Two framed prints hang side by side. Both are signed in pencil. Both are numbered. Both say limited edition. One is an artwork made as a print. The other is a photograph of a painting, run off an inkjet printer. The price difference between them, over time, can be the difference between an asset and a decoration.
Nothing about the signature or the number tells you which is which, and that is precisely why this confusion persists.
Two different objects
An original print is a work conceived as a print. The artist makes a matrix, a screen, an etched plate, a lithographic stone or plate, a woodblock, a linoleum block, and the printed impression is the work itself. There is no prior painting that it copies. Every impression in the edition is an original, in the same way that every cast in a bronze edition is a sculpture.
A reproduction is a photographic copy of an existing work, printed by a machine. It may be beautifully made on good paper with pigment inks that will last, and there is nothing dishonest about it as an object. What makes it a reproduction is that the print is a picture of an artwork rather than the artwork.
Photography and digital art complicate the vocabulary usefully. A photographic print made by or for the photographer, in an edition, from the artist’s own file or negative, is the work. There is no earlier object it reproduces. The same is true of digitally native work output to paper. The test is not the technology, it is whether the printed sheet is the artwork or a document of one.
The words that do the damage
Most buyers are not deceived by a lie. They are deceived by a word doing more work than it should.
Giclée is the one to watch. It sounds like a fine-art printmaking process with a lineage. It is a marketing term coined for high-quality inkjet output, and it describes a printer, not a method of authorship. A giclée can be an original digital artwork or a copy of a watercolour. The word does not distinguish them.
Limited edition means only that a number was chosen. A reproduction limited to five hundred is still a reproduction, and five hundred is not scarce.
Hand-embellished or hand-finished usually means someone added brushstrokes of gel or paint on top of a printed image. It raises the price and does not change what the sheet is.
Signed and numbered is the most misleading pair of words in the trade, because the buyer reads them as evidence of originality when they are evidence only that the artist held a pencil.
Open edition at least tells you the truth: unlimited, no scarcity, priced accordingly.
Reading the edition line
The fraction in the lower left, 12/50, means the twelfth impression of an edition of fifty. In most contemporary printmaking the number does not indicate the order of printing or any difference in quality, despite a persistent belief that low numbers are better. In older intaglio work, where plates genuinely wore, the belief had a basis.
Beyond the numbered edition you will meet a small vocabulary of proofs. AP or EA, artist’s proof or épreuve d’artiste, are impressions retained by the artist outside the numbered edition, conventionally a modest proportion of it. PP, printer’s proof, goes to the workshop. HC, hors commerce, is not for sale, at least originally. BAT, bon à tirer, is the single approved impression against which the edition was matched, and it is often the most desirable sheet of all.
What should raise an eyebrow is a large quantity of proofs relative to the edition. An edition of thirty with forty artist’s proofs floating around is an edition of seventy pretending otherwise.
How to tell them apart in the room
You do not need a laboratory. You need a loupe and a few minutes.
- Look at the surface at an angle. Screenprinted ink sits on top of the paper and you can often see a slight relief where colours are laid. Inkjet sits flat and even.
- Look for a plate mark. Etchings, engravings and other intaglio prints are pressed hard enough that the edge of the plate leaves an embossed rectangle in the paper. It can be faked, but its presence is a strong signal, and its absence on something described as an etching is a serious question.
- Use the loupe on a mid-tone. Inkjet output resolves into a fine, irregular spray of dots in several colours. Screenprint shows flat areas of solid colour with crisp boundaries, sometimes with a halftone dot pattern that is regular and much coarser. Offset lithography shows a regular rosette pattern of dots.
- Look at the edges of the image. Hand-pulled screenprints often show tiny registration shifts between colour layers. Machine reproduction is perfectly registered because it was never separated.
- Look at the paper. Good printmaking paper has a deckle or a distinct handmade edge, a substantial weight and a visible texture. A watermark you can find by holding it to the light is meaningful.
- Look for a chop. Many workshops blind-emboss their mark into the margin. It identifies who printed it and is a strong provenance signal.
None of these is conclusive alone. Together they usually settle it in a minute.
Questions that get an honest answer
Ask the seller, in this order: is this an original print or a reproduction of an existing work; what process; who printed it and where; how large is the edition and how many proofs exist beyond it; is there a publisher, and is there documentation.
A knowledgeable dealer answers all five without hesitation and often enjoys being asked. Vagueness at question one is the whole answer. Watch particularly for the reply that the artist personally approved and signed every one, which is offered as though it responds to the question and does not.
Ask also whether there is a certificate, and then read it, because certificates are frequently produced by the seller and confirm only what the seller wishes to assert. A certificate from the publishing workshop naming the process, the paper and the edition size is worth something. A generic printed card is not.
What this means for value
Original prints have a real secondary market. They are catalogued, they appear at auction, and a well-known image from a good workshop holds and sometimes builds value. Reproductions almost never do. There is no depth of demand, the supply is effectively unbounded because more can be printed from the same file, and the resale market for them is close to nonexistent.
This is not an argument against buying a reproduction. If you love an image, a well-printed pigment reproduction on decent paper is an honest, modest purchase and will look good for decades. Buy it for what it is, at a price that reflects what it is, which is typically a small fraction of what an original print by the same artist would cost.
The problem is never the existence of reproductions. It is reproductions sold at original-print prices to people who were given every visual cue of originality and no clear statement of fact.
If you are the one selling
Say what it is, in the listing, in the same size type as everything else. Use the word reproduction where it applies. Do not number an open edition. Do not sign a reproduction in a way designed to read as an artist’s signature on an original. State the process, the paper and the ink.
Artists sometimes worry that this candour costs sales. It costs a few, and it buys the thing that actually sustains a practice, which is a buyer who trusts you enough to come back and spend more next time.
