FAQ: Appraising Art by Joan Seifried

Here are five questions that I get asked all the time in my business Angel Appraiser.

1. If given a piece of art, how do you know what it is? Many people, because we are in a technological age, will turn to the internet to research a piece of art or an antique. But to do this you must know the key words to refine your search. If you do a Google search and you say fine art, your going to get millions of hits and therefore to understand how to research a piece you essentially need to be educated in the following: period, style, medium, and production techniques and you need to know if it’s a print, a painting or the technique with which it was made. In fact, to really do a comprehensive search of an item of value you need an expert.

2. Don’t you think, Joan, that because it’s my grandmother’s and I am 70 years old, that it’s an antique? My answer to this is that people often relate an antique from whom it came. But what provenance actually is and how important it is, is dependent upon the immediacy of what we call “first source material”. In other words, we need original letters, labels, photographs or invoices? Even the existence of these does not indicate 100% certainty of ownership. Therefore to confirm provenance you need to be a very good inductive researcher. Provenance influences value greatly. There’s that old joke about “George Washington slept here”. The proximity to an important personage or an important period of time can be worth more then the object itself.

3. What is it worth? The answer to this question is basically to develop your eye to distinguish a sliding evaluative scale which Isaac Sachs, a famous connoisseur, called “good, better, best”. To give you an example, a chest of drawers from 1750 can be worth $2.5 million, but it could also be worth $500. Just on the face of the piece, what makes the difference between those two figures are three simple but very difficult areas of expertise:

• Connoisseurship
• The marketplace
• Trends and fads

Within the marketplace the determinants are broken down into importance, rarity, demand and condition. A commonly held belief is because an object is an antique it necessarily increases in value. The marketplace sometimes indicates otherwise. However, when an object becomes rare the marketplace is narrowed down and value increases. Condition is highly important in certain areas of collecting. For example, there is no demand for American country furniture, which has been stripped. However, there is a demand for Early Greek black and red ceramic ware that has been restored.

4. What makes a good appraiser? The elements that make up a good appraiser have been difficult for me to identify. So I called a few appraiser friends of mine. The following are some of the characteristics of a good appraiser:

• Visual memory
• Understanding the relationship between words, imagery and scholarship
• A sense of history
• The ability to research
• Networking ability in various fields
• Intuition of the marketplace
• Understanding collectors
• The ability to ask inductive questions . This is Joan’s “I have a painting” theory: a client called me and says I have a painting. My first question is. “Is it on canvas?” “Can you see the brush strokes?” “What is the subject?” “How big is it?” “How is it signed?” “What is the condition?” I develop a visualization of what the object is. (Of course then I ask to see it in person, in all cases) But knowing which questions to ask is vital.
• An innate ability to focuson “the nut of the estate”. Joan’s “psychological rule of appraising” is that for some reason the last object a client shows you when visiting their home is usually the most interesting. Notice I didn’t say most valuable. This maybe because this ‘sleeper item’ is not ordinarily seen. What clients don’t realize is that appraisers are trained to recognize the “out of the ordinary”.
• The ability to recognize uniqueness. The layperson will recognize what the marketplace tells them to recognize. A good appraiser with a considerable amount of tenure will recognize something unique amongst your treasures. This is because we see many of the markets favorites again and again so we know the things we see everyday. Therefore, in the best cases, we know the unique when it stares up at us. This unique quality may have nothing to do with monetary value at the point we’re seeing it, but over time I’ve realized that the unique item increases exponentially in value.

5. How do you become a connoisseur? A great teacher of mine said the great collector is always evident when we see his/her first totally obsessive specialist collection that is in one very narrow field. He collects only the top marbles from 1910-1915, or the best condition Lionel trains from 1920-1925, or drawings by artists who only work in Conti, 1740-1744. What does narrowing the field teach us? It teaches us an incredibly wide universe of things: the source history of an era, the material culture, the tastes and facts, the color schemes, the media, the world leaders, the best buyers, the idea of buying the best and ways to avoid the worst, the idea of impulse, the idea of the hunt, of luck, of right time and right place, of money, or lack thereof, of the greats within the field, and a world in a microcosm. From this one narrow arena of collecting, the nascent collector learns how to collect and what to look for in sometimes unbelievable settings, and, moreover, how to see.

“How to see” is the single most complex thing about looking at art. It has been said that the great connoisseurs who know everything about a field can walk into a show or gallery and force themselves to forget all they know and just look.

In conclusion, if you have some good art and you would like to leave it to your children or you would like to learn more about it yourselves, you should not believe that watching the Antiques Road Show makes you an expert. No one person can be an expert in everything, but a good appraiser can guide you. They can tell you what you have and what it’s worth for valuation, insurance rider, estate or donation purposes. A trained eye can possibly recognize something unique in the last place you’d look for it..

J.M. Barrie said in his preface to Peter Pan “History is found in whatever falls out of the back of the drawer”. A good appraiser can help you find that history.

I am available for email consultations anytime to help members of SDVAN at joanseifried@cox.net . For more information www.angelappraisers.com

Read Joan Seifreid on Pricing Art

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