What belongs on the inventory list when you hand work to a gallery

What is a consignment list?

It is the receipt for your work. When you consign work to a gallery, you leave it in their care, and they act as your agent, for sale or return. The gallery holds the work. It does not own it.

The list, sometimes called an inventory sheet, a stock list or a consignment receipt, is the only document that says which objects in the gallery's store are yours, in what condition they arrived and at what price they may be sold. One line per work. Two signatures. A copy each.

Artists learn this the hard way. In October 2026 a painter on r/artbusiness described bringing sixteen framed originals to a gallery for a festival weekend and leaving a day later with misgivings. The most upvoted practical advice in the thread was short: never go into a gallery situation without a signed contract, and you should already have had an inventory list with photos in hand when you arrived with the work.

What should be on each line?

At the bottom: the gallery's name and address, the name of the person receiving the work, both signatures and the date.

The packing line sounds fussy until you need it. In June 2026 a painter in the UK described collecting a £1,000 painting at the end of an open exhibition and finding her professional foam packing gone, the work still on the wall, and no sign-off or damage inspection on the way out. A line on the list saying what the work arrived in, and a signature when it leaves, turn that from a complaint into a claim.

Why do the photographs matter more than the description?

Because a description is an argument and a photograph is a record. Take them on the day of hand-over, in the gallery if you can: front, back, signature, and any existing damage close up. Keep them with the date. If the work comes back with a dented corner, you have a dated picture of that corner as it left your hands.

The same photograph belongs on the list itself. A thumbnail beside each line costs nothing and removes the commonest confusion in a busy store, which is two blue paintings of similar size.

What should the contract say?

The list says what. The contract says on what terms. They should be attached to each other, and the agreement should state that later lists, once signed by both of you, become part of it. That way a second delivery in spring is covered by the same terms as the first.

The points worth having in writing:

1. The work remains yours until you are paid. This is called retention of title. Henry Lydiate, writing in Artquest's Artlaw column, recommends a clause saying the artist keeps ownership of all work delivered until the gallery has received the full purchase price, with each later delivery evidenced by a detailed consignment receipt signed by the gallery.
2. Prices and discounts. The retail price per work, and whether the gallery may offer a discount without asking you. If it may, who absorbs it.
3. Commission. The percentage, and on which figure it is calculated: the price including or excluding VAT, with or without the frame.
4. Payment after a sale. A fixed number of days, and a statement of what sold, when and for how much. Ask whether you will be told the buyer's name.
5. Insurance. Artquest's view is that a gallery is always legally responsible for taking good care of work it receives on consignment, and that whatever is agreed about insurance should be written into the exhibition contract.
6. Carriage both ways, and who pays for it.
7. Duration and return. When the consignment ends, and how unsold work comes back.
8. Images. Whether the gallery may photograph and publish the work, and for what.

You do not need a lawyer to ask for these. Many galleries have a standard agreement; read it entirely, and if they have none, bring your own.

What happens to your work if the gallery closes?

This is the reason the list exists. When a gallery becomes insolvent, its assets are gathered up to pay its creditors. Work on consignment is controlled by the gallery, not owned by it, but someone has to prove which work that is. Lydiate's advice in the same column is that artists affected by a gallery's insolvency should contact the administrator straight away and formally notify them of the consigned works, together with the documents that identify them.

Those documents are the signed list, the photographs and the agreement. Without them, you are one more voice in a queue of creditors describing a painting from memory.

The rules differ by country. In New York, for example, the law treats consigned work and the money from its sale as trust property held for the artist, which protects both from the gallery's creditors. Do not assume your own country does the same. Put retention of title in the contract instead.

What should you keep yourself?

• Your signed copy of every list, including the one signed when work comes back.
• The hand-over photographs, dated.
• The agreement, and any email that changes a price or extends a date.
• A record per work of where it is now: the gallery, the date it went in and the date it is due back.
• Every sale, on the work it belongs to: date, price, what you received and when.

Keep that record by work rather than by gallery. A work moves. It goes to a gallery, comes back, goes to a fair, is lent to an exhibition, and is finally sold. If the history lives in a folder called "Gallery A, 2026", the second gallery's paperwork is somewhere else, and the full story of the piece is in no single place. The gallery keeps its own books, of course. A gallery owner with twenty-three artists on r/artbusiness described the gallery's system in detail: one spreadsheet a year, one tab a month, reconciled monthly. That is the gallery's record of its stock. Yours has to be yours.

Making the list from the record you already keep

In Samlio, select the works going to the gallery in your archive and export them as a consignment list. You fill in the gallery, the period and the commission, and the gallery is already filled in if you have recorded it on the works. The PDF puts the terms at the top, then one line per work with a small image, title, the work's inventory number from your archive, year, medium, size and sale price in euros, the currency the archive records prices in, then a total, a sentence saying the gallery received the works in the condition shown on the terms stated, and a signature line for each of you. Any term you leave blank prints as a line to fill in by hand. The insured value and the owner never appear on it.

Two things it does not do. There is no condition column, so a known mark or a scuffed frame goes in the work's notes, which you can choose to print, or by hand on the list. And the commission is one figure for the whole delivery, so a work on different terms needs a list of its own.

If the work is going to a show you were selected for, the open call calendar lists the fee and terms of each call we publish. If you were invited and asked to pay, read this first.