How to Collect Antique Paintings

Is it signed? Is it old? Has it been restored? The questions you ask before you buy, answered one by one.

What a Genre Scene Was Really SayingBefore 1800 the everyday was a vehicle. Then the meaning fell away, and painters showed ordinary life for itself. → Period Copies After the Old MastersA photograph reproduces an image. A copy reproduces a painting, and a parish that needed an Assumption above its altar could do nothing with a print. → Reading Attribution on an Antique PaintingSeven terms between a painter's own hand and a copy made after him, and what each one actually claims about the picture. → How to Read Signatures and Inscriptions on Antique PaintingsA signature is a clue, not a verdict. Where to look, how to read monograms and dates, and the red flags that separate real signatures from added ones. → How to Read Signatures and Inscriptions on Antique PaintingsBefore photography, there was exactly one way to own the image of a famous painting. Someone had to paint it again, by hand, in oil. For four centuries, copying was not a shady corner of the art world but one of its central activities. → Relined, Restored, Craquelure, Understanding ConditionCraquelure is not damage and relined is not a defect. What condition terms really mean on a painting that has survived two centuries, and how to judge them. →

Why does a French field painted in 1860 look nothing like one painted in 1830? The century that changed landscape.

French Impressionist Landscape Painting Beyond the Famous NamesThirty painters showed in 1874. Four entered the canon. The others were painting the same rivers in the same years. → Animated Landscapes, Figures in 19th-Century French PaintingA landscape in which figures appear, but in which the figures are not the subject. How to read the French paysage animé — and why the same canvas sells for less catalogued one way than the other. → Haystacks in French Painting, Before and After MonetSixty years of French haystacks before Monet made them the whole picture, and the difference between a sheaf and a stack. → Pastoral Scenes, Shepherds and Sheep in 19th-Century French PaintingThe century that took the pastoral back from porcelain shepherdesses and gave it the weight of a biblical scene. → The Barbizon School in PaintingA village an hour from Paris, an inn, and the painters who decided a stand of oaks deserved what the Salon gave to Ovid. →

Who were they, and why were they painted? The people behind the frames, and how to read what they wear.

Royal Portraits, Made to Be CopiedA sovereign had one face and needed a hundred, in a hundred rooms, at the same time. The picture painted from life was not the end of the process but the beginning. → French Impressionist Portraits Beyond the Famous NamesThe man with the pipe in Degas's most famous café scene was a painter, and his own portraits are still in circulation. → Emperors, Officers and the Symbols They WoreA double-headed eagle, a golden ram on a ribbon, a white coat. Four symbols that tell you what an Austrian portrait is. → Portraits of Unknown Sitters in Old Master PaintingHistory kept the faces and lost the names. Why anonymous portraits are the smartest buy in Old Master painting, and how to judge one like a specialist. → Rigaud, Tocqué and the French Rococo PortraitOne built the image of absolute monarchy, the other perfected the honest likeness. What after Rigaud and follower of Tocqué really mean on a painting. → Collecting 18th-Century French PortraitsEveryone who mattered in eighteenth-century France needed to be painted, and the great portraitists ran workshops to meet the demand. What the attribution terms mean, how to date a canvas without a signature, and what still comes to market. →

Why did a country household commission a portrait of a dog? Animals as companions, as property, and as sport.

Animal Painting in 19th-Century FranceThe most talked-about painting at the 1855 Exposition Universelle was a horse market, and it made its painter famous. → Collecting Antique Dog PortraitsTwo of the dogs in our collection have names. Nobody knows who owned them. Everybody knows what they were called. →

Which saint is this, and how would a seventeenth-century viewer have known? Reading the attributes.

Salome and the Head of John the Baptist in PaintingSalome and the head of John the Baptist: the platter that identifies her, the painters who made the subject from Luini to Moreau, and how to collect it. → Judith and Holofernes in Painting → Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well in Old Master Painting → Mary Magdalene in Old Master PaintingShe was a sinner, a saint, a hermit, a feminist icon and for five centuries, the woman every European painter wanted to paint. From Titian's golden storms of hair to Caravaggio's quiet Roman girl in a dark room, this article traces the Magdalene through the history of Western painting, explains her iconography, and asks why collectors (especially in the US) should be paying attention. →

Where does it hang, and how do you look after it? Framing, lighting, hanging and care.

Reading the Frame on an Antique PaintingThe frame is half the object. It adds four to eight inches across, it decides how the picture reads on a wall, and on a small painting it can be worth as much as the canvas. → Choosing an Antique Painting for Above the FireplaceThe mantel decides the painting before you do. The two thirds rule, framed size, hanging height, and when to stand a picture on the shelf instead. →