How to Tell if a Watercolor Is an Original or a Print

Tilt the painting so light travels across its surface rather than straight at it. An original watercolour sits in the paper — the cotton fibre is slightly disturbed where the brush moved, pigment has granulated down into the tooth, the edges of the marks have physical depth, and the sheen varies across the sheet because different pigments dry differently. A print sits on the paper: perfectly uniform, evenly sheened, and under a loupe it dissolves into a grid of dots.

That is the whole test, it takes about sixty seconds, and it requires no expertise whatsoever. But there are three refinements worth knowing, because the market has gotten good at defeating the naive version.

1. Do not trust the texture of the paper

This is the trap, and it catches almost everyone.

Good giclée prints are printed onto genuine textured watercolour paper — sometimes onto 100% cotton rag. So the sheet feels right. It has tooth. It has deckled edges. It behaves, to the fingertips, exactly like the real thing, because it is the real thing; only the image on it is manufactured.

So the paper proves nothing. Look instead at what is sitting on the paper.

2. Look at the edges of the marks, not the marks

This is the test that cannot be faked, and it comes straight out of how the medium physically works.

When a loaded brush moves across paper and stops, the water carries pigment to the end of the stroke and abandons it there as it dries. Pigment accumulates at the edges. Watercolourists have a word for the result — the hard edge, the dried bead, the faint dark rim around a shape where the wash pooled and settled. Under raking light you can see that ridge. You can sometimes feel it.

A printed edge has no ridge, because nothing was ever deposited. The ink is a uniform film. Where the original has a topography, the print has a photograph of a topography.

Find a hard edge in the painting — the boundary of a dark shape against a light one is ideal — and look at it from an angle. In an original, the pigment gathers there. In a print, the darkness simply stops.

3. Look for granulation, and look for the accidents

Certain pigments — the ultramarines, the earths, many of the cobalts — do not dissolve so much as suspend, and as the water dries they settle into the low points of the paper's tooth. This produces a mottled, sandy, faintly starry texture that is one of the great pleasures of the medium, and it lives at the scale of the paper's grain.

A print can reproduce the appearance of granulation as an image. What it cannot do is put pigment into the valleys and not on the peaks — because a printer does not know where the valleys are. Under magnification, granulation in an original follows the paper's texture. In a print, it floats independently of it, like a photograph of sand laid over a rough wall.

And then look for the accidents. A backrun that was allowed to stay. A bloom at the edge of a wash. A place where the pigment lifted slightly when a brush passed twice. Originals carry the small, irreproducible evidence of a real event happening in real time. Prints of paintings carry those marks too, of course — but flattened, printed, sitting on top of the paper rather than in it. Everything in a print is at the same depth. That is, finally, what gives it away.

Buying online, where you cannot look

Ask for two photographs: one taken in raking light, and one close-up of a single hard edge at high magnification.

Any honest artist or dealer will send both without hesitation. It is a reasonable request, it costs them two minutes, and they have nothing to lose by it. I would send them cheerfully, and so would every serious painter I know.

Hesitation is information. So is a seller who does not understand the request.

A note on signatures, and on prints generally

A pencil signature proves nothing about originality. Artists sign limited-edition prints as a matter of course, entirely legitimately — a signed print is an honest product, and I have no quarrel with it.

The quarrel is only ever with a print sold as an original, and with the vagueness that lets it happen: language like 'watercolour on paper' or 'hand-finished' or 'artist's edition', which sounds like a painting and is not one. If a listing will not say plainly, in one word, whether the object is an original or a reproduction, treat the omission as an answer.

Ask directly. Watch what happens next.

Why this matters more than it used to

Because the thing you are paying for in an original is not the image. Images have never been cheaper — an image can now be conjured from a sentence.

What you are paying for is a record: a sequence of decisions made in real time by a person who could not take any of them back. That record is in the ridges at the edges of the strokes, in the pigment settled into the tooth, in the bloom that was allowed to stay because it was better than the plan.

It is, quite literally, on the surface. You just have to hold it to the light.