Investing in art doesn’t just add to your home décor, it makes you more introspective. If done correctly, it can also drastically increase your net worth. According to recent studies, the price of art has gone up more than 1000per cent in the past four decades. Even so, the primary question that strikes the mind of someone who has never bought art is: is it a safe investment option? The answer is simple: just like any other investment, you need to first educate yourself about the intricacies of the industry and know about the pros and cons of any niche.

So, how to go about it? First, you need to understand that ‘art’ does not just refer to paintings but includes a variety of disciplines such as sculpture, drawings, sequential art and photography. There are many more but when you’re thinking about investing in art, you should:

Study the Artist
It is extremely important to perform detailed research about the artist. Age, education, and previous exhibitions and awards should be known. This can’t be done just by browsing the internet; you will have to actually visit galleries and understand what sells in the contemporary market.

Research the Artwork
The primary question is: how to tell whether a painting is a real or a fake? This isn’t usually a problem if the artist is alive, but if it is a Picasso or a Da Vinci, or any deceased artist, you should obtain a certificate of authenticity from an expert and get it appraised.

Investigate the Dealer
Purchasing art involves a great deal of scrutiny, and the market is such that it is extremely difficult to know the reputation of dealers and brokers. It’s much more feasible to find out a gallery’s reputation.

Where to Buy Art
There are many options. Auctions are exciting, but it is extremely important to stay cautious as you’re not just paying out of passion but also thinking of it as an investment. So, you need to be certain of its value, weigh price and condition, and bid accordingly. Also, you need to know that 10% to 30% can be added to your final bid. Galleries are very different – they provide a relaxed environment in which buyers can take their time to understand, introspect and purchase.

But if you are entirely new and sceptical, perhaps you should start with art fairs as they have more variety at lower prices, and usually prove to be great learning grounds for art.

Reselling
It is extremely important to take good care of your art as it matters greatly while fixing its resale value. Keep it away from a fireplace or damp, humid rooms – these are basic. Also, a timely revaluation will enable you to know its current worth before selling it.

While investing in art, it is most important to understand whether you are buying for passion or investment. That demarcation is paramount and will lead to making the art more profitable.

Akshaypat Singhania
Chairman & Managing Director of JK International and Director of JK Organisation

Degas began by copying Italian Renaissance paintings at the Louvre and trained in the studio of Louis Lamothe, who taught in the traditional academic style, with its emphasis on line and its insistence on the crucial importance of draftsmanship. Degas was also strongly influenced by the paintings and frescoes he saw during several long trips to Italy in the late 1850s; he made many sketches and drawings of them in his notebooks.

Evidence of Degas’ classical education can be seen in his relatively static, friezelike early painting, Young Spartans Exercising (ca. 1860; National Gallery, London), done while he was still in his twenties. Yet despite the title, and the suggestion of classical drapery on some of the figures in the background, there is little that places the subject of this painting in ancient Greece. Indeed, it has been noted that the young girls have the snub noses and immature bodies of “Montmartre types,” the forerunners of the dancers Degas painted so often throughout his career. After 1865, when the Salon accepted his history painting The Misfortunes of the City of Orléans (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Degas did not paint academic subjects again, focusing his attention on scenes of modern life. He began to paint scenes of such urban leisure activities as horse racing and, after about 1870, of café-concert singers and ballet dancers.

At the age of 40, Sir Winston Churchill found himself at a career low: After the World War I attack he ordered on Gallipoli, Turkey, went horrifically awry, he was demoted from his role as First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1915. He resigned from his government post and became an officer in the army. Deflated of power and consumed with anxiety, he took up an unexpected new hobby: painting.

“Painting came to my rescue in a most trying time,” Churchill would later write in the 1920s, in essays that would become a small book, Painting as a Pastime. The hobby became, for the great British statesman, a source of delight and a respite from the stress of his career. He would eventually create over 550 paintings, crediting the practice with helping him to hone his visual acuity, powers of observation, and memory. The pastime would flourish, and perhaps even aid him, as he furthered his career as a world-renowned writer, orator, and political leader.

Churchill first picked up a brush at the suggestion of his sister-in-law, Lady Gwendoline Bertie, who was also a painter. In Painting as a Pastime, he recalled his first artmaking attempt one day in the countryside. Intimidated by the blank canvas before him, he diffidently placed a pale blue daub of paint on its surface to begin the sky, and was soon interrupted by the arrival of Glasgow painter Sir John Lavery and his wife, Hazel. The latter exclaimed, “Painting! But what are you hesitating about?” She grabbed a brush and made “large, fierce strokes and slashes of blue on the absolutely cowering canvas.” With that, Churchill wrote, “I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with Berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since.”

In the five decades that followed, Churchill was prolific, primarily focusing on landscapes and seascapes made en plein air. And despite his incessant claims that he was merely an amateur, he developed an admirable flair for the art.

“His approach was very simple: Go outside and paint what you see,” Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s great-grandson, told Artsy. “He did it for fun; he didn’t take his paintings very seriously.”
Churchill was most fond of oils, for their forgiving, flexible nature and bright colors—as well as the joy they exuded. “Just to paint is great fun,” he wrote. “The colours are lovely to look at and delicious to squeeze out.”

He was known to set up his easel outdoors to capture the grounds of his country home in Kent, called Chartwell. (Now owned by the National Trust and open to visitors today, it still houses Churchill’s preserved painting studio.) The politician-painter would also work during his travels to Egypt, Italy, Morocco, and the south of France, among other locations.

While a proclivity for outdoor subjects prevailed, he also tried his hand at still lifes and portraits, with varying degrees of success. Churchill’s works read as somewhat intimate snapshots, illustrating his favored travel destinations, holidays, and family members. On the whole, his subjects appear decidedly positive, communicating the pleasure he got out of depicting them.
Churchill was largely self-taught, and adamant that formal art lessons were a young person’s game. The thing he and his like-minded amateur peers needed most, he believed, was a certain kind of passion.

“We cannot aspire to masterpiece,” he wrote. “We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box. And for this Audacity is the only ticket.”

Nevertheless, he was keen to improve his technique, and did so by taking cues from leading artists. He admired the work of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist masters like Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, and Henri Matisse, and was even known to travel to the same locations where they had painted years before, seeking out the light and land that had proven inspirational.