Fellow appraiser Xiliary Twil send me a very interesting article which can be useful to appraisers when working on assignments for custom, commissioned portraits. The Observer article goes into some depth and length, so I have only posted to section, including the price of portraiture and is it worth the cost. The article notes the difference between the cost to commission and the secondary market, and also notes portraiture is a "sentimental endeavor".
Well worth taking a few moments to read and also print out and save for future reference.
The Observer reports
The Observer article continuesThe Price of Portraiture—for an Artist
“Portraits take time away from my other work, from exhibiting, from my career,” said painter Brenda Zlamany. On the other hand, like Warhol, she also realizes how lucrative they can be. “I can make $100,000 from a portrait. I’m not going to turn that down. I can sell a painting for $100,000 at a gallery, but I only get half, because of the dealer commission.” So she does one or two a year because of the more reliable money it brings in. “I make a really decent living, and I don’t have to teach.”
Brenda Zlamany, Portrait #135 (Kurt Landgraf with Blu on Red), 2010. Oil on panel, two panels, 88 x 41 and 27 x 27 in. Brenda Zlamany
Jacob Collins, a highly realistic painter who is represented by New York’s Adelson Galleries and does an average of two private portrait commissions annually, also pushed back on the disparagement of portraiture. “If you’re known as a portrait artist, at least you’re known for something,” he said. “A lot of people would like to be known for something.”
His portraits, like his gallery paintings, average $100,000 apiece, although his style of working with a portrait subject may not appeal to everyone. Most portraitists meet with the subject, do some sketches and take lots of photographs, then retreat to their studios to paint. Collins doesn’t use photographs but does everything—the posing, the sketches and the actual painting—in front of a posed subject. “I warn people in advance, ‘Do you really want to sit this long?’” noting that there may be 12 to 14 sessions and as many as 40 hours of posing. “Most people don’t want to do that.” Many subjects simply feel uncomfortable with someone looking directly and intently at them, which may explain why people like to look at art but not be the subject of art themselves.
He also warns prospective subjects that he won’t pretty up a face. As they sit still, sitters, especially older ones, zone out and their faces often droop. Gilbert Stuart, renowned for his portraits of George Washington, wrote that “a vacuity spread over his countenance” as soon as Washington began to sit. Most portrait subjects are older people who may become sleepy if they are required to sit inactively for extended periods of time. “I don’t mind when faces sag and go into deep repose,” Collins said. “My portraits look like a person who is sitting still.”
Greene, who also paints from life except for when the artist is deceased, noted that his chosen way of working presents some roadblocks at times. “It is easier to do a posthumous portrait than one of someone who is alive,” he said. And he has done quite a few of both over his 50-year career. “You work from a photograph, or from several photographs, selecting the facial expression that is most salient, and of course a photograph doesn’t move or talk. The expression doesn’t change, you don’t have to arrange sittings.” Alive or deceased, the price of his time and work are a constant.
For Greene, portraits of the living tend to take longer—from several months to a year—than those of the dead because of the need to do numerous sittings, perhaps as many as a dozen, each lasting three hours. And all that time is needed. For portraitists, there are a lot of decisions to be made: the size of the overall painting, what their subject should wear, whether it will be full-length, three-quarters or a bust, not to mention the background. (In the portrait that Greene did of former Republican Congressman Larry Combest, a photograph of the politician’s wife is part of the scenery—“he loved his wife very much.”)
Another decision is whether or not to include the sitter’s hands, which portrait artists often look to omit. “Hands are a pain in the ass,” Zlamany said. “Goya used to charge extra for hands.” (She didn’t recall where she read or heard that.) “Hands are extremely expressive, as expressive as a face."
Source: ObserverYour Time and Money: Is It Worth It?
Portraiture is one of the odd areas of the art world where prices on the secondary market may be but a tiny fraction of their original primary market value. Debra Force, an independent dealer in American art, told Observer that unless the subject “is a well-known person, people say, ‘Why do I want a portrait of someone I don’t know?’” Recently, she was asked by an insurance company to estimate the value of a contemporary portrait that someone had done of his wife, which had been burned in a fire. The insurance value—what it would cost to have another portrait painted of this woman—was approximately $25,000, although the fair market value (what the painting might have sold for on the secondary market if it had not been destroyed) “would have been much less. A thousand dollars, maybe $500.”
It doesn’t even matter if the artist is well-known and well-regarded, she said. Portraits by Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Sully and Gilbert Stuart, among the most renowned portrait artists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, “can be difficult to sell. You can get a Stuart for under $10,000.”
Gilbert Stuart painted one of the most iconic images of George Washington during his time, yet the artist’s other portraits can be acquired for a surprisingly low cost. Cindy Ord/Getty Images
The National Portrait Gallery acquires works for its permanent collection through gifts from private art dealers, gallery owners and family members of noted individuals whose parent or grandparent was portrayed in a painting, drawing or photograph, said Brandon Brame Fortune. They receive “maybe 100 things in the course of a year.”
Most curators look to solicit gifts from collectors of specific types of objects, but Fortune noted that there aren’t many art buyers who specialize in collecting portraiture. One who does, New York City lawyer Nathaniel Kramer, owns several hundred painted, drawn and photographed portraits of people he doesn’t know. “They’re usually friends or acquaintances of the artist,” Kramer said. “They weren’t commissioned.” Not knowing the subject isn’t a drawback for him; he just likes to look at people. “Some people like to look at horses, some people like to look at boats. I don’t ask questions of horses or boats. People are more interesting to me.”
Ultimately, however, having a portrait painted is a sentimental endeavor, and perhaps a slightly egotistical one, too. It’s something meant to preserve your memory or stand the test of time—the money and effort invested in it is the very reason they tend to linger as historical records. Long after the subject has gone, whoever he or she may have been, a painting is still something we assign immense value to, and are not given to discarding—whatever it’s actual market value may be. Having your portrait painted (or that of a loved one), whether you like the outcome or not, is a pretty sure-fire way of making sure that face sticks around.
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