Buying guide
How to tell if a painting is a print or an original
A print reproduces an image mechanically. An original was made by hand, once. The quickest reliable test is to look at the surface under a strong light held almost flat against it: an original has physical relief where the paint sits proud of the ground, and a print is flat. Magnify a mid-tone and look for a regular dot pattern — if you find one, it is a print.
That gets you the right answer perhaps nine times in ten. The tenth is where people lose money, and most of this guide is about that tenth.
The dot test
Almost every mechanically printed image is built from a grid of dots. Get a loupe on a mid-tone area — not a dark shadow, not a highlight — or use your phone's macro mode and crop in hard. What you are looking for is regularity: rows of dots at consistent spacing, often in rosette patterns where the cyan, magenta, yellow and black screens overlap at different angles.
Hand-applied paint has no such regularity. Under magnification you see pigment particles, brush drag, and edges where one stroke stopped and another started.
Two honest caveats. Fine-art giclée printing uses a randomised dot pattern specifically so it does not look like a screen, so absence of a rosette is not proof of anything. And genuine printmaking — etchings, lithographs, screenprints — is not a fake at all: those are original works in their own right, made by the artist in a limited edition, and are collected as such. The thing you are guarding against is a photographic reproduction of a painting sold as the painting.
Raking light
Turn off the room lights, hold a torch almost parallel to the surface, and look across the painting rather than at it. Impasto — paint standing proud — throws little shadows. Brush marks catch the light along their ridges. A flat print does none of this, and the difference is obvious once you have seen it.
The trap: canvas-transfer prints and enhanced giclées are given a clear gel topcoat brushed on in fake “brushstrokes”. Under raking light they do have relief. What gives them away is that the relief does not follow the image. Real brushwork describes the thing it depicts — the stroke that makes a branch runs along the branch. Fake texture is applied in a generic sweep across the whole surface, and you will see ridges crossing straight over an edge where no painter would have dragged a loaded brush.
The edges of the image
Look at where the picture meets the edge of the canvas or the paper. A painting made on that support has paint that thins, wobbles and sometimes runs over the turnover edge, because a person was working to the edge of a physical object. A print has a mechanically precise border, often with a thin uninked margin of perfectly even width, because the file was placed on the substrate.
On paper, check for a plate mark — the shallow embossed rectangle an etching or engraving plate presses into damp paper, slightly larger than the image. A real plate mark has a soft, slightly irregular bevel you can feel with a fingernail. A printed facsimile of one is flat.
Turn it over
The back tells you more than the front, and it is the part reproductions almost never get right.
- Canvas and stretcher. An older painting has a stretcher with keyed corners — small wooden wedges tapped into slots — and canvas attached with tacks rather than staples. Staples suggest post-1950s construction. None of that dates the image, but it constrains it.
- Show-through. On an original, thick passages of paint often show as faint bumps or discoloration on the reverse of the canvas. A print on canvas usually has a suspiciously clean, evenly coated back.
- Ageing that matches. Genuine age is uneven — darker where air reached, lighter under the stretcher bars, dirt in the weave. A uniformly tea- coloured back is a warning sign.
- Labels, stamps and inscriptions. Colourman's stamps, exhibition labels and framer's tickets are the beginning of a provenance trail. Photograph everything on the back before you do anything else — this matters as much for researching the signature as it does here.
Craquelure
Old paint films crack as they age, in networks that follow the stresses of the support. Real craquelure goes through the paint layer — under magnification you see into the crack, down to the ground beneath, and the edges are slightly raised. Printed craquelure is part of the image: it sits flat, it does not deepen at the edges of the panel where stress concentrates, and it often repeats.
Be careful with this one in both directions. Cracks can be induced deliberately, and plenty of genuine twentieth-century paintings have no craquelure at all because they are not old enough.
The signature
On an original, the signature is paint: it sits on top of the surrounding paint film, it has its own relief under raking light, and under magnification you can see the brush start and stop. On a reproduction the signature is part of the printed image, at exactly the same level as everything else.
The variant to watch for is a real signature added to a print — genuine ink or paint over a printed image. This is normal and legitimate for a signed limited edition, where the artist signs in pencil in the margin. It is not legitimate when someone adds a famous name to a reproduction. If the signature is the only hand-applied thing on the surface, that tells you a great deal.
What to ask the seller
Most eBay sellers of inherited or house-clearance paintings genuinely do not know what they have, and will answer straightforward questions honestly. Ask:
- A photograph of the whole back, including the stretcher corners.
- A close-up of the signature, and one of a mid-tone area, both in daylight.
- One photograph taken with a torch held flat across the surface.
- Whether the surface feels raised anywhere when they run a finger across it.
A seller who will not photograph the back is telling you something. A seller who says “I think it may be a print, I honestly don't know” is usually being straight with you, and those listings are frequently the interesting ones — that uncertainty is exactly why they are cheap.
When to stop guessing
Everything above is triage you can do from photographs and, later, in the hand. None of it is authentication. If a painting is worth enough that being wrong would hurt, the next step is a person with the object in front of them: an accredited conservator can tell you what the surface actually is in a way no photograph can, and a laboratory can date the materials.
We keep a directory of the UK routes — free auction estimates, accredited conservators, scientific labs and provenance checks — in where to get a painting authenticated in the UK. If the frame is the interesting part rather than the picture, which happens more often than people expect, start with what makes an ornate frame valuable instead.
How Cherished Canvas handles this
Every painting we list gets a print-likelihood flag, and you can filter the whole feed by it. It works on exactly the signals above, read from the listing's photographs — so it is a prompt to look harder, never an answer. Software cannot tell an original from a good print in a JPEG, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.