How to Verify a Painting: Three Questions Before You Buy

A forgery is not given away by the brush. The brushwork of a good forgery is impeccable — otherwise it would never have reached the sale. A forgery is given away by the past it does not have.

To verify authenticity means to ask a canvas three different questions and to receive three converging answers. Not one. It is precisely the divergence between them that most often opens a forgery up.

The eye will tell a bad copy apart. Nobody will tell a brilliant one apart — which is why authenticity is not looked at, it is proved.

Question one: what is this made of

This is the work of technical examination — the only answer that lies under the paint rather than around it. Pigments, ground, the threads of the canvas, craquelure, an X-ray of the underpainting: could such paint have existed in such a year. Titanium white in a picture “from the early nineteenth century” closes the question at once — it was not manufactured then. What you do as a buyer: demand a report from an independent laboratory or a museum expert, not a “certificate from the seller”. Every trader praises his own goods; authenticity is confirmed by someone the seller does not pay.

Question two: whose hand is this

This is attribution, and it has a ladder down which the price descends step by step: “by the master”, “workshop”, “circle of”, “in the manner of”. The same subject, a similar stroke — and between the top rung and the bottom lies an abyss of whole orders of magnitude. What you check: which rung the wording in the description is standing on. “In the manner of Aivazovsky” is an honest admission that the master’s hand is not here. The support is the catalogue raisonné, the complete corpus of an artist’s work: if a piece is absent from it and nobody has submitted it for inclusion, that is not a verdict, but it is a question that must have an answer.

Read the wording in the description as a verdict, not as a compliment: the market writes exactly the rung it is prepared to defend.

Question three: who owned this

This is provenance — the history of ownership from the studio to today. It does not look under the paint; it looks around: whose signature is on the invoice, in whose will the piece is listed, in the catalogue of which exhibition it was printed. What you look for is continuity. A hole in the history of ownership — especially in the dark years of the twentieth century — is read by the market as risk and subtracted from the price, because behind the hole there may be theft or illegal export. To buy a piece without a clean past is to buy someone else’s problem along with the canvas.

Three questions, three instruments — and only all three together give what can be called authenticity. Because trust is built as a chain, not as a sum: it holds while every link is intact, and it snaps all at once if a single link gives way.

What this means when you buy from a living artist

This whole verification machine is needed where the author died long ago and there is nobody left to ask. With a living artist the chain is short and honest: the work comes straight from the studio, with a certificate of authenticity from the author himself, with photographic records and the right to confirm at any moment that this is his hand. Here you are paying not for a reconstruction of the past but for the absence of a break: between the one who painted it and the one who hung it on the wall there is not a single dark link.

A dead artist is verified through papers. A living one can simply be asked. That is the cleanest provenance there is.

— Evgeny Fleysher