What to Give a Buyer When You Sell a Work Yourself
The paperwork that takes ten minutes in the studio and cannot be reconstructed once the work is gone.
Four things. An invoice, a signed record of the work with its full details, photographs of the front and the back, and a short note on materials, care and copyright. Together they take about ten minutes to prepare. They are the first link in the work's ownership history, and nobody else can make them later.
What exactly should the buyer leave with?
Four documents, and ideally one envelope or one email containing all of them. The point is not formality. The point is that in thirty years, when the work is being sold again or lent to an exhibition or valued for insurance, someone will want to know what it is and where it came from, and the only person who ever knew both at the same time was you.
| What you hand over | What it establishes | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| Invoice | That a sale happened, on a date, for a price, between two named parties | Buyer's files, and yours |
| Certificate or signed record | That you made it, and which specific work it is | Travels with the work |
| Photographs, front and back | What the work looked like the day it left the studio | Both, at full resolution |
| Work sheet | What it is made of and how to keep it well | Buyer's files |
None of this needs design. A clean page with accurate information outlasts a beautiful one with a missing dimension.
What should an artist's invoice for an artwork include?
An invoice is the commercial record of the sale: who sold what to whom, when, and for how much. For an artwork it carries more weight than it does for most objects, because it is usually the only document that names the first owner.
- The date of sale, and your full name and address.
- The buyer's full name and address. Not just a first name and an Instagram handle.
- The work: title, year, medium written out in full, dimensions in height by width by depth, and the edition number if there is one.
- Your own inventory number for the work. A short code, used once, never reused.
- The price, the currency, and whether any sales tax applies.
- What is included. Frame, plinth, hanging fittings, certificate, crate. Buyers argue about frames more often than you would expect.
- A line stating that copyright in the work remains with you.
In the United Kingdom, the right to be identified as the author of a work has to be asserted in writing under section 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. An invoice is a sensible place to do it, in one sentence, once.
Is a certificate of authenticity from the artist worth anything?
Yes, and more than any certificate issued later by anyone else. A certificate of authenticity is a signed statement confirming that a particular work is by a particular hand. Authentication boards, estates and committees spend years reconstructing what the artist could have written down in a minute.
Its value sits entirely in its detail. A card reading "this is an original work by me" above a signature is close to worthless, because it could be attached to anything. A useful certificate names the title, year, medium, exact dimensions, edition, your inventory number, and carries a small printed image of the work itself. Sign it and date it. If the work is an edition, say what the edition is and whether artist's proofs exist.
For some works the certificate does more than confirm authorship. It sets out how the work is to exist at all, which is the case with Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the candy spills, where the certificate carries the instructions that make the work a work. Most studio practices never need to go that far. But if your piece can be installed in more than one way, the certificate is where you say which ways are yours.
Certificates get separated from works. Record the certificate in your own files so that you can confirm it later if a buyer loses theirs.
Should you photograph the back of a work before it leaves the studio?
Yes, always, and it is the step most often skipped. The verso, meaning the reverse of a painting, drawing or print, is where the evidence collects: your signature and date, the stretcher, inscriptions, studio stamps, gallery labels, exhibition labels, shipping marks.
A canvas that goes out with a backing board fitted and no photograph of what is underneath has lost that information for as long as the board stays on. The same applies to works on paper once they are mounted and sealed into a frame.
Shoot both sides flat, in even light, at the highest resolution your camera allows. Add a detail shot of the signature and of any label. Keep the original files rather than the versions you compressed for email. Give the buyer a copy of all of it.
What is a work sheet, and what should it say?
A work sheet is a single page about the object rather than about the transaction. It says what the work is made of and how to live with it.
List materials specifically. Not "mixed media" but what the mixed media actually were, including the brand of paint or adhesive where a conservator would care. Say whether the surface is varnished. Say how it hangs, which way up, how much weight the fixings need. Say what light it tolerates and what it does not. If the piece includes anything that will change, say so plainly, because the buyer who knows a resin will yellow is far less unhappy in ten years than the one who finds out.
This page also functions as the first condition report, meaning a written description of the physical state of a work at a given moment. Yours is the baseline. Every later report, by an insurer, a shipper or a conservator, is measured against the day the work was finished.
Who owns the copyright after the sale?
