Nothing is decided until the artist is
Every question that follows — which channel, what estimate, whether to pay for anything at all — depends on the name. A signed work by an artist with a record at auction has a market, and a market means comparables, and comparables mean you can argue about the price. A good painting by an unrecorded hand is a decorative object, and decorative objects sell on how they look above a sofa.
So spend the first effort on attribution rather than on selling. Read the signature, then turn the picture over: gallery labels, framer's stickers, exhibition and auction numbers, inscriptions and stamps are where a painting names itself. And confirm you are selling a painting at all — under a loupe a printed reproduction shows a regular pattern of dots where an original shows continuous, uneven brushwork.
Then find a figure you could defend
There are two figures for any picture and confusing them wastes months. Retail is what a gallery would ask, framed, hung and warranted. Fair market value is what a work changes hands for between willing parties at auction or privately, and for fine art it commonly sits somewhere around forty-five to seventy percent of the retail figure. You are almost always selling into the second number.
Build it from sold results, not asking prices, and compare properly: the same artist, a comparable period in their career, similar medium, similar size, similar condition. One outlying result does not make a market — three consistent ones do. If nothing by the artist has sold publicly, you are pricing a decorative work, and the honest range is narrower and lower than the internet will suggest.
The channels, and what each one takes
Every route trades speed against proceeds, and none of them is wrong. A dealer buying outright pays least and pays this week. An auction house reaches the most competitive buyers and takes the longest. A gallery gets the highest sticker price and keeps roughly half of it, in exchange for finding a buyer who will pay a gallery price at all.
The one honest way to compare them is on what lands in your account, after commission, after fees, and after whatever the platform calls its charges. A twenty-percent difference in headline price disappears entirely inside a twenty-point difference in commission.
- Auction — seller's commission out of the hammer, plus photography, insurance and catalogue charges. Broadest reach; three to six months.
- Gallery or dealer consignment — commonly a 50/50 split, sometimes 40/60 in the seller's favour for established names. Highest asking price, indefinite timeline.
- Online marketplaces and art platforms — roughly 15–30% commission, and you handle photography, packing and shipping.
- A dealer buying outright — roughly 25–45% of retail, in cash, immediately, with no further risk to you.
- Privately, to somebody who wants it — no commission at all, and the whole burden of proof, paperwork and payment security on you.
Auction, in the detail that costs money
An estimate is a range the specialist expects the work to sell within, and it is set deliberately low at the bottom end to start bidding. A reserve is the confidential minimum below which the work will not sell; it normally sits at or below the low estimate and it is negotiated, not imposed. A lot that fails to reach it is bought in, which means unsold — and an unsold lot can still leave you with the photography and insurance charges to pay.
Then there are two fees pulling in opposite directions. The seller's commission comes out of the hammer price and is negotiable, particularly on desirable material. The buyer's premium is added on top of the hammer and is paid by the buyer — at the major houses it sits around twenty-seven to twenty-nine percent on the first tranche in 2026, stepping down to twenty-two percent and then fifteen on the highest bands. That premium is not your cost, but it is not free to you either: a bidder with a fixed budget subtracts it before deciding what to bid, so it presses down on the hammer you receive.
Read the consignment agreement for the parts nobody mentions. How long the house has the work. Whether the reserve can be moved. Who pays for transport, photography, condition reporting, framing and insurance while it is in their care. When settlement is made — commonly around a month after the sale, and only once the buyer has actually paid. And what happens if the lot is bought in: whether it can be re-offered, and whether that costs you again.
The royalty most sellers have never heard of
If you are selling in the UK or the EEA through an auction house, gallery or dealer, the Artist's Resale Right applies to works resold for £1,000 or more. The royalty is paid to the artist, or to their estate for seventy years after their death, and in the UK it is the seller who bears it. It is calculated in cumulative bands — four percent on the first £50,000, three percent to £200,000, one percent to £350,000, half a percent to £500,000 and a quarter of a percent above that — and the total is capped at £12,500 for any single work.
It is collected in practice by a collecting society rather than by the artist, and the auction house or dealer will deduct or invoice it as part of the sale. Two things follow. It applies only where an art market professional is involved, so a genuinely private sale between two individuals falls outside it. And it does not exist as a federal right in the United States, which is one reason the same picture nets differently on either side of the Atlantic.
Do not improve it before you sell it
The instinct to make a picture presentable costs more money than any other single decision. Do not clean it, do not touch in a loss, do not varnish it, do not have a stretcher replaced and do not strip the old labels off the back. A yellowed varnish is a specialist's afternoon and a buyer's expectation; a picture that has been cleaned with a household product is damaged, permanently, and the damage is visible to anybody who looks under a lamp.
Reframing is the same trap in a cheaper form. An original period frame is part of the object and occasionally most of its value, and even a poor old frame is worth keeping in the corner of the room rather than in a skip. If conservation is genuinely needed, have it quoted by a professional conservator and ask whether it will return more than it costs — on a modest picture it very often will not, and a buyer would rather have an honest condition report than a hopeful repair.
- Photograph the front, the back, every label and any damage before the work moves.
- Leave old labels, stamps and inventory numbers exactly where they are.
- Get conservation quoted, not assumed — and only where it earns its cost back.
- Keep the original frame, even if it is not going on the wall.
The paperwork a buyer will ask for
Provenance is the chain of ownership, and it is worth real money because it answers two questions at once: is the work by the artist, and is it yours to sell. Receipts, gallery invoices, exhibition catalogues, correspondence, probate and insurance schedules all count. A continuous history lifts the price; a gap invites the buyer to discount for the risk of one.
For anything of consequence, expect the questions to get sharper. A buyer or a house may check the work against the artist's catalogue raisonné, against stolen art databases, and against whatever the labels on the back claim. And if the picture is old or valuable and it has to cross a border, check whether an export licence is required before you agree a sale — thresholds vary by country and by the age of the work, and discovering one after the hammer has fallen is an expensive way to learn about it.
Tax, and the limit of this page
A profit on the sale of a painting is generally a taxable gain, and in several jurisdictions art is treated as a collectible at a less favourable rate than shares. What the gain is measured against differs too: a work you bought has a purchase price, and a work you inherited is usually measured against its value at the date of death, which is one of the better reasons to have had it valued then rather than now.
That is as far as this page should go. The house makes instruments that return indicative figures; it does not give tax, legal or investment advice, and nothing here is a substitute for an accountant who can see your actual position. If the sum is large enough to matter, the fee for an hour of proper advice is trivial against the fee for guessing.