What to look for in an original painting

Most people buy their first painting with their eyes and their second one with their eyes and a few questions. The questions are not about taste — nobody can help you there, and nobody should. They are about whether the object in front of you is what it claims to be, and whether it will still look like this in twenty years.

Start at the edges

The edge of a canvas tells you more than the middle does. On a stretched painting, look at how the fabric turns the corner: a tidy, tensioned fold and a painted or deliberately bare wrap suggests someone who thought about the piece as an object, not just as an image. Slack canvas, staples on the face rather than the back, or a wrap where the image simply stops mid-stroke are all worth asking about — none of them are fatal, but they change what you are buying.

On board or panel, check that the support is flat and sealed. Unsealed hardboard drinks moisture out of the air and will cup over a few humid seasons. A sealed back is a small thing that says the maker expects the work to outlive the sale.

Read the surface, not the photograph

Ask for a raking-light photograph — one taken with the light coming across the surface rather than straight at it. It costs the artist thirty seconds and it shows you everything a flat product shot hides: brush direction, impasto, the ridge where one session stopped and the next began, and any cracking in thick passages.

Texture is also how you tell an original from a print of an original. A giclée on canvas can be very convincing head-on and is completely obvious in raking light, because the surface is uniform where the image says it should not be.

The two questions worth asking

1. What is it made of, exactly? Not "acrylic" — acrylic on what, over what ground, with what varnish, if any. An artist who can answer this quickly has thought about permanence.

2. How should I hang it? The answer tells you whether the work is light-sensitive, whether it wants glazing, and whether the artist has a view about framing. Silence here is not sinister, but a real answer is a good sign.

Signature, date, and the back

A signature on the front is a convention, not a guarantee, and plenty of good work is signed only on the reverse. What matters more is that the back carries something: title, year, medium, the artist’s name in their own hand. That is the beginning of provenance, and it is the part that gets lost first when a work changes hands a few times.

The most valuable thing attached to a painting is usually not the frame. It is the paper trail that says who made it, when, and out of what.

Condition language, plainly

• Craquelure — a fine network of cracks. Normal in older oil work, worrying in a piece painted last year.

• Foxing — brown spotting on paper, usually a humidity problem. Treatable, but ask before you buy.

• Bloom — a milky haze in varnish. Often reversible by a conservator, and not a reason to walk away.

And then ignore all of it, once

Every collection worth looking at has one piece in it that failed some checklist and came home anyway. The checks are there so that the exception is a choice rather than an accident.

Ask what the ground is

The ground is the prepared layer between the support and the paint, and it decides more about longevity than the paint does. A canvas primed with acrylic gesso under oil paint is the most common combination in the world and it is fine. Oil paint applied directly onto raw, unprimed canvas is not: the oil migrates into the fibres and embrittles them from the inside, and the damage does not become visible for a decade or two.

You are not trying to catch anyone out. Most artists will answer this happily and in detail, because it is the part of the craft they think about hardest and are rarely asked about.

Photographs lie in four predictable ways

1. Colour. Phone cameras aggressively correct white balance. Ask for a shot with a plain white sheet of paper in frame — it gives you a reference the camera could not invent.

2. Scale. A painting photographed alone could be any size. Ask for one with a common object or a person beside it.

3. Crop. A tight crop hides the edges. Always ask for the full object including all four sides.

4. Gloss. Varnish photographs as glare, so artists often shoot before varnishing. What you receive may be shinier than what you saw.

What a signature is and is not

A signature is a convention, not a guarantee — it is the easiest thing on a painting to add. What actually establishes authorship is the chain from the studio to you: an invoice naming the artist, studio photographs of the work in progress, and the artist recognising the piece as theirs. That chain is worth building deliberately, and it is the subject of its own article.

A note on prints, honestly

There is nothing wrong with buying a print, and a well-made limited edition from an artist you follow is often the smartest first purchase anyone makes. What matters is that you know which you are buying. An edition should be numbered, the technique should be named, and the edition size should be stated and closed. "Limited edition" with no number is marketing.