I started with one bad print.
It was mis-framed, foxed and attributed to nobody. I paid eleven pounds for it in 2004 and spent two years finding out who made it.
That is still the whole method — buy the thing nobody has bothered to look at properly, then do the looking.
Four rules I have not broken.
See it in person
Or send someone who owes me a favour. A photograph flatters everything.
Condition over name
A damaged work by someone famous is still a damaged work.
Walk away once
If it still bothers me a week later, it was worth having.
Publish the provenance
Including the gaps. Especially the gaps.
I bought a signature, not a painting.
It was the right name in the right hand in the right corner, and I stopped looking there. The board underneath was later, the ground was wrong, and a conservator told me so in about ninety seconds.
I kept it. It hangs in the hallway where I see it every morning, which is a cheaper reminder than the one I paid for.
Provenance, condition and what I nearly bought.
Roughly a thousand words, once a month. It covers what I looked at and what I turned down.
No sales list, no investment tips.