Reading the back of a painting

Before you look at the front of any canvas, look at the back. The verso — the reverse side — is where a painting's life is written. Stamps, stickers, pencil inscriptions, stretcher marks, inventory numbers, customs stickers from ports of entry: they are the passport of the object.

A Beirut gallery stamp from before 1975 is immediately significant. It places the work in a specific milieu — the Monnot quarter, the Hamra cultural corridor — at a moment when the Lebanese art market was the most active in the Arab world. Works that bear these stamps carry with them an invisible sociology.

Auction house labels are equally telling. Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams all use distinct label formats that have changed over the decades; a conservator who knows the archive can date a sticker to within a decade from its typeface and adhesive alone. Fake provenance labels exist, but they rarely survive scrutiny under UV light, where the adhesive age becomes visible.

The stretcher itself holds evidence. Hand-cut mortise-and-tenon joints indicate pre-industrial manufacture, typically before 1900. Machine-cut keys, first used widely around 1920, narrow the window further. Lebanese cedar stretchers are identifiable by grain and colour, and their presence in a work attributed to a Lebanese artist adds a layer of material confirmation that no document can replicate.

We ask every consignor to photograph the verso before submission. Not for bureaucratic reasons — but because the reverse side often tells us more in thirty seconds than the front tells us in an hour. Learn to read the back of a painting, and you'll find that most questions about authenticity answer themselves.