An executor clearing a house is rarely short of pictures. What they are short of is a defensible figure for each one, fixed at the date of death, in the form HMRC asks for in box 3 of schedule IHT407. Most of that work is research rather than connoisseurship, and the research tools cost between nothing and about £15 for a month.

We charge £30 including VAT to value a single work online and £60 for multiple items. Plenty of estates should pay that. Plenty should not. If the picture over the fireplace is a signed limited edition print bought from a gallery in 1998, you can establish its open market value yourself in an evening and keep the £60. Below is the method, the databases it runs on, what each of them charges, and the four points at which the process quietly goes wrong.

What HMRC Expects From an Art Valuation for Probate

The standard is open market value under section 160 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984: the price the work might reasonably be expected to fetch if sold on the open market on the day the owner died. It is not the insurance figure, not what was paid for it, and not what a dealer would offer for a quick sale, a distinction we have taken apart in our guide to what HMRC means by open market value.

Nothing obliges you to buy a professional valuation. IHT407 asks only that you enclose a copy “if you have a professional valuation”, and HMRC’s own internal guidance at IHTM21011 treats a valuation as something the taxpayer may or may not have obtained. What HMRC does do is triage. Officers are told to concentrate on the higher value items or estates, and where a return includes a collection of pictures, or a single picture, “valued at a substantial figure”, the guidance on paintings tells them to refer it to Shares and Assets Valuation for advice. A modest watercolour will not attract that attention. A name that a specialist recognises might.

Step One: Identify the Artist Before You Value Anything

Everything downstream depends on the name, so spend longer here than feels necessary. Read the signature under raking light, and photograph it. Then turn the work over. The reverse of a picture carries more evidence than the front: framer’s and gallery labels, exhibition labels with a catalogue number, stencils and stamps on the stretcher, old auction lot tickets, sometimes a title and date in the artist’s hand.

On prints, look along the bottom margin for an edition fraction, a pencil signature, a blindstamp near the lower corner, and any publisher’s line. A work marked 12/150 in pencil is a different proposition from an unnumbered sheet with a printed signature, which is usually a reproduction rather than a print at all.

To turn a name into a body of work, Art UK is the quickest free route for British artists, since it photographs and catalogues the public collection. Most public library memberships also give free remote access to Benezit and Grove Art through the reference portal, which will tell you whether an artist has any auction record worth chasing before you pay for a database.

Which Art Price Database to Use for Probate Research, and What It Costs

For a UK estate, the practical choice is the archive that indexes UK regional salerooms, because that is where most inherited art actually changes hands.

• thesaleroom Price Guide costs £14.95 a month with the first month free, and covers more than 21 million lots back to 2000, weighted heavily towards British auction houses. For most executors this is the only subscription needed, and cancelling inside the free month is a legitimate way to do the job for nothing.
• Invaluable sells its archive in depth bands: $30 a month or $250 a year for one year of results, $55 or $500 for five years, and $199.95 a month or $1,995 a year for the full fifteen-year professional archive. It also sells daily and weekly access, which suits a one-off job.
• artnet sells searches rather than time. Its published schedule runs from about $19 for five searches to $990 for 450, with records going back to 1985 across auction houses worldwide. Buying ten searches to settle one contested attribution is often better value than a monthly subscription.
• Artprice holds roughly 30 million auction results covering more than 635,000 artists from 1983 onwards, according to the Sotheby’s Institute of Art library guide, and is the strongest of the group on continental European material. It sells tiered subscriptions rather than a single flat rate.
• MutualArt charges $29 a month for the past year of results and $39 for unrestricted access to the archive.

Before paying anything, exhaust the free layer. The major auction houses publish their own past results without charge, and between them that covers a large share of anything significant. Barnebys and FindArtInfo aggregate enough to confirm whether an artist has a market at all. For a decorative print or a minor local landscape, that is frequently the whole exercise.

How to Search an Auction Archive When the Cataloguing Is Thin

Auctioneers write to fill a line of a catalogue, not to help a researcher three years later, so a picture may be listed as “Continental School, harbour scene, oil on board” with no artist field completed at all.

