Identify
Who, when, which technique? Signature, reverse, labels, stamps and frame often say more than the front.
Art valuation
A figure is only as good as the reason behind it.
“It is worth about 3,000 euros.” Sentences like that arrive quickly. They help nobody unless the reason is attached. I value art so that you can follow the number yourself: which comparable work, which condition, which market, which moment.
Method
How I arrive at a value.
Compare
Checked against catalogues raisonnés and prices actually achieved at auction — not against asking prices on sales portals.
Place
Condition, format, period and current demand decide where your work sits inside that range.
Market value is not insurance value
The same picture can carry several correct numbers: the price a sale could achieve, the replacement value for insurance, and the figure needed to divide an estate. I tell you beforehand which value your purpose needs.
Occasions
When a valuation is needed
- Inheritance and estates — dividing among heirs, a figure for the estate inventory.
- A sale decision — before you consign or accept an offer.
- Gifts and the division of assets — numbers the people involved can rely on.
- Simply to know — because you want to understand what has hung on the wall for thirty years.
Focus
What I value
- Paintings, from Old Masters to post-war art
- The Düsseldorf school of painting and regional artists
- Prints, drawings, watercolours
- Sculpture and bronzes
- Artists’ estates and collections that grew over time
- Modern and contemporary art
What to send
Good photographs can spare a visit
- The whole work, straight on, in daylight
- Signature and date, close up
- The entire reverse, with every label
- Damage, tears, retouching
- Measurements: the image, and the outside with the frame
- Whatever you know about where it came from — fragments help
Provenance research
Where a work came from — and whether the story holds.
Value rises and falls with provenance, in both directions. A documented history can lift a work sharply. A history that does not survive a check can cost you the entire sale — if the auction house notices it and I did not.
Gather
Collect whatever exists: labels, stamps, inscriptions on the reverse, old invoices, insurance papers, family photographs. The back of a picture is almost always more informative than the front.
Check the object
Do the labels even belong to this work? Are they on the original support, or on one added later? Reused boards and labels mounted afterwards are more common than people think, and a photograph will not show it. This step needs time with the original.
Ask
Gallery and artist archives, museums, exhibition archives, former insurers and agents. These answers are not in a database. They have to be requested, often in more than one language and through more than one stop.
Compare
Catalogue raisonné, exhibition catalogues, auction databases: do number, measurements, title and date match what is actually in front of you? A few centimetres of difference often collapse an attribution.
Write it down
In writing, with sources: what is documented, what was disproved, and from which point the chain is unbroken. The papers stay with the work and travel with a sale. They are themselves part of the value.
The result
Confirming a story is useful. Disproving one can be worth more.
Not every search ends with a prettier history. Sometimes a gallery label never belonged to this sheet. That is not bad news. It is timely news. A work whose provenance falls apart at consignment is rejected or left unsold.
- A documented history lifts the achievable price and opens houses that would otherwise decline.
- Gaps between 1933 and 1945 have to be clarified. Without that, no serious auction house will take a work.
- Attributed works stand or fall with the chain — it often decides a multiple of the price.
- Properly filed, the research is an asset that stays, not a one-off remark.
When the effort is worth it
Research takes time, and time is not free. For a landscape in the low hundreds the effort rarely matches the result. For anything in the tens of thousands, for attributed works, and for anything that may touch the years 1933 to 1945, there is no way around it. I tell you beforehand which category your work falls into — before you commission anything.
Said plainly
I prepare market-based valuations from more than ten years in the art trade and the auction business. If you need an opinion that requires a public appointment or a certification — for court, for example — I say so directly and name a suitable address.
Selling, not only valuing
When the figure is followed by a sale.
Often the valuation is only the first step. After that I place the work for a success fee — or you sell directly to Böcker Fine Art, without waiting for the next auction. Porcelain, silver, furniture and complete estates go there as well.
To the purchase site