sale companies handle art, and what to ask

A good company knows the limits of its own expertise. It prices the decorative pictures confidently, recognizes a signed print or a listed name when it sees one, and tells you when a piece should go to a specialist. Most have a relationship with an auction house or a dealer for exactly this, and the contract should say what happens when a piece is sent out.

Ask these before you sign, and keep the answers with the rest of your contract checklist:

• Have you sold art like this before, and what did you do with the pieces worth more than the sale could bring?
• Will you tell me before any piece is sent to an auction house or a dealer, and will I see the estimate first?
• If a piece is consigned elsewhere, does your commission apply on top of theirs?
• Who researches signed pieces, and can I see the results for anything priced above a few hundred dollars?

A company that answers the first question with "we sell everything on the floor" is telling you something. That policy suits the company, because it is simple, and it costs a family exactly the difference between a Saturday price and the right one. If you have already found a piece that matters, say so at the walk-through, and be clear that it is either coming out of the sale or being priced with a specialist's input.

Condition, frames and the mistakes that cost money

Condition sets the price for everything on the wall, and most of the damage that lowers it was done with good intentions. A painting "cleaned" with a household product, a print pressed flat under books: each was worth more the morning before somebody helped.

A period frame can be worth more than the picture in it, and should be priced as a frame rather than thrown in. A painting with a small tear is still saleable and should be described honestly. And do not let the art leave the house early: relatives who "just want the picture from the hallway" are one of the ways value walks out before anybody has looked at it. The guide to what not to do before an estate sale covers why an early giveaway is so hard to undo.

What to do next

Take every picture down, sort it into the three groups above, photograph the backs, and spend twenty minutes on each piece that earned a second look. If any of them has a market in the thousands, send photographs to an auction house before the estate sale company prices it. Everything else belongs in the sale, where a good company will price it well and the buyers are already walking through the door.

When you are ready to hear from companies near you, describe the estate once and local companies will reach out to you, free. The guide to overlooked treasures covers the other categories that hide value in an ordinary house.

Frequently asked questions