Collecting Guides
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What a Genre Scene Was Really Saying
Before 1800 the everyday was a vehicle. Then the meaning fell away, and painters showed ordinary life for itself.
Reading the Frame on an Antique Painting
The 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 Fireplace
The 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.
How to Collect Antique Paintings
Our collecting guides, mapped. How to judge a painting, and the traditions behind it. Landscape, portrait, animal and sacred subjects.
Royal Portraits, Made to Be Copied
A 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.
Period Copies After the Old Masters
A 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 Painting
Seven terms between a painter's own hand and a copy made after him, and what each one actually claims about the picture.
Animal Painting in 19th-Century France
The most talked-about painting at the 1855 Exposition Universelle was a horse market, and it made its painter famous.
Collecting Antique Dog Portraits
Two of the dogs in our collection have names. Nobody knows who owned them. Everybody knows what they were called.
How to Read Signatures and Inscriptions on Antique Paintings
A 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.