You do, unless you have agreed in writing to hand it over. Selling the physical object and selling the right to reproduce it are two separate transactions. In the United States this is set out directly in section 202 of the Copyright Act, which separates ownership of a material object from ownership of the copyright in it. The position is the same in principle across the UK and Europe.
Most buyers are not trying to take anything from you. They want to post a photograph, or lend the work, or let a magazine shoot it in their house. Write down what they may do. One permissive, specific sentence prevents the awkward email later.
Worth knowing: in the UK the Artist's Resale Right pays you a royalty when a work is resold through an art market professional at €1,000 or more, according to DACS, which collects it. Your own first sale is not covered. But the invoice from that first sale is often what proves the work is yours when the resale happens.
How do you keep track of who owns your work?
Keep a register. A register is one list of everything you have made, one row per work, with the inventory number, title, year, medium, dimensions, photographs, where it is now and who has it. Update it on the day something moves, not at the end of the year.
When a gallery sells for you, ask for the buyer's name. Some will give it, some will not, and some collectors genuinely prefer not to be named. Record what you can. "Private collection, Oslo, acquired 2021" is a great deal better than a blank.
This is the quiet part of the job that nobody trains artists to do, and it is the part that determines whether your work can be traced in fifty years. Provenance, the documented chain of ownership of a work from the artist's hand to the present, is almost never lost in one event. It goes one undocumented sale at a time, and more often than not the first missing link is the artist's own sale.
A register is easier to keep in something built for it than in a spreadsheet you avoid opening. Samlio keeps the sale attached to the work, so the record begins where the work did.
The person best placed to say who first owned a painting is the person standing in the room it was made in, on the day it leaves.
In short
- The artist's own sale is the first link in a work's ownership history, and it is the link most often missing.
- A certificate of authenticity is only as useful as the detail on it; a signature with no title, dimensions or image could belong to anything.
- Photograph the back of a work before it leaves the studio, because a backing board or a new frame can hide that information for decades.
- Selling the object does not sell the copyright, so say in one sentence on the invoice what the buyer may and may not reproduce.
- The first description you write of a finished work becomes the baseline against which every future condition report is read.
Questions people ask next
- What if I sold work years ago and kept no records?
- Reconstruct what you can while the memory is still available to you. Bank statements, old emails, exhibition lists and shipping receipts will give you dates and names for more works than you expect. Write down what is certain, mark what is uncertain as uncertain, and start keeping proper records from the next sale onward.
- Do I need a certificate for small works and prints too?
- For prints and editions, yes, because the edition number is part of what the buyer is acquiring and it needs to be stated somewhere permanent. For small unique works, an invoice with full details and a photograph does most of the same job. The test is whether a stranger could match the document to the object without your help.
- The buyer wants to stay anonymous. What do I record?
- Record the full details privately in your own register and agree with the buyer what may be shown publicly. A common arrangement is that exhibition labels and published lists read "private collection" with a city and year, while your own files hold the name. Anonymity in public and anonymity in your records are not the same thing.
- Should the invoice mention tax?
- It should state the position clearly, whichever position applies to you. Whether you charge sales tax or VAT depends on where you are and whether you are registered, and a local accountant will answer that in one conversation. An invoice that is silent on tax causes problems for the buyer later, particularly if the work is resold or exported.
- What do I do when a work I sold changes hands again?
- Add the new owner to your register if you learn of it, with the date and how you found out. Collectors and galleries will sometimes tell you, and resale royalty statements will sometimes tell you in countries where that right applies. Nothing obliges a buyer to inform you, so treat every piece of information that arrives as worth writing down.
Sources
- DACS, Artist's Resale Right, Supports the €1,000 threshold, the role of an art market professional, and the exclusion of the artist's first sale.
- Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 78, Supports the requirement that the right to be identified as author be asserted in writing in the UK.
- 17 U.S. Code § 202, Ownership of copyright as distinct from ownership of material object, Supports the separation of physical ownership from copyright.
- Tate, Art Terms: Provenance, Supports the definition of provenance as a documented chain of ownership.
Before the next deadline
Collected, every other Tuesday: the open calls, residencies and grants closing next, and one thing to do the same evening. Unsubscribe in one click.
Written for Collected, the publication of Samlio, where artists and collectors keep a record of their work.