Start with the surname alone and filter by medium, rather than typing a full title that no auctioneer used. Try the variants: hyphenated and unhyphenated forms, anglicised spellings, initials in place of forenames, and the transliterations that Eastern European and Chinese names attract. Widen the date range and browse the thumbnails, because the image will identify a hand faster than the text will.

Check whether the figure shown is the hammer price or includes the buyer’s premium, since the two can differ by a quarter or more and the databases are not consistent about which they display. Do not filter out the unsold lots either. A work bought in at £4,000 tells you where the ceiling sat that day, which is evidence, and quietly ignoring it is how executors end up with an optimistic average.

Comparing Like With Like

A search returning forty results by the right artist is not yet a valuation. Rank the comparables by medium first, because oils, watercolours, drawings and prints by the same hand occupy different markets. Then size, then subject, then period. For a great many artists, subject drives price harder than dimensions do, and the collector who wants the coastal scenes is indifferent to the still lifes.

Condition and provenance adjust the figure after that. Tears, overpaint, a relined canvas, foxing and light-struck fading all reduce it, and a documented exhibition history or a named collection can lift it. If you can only find comparables that are meaningfully better or worse than the work in front of you, say so in your notes and explain the adjustment you have made. A reasoned figure with visible workings survives scrutiny far better than a confident round number.

The Cataloguing Words That Change the Value

Auction catalogues use a settled hierarchy of attribution, and the gap between its rungs is where most amateur valuations go wrong. A work catalogued as by the artist is presented as their own work. “Attributed to” signals probable but not certain authorship. “Studio of” and “circle of” place it near the artist without being by them. “Follower of”, “manner of” and “after” move progressively further away, and “bears signature” is a polite warning that the signature is not accepted.

Each step down that ladder can cut the figure by an order of magnitude, and a database search on a surname returns all of them mixed together. Read the qualifier before you note down the price.

Prints are more forgiving, which is why they are the best candidate for doing yourself. Edition size, state, publisher, whether the sheet is signed in pencil and whether the margins are intact are all visible facts that appear in catalogue descriptions, so comparables are easy to match with confidence.

Valuing at the Date of Death, Not Today

The valuation date is the date of death. Not the date probate was granted, not the date the house was cleared, and not the date you happen to be doing the research. Individual artists’ markets move sharply on a single strong sale or a retrospective, so a comparable from eighteen months the wrong side of the death is a starting point requiring judgement, not a figure to average in.

If the work is later sold, the result is evidence HMRC can look at. There is no equivalent for chattels of the loss relief available on land or quoted shares, so a sale well below the reported figure will not generate a refund, and a sale well above it invites a question about whether the original valuation was honest. Recording what you searched, on which database and on what date, costs a few minutes and answers that question years later.

When Valuing Art Yourself Stops Making Sense

All of this rests on an identifiable artist with an auction record. It falls apart when the signature is illegible or absent, when the attribution is genuinely open, when there is significant damage or restoration to price, or when the plausible range is wide enough that the top of it would draw a Shares and Assets Valuation referral. It falls apart too when the picture might be considerably better than it looks, the case that costs beneficiaries most.

Executors carry personal responsibility for the figures they submit, and that is the honest reason to buy an opinion rather than a scarcity of time.

Whether a Paid Valuation Pays for Itself

Our multiple item art valuation is £60 including VAT. Inheritance tax is charged at 40% on the part of an estate above the threshold, so £60 of tax corresponds to £150 of declared value. If researching a group of pictures properly produces a total £150 lower than the round number you would otherwise have written on IHT407, the fee has paid for itself, and every pound below that is saved tax. In an estate under the threshold there is no tax to save at all, and what you are buying is a signed opinion that will not be queried.

Set against that, a month of thesaleroom at £14.95 and an evening of your own time. For one decorative print, do it yourself. For a wall of unidentified oils in a taxpaying estate the sums point the other way, and our art valuations for probate start at £30 for a single work.