Giving Art to Your Children Before You're Gone

Most art moves down a generation in the worst possible week. After a funeral, in a hurry, with everybody exhausted and nobody entirely sure who wanted what.

It does not have to happen that way. Doing it now is better for everyone involved, and that includes you.

The story is the part that gets lost

The object survives perfectly well. The story does not survive at all.

Where you bought it, what year it was, what was going on in your life that month, why you chose that one when there were others on the wall next to it. All of that lives in exactly one place, which is your head, and once you are not here to tell it the painting quietly becomes a nice object with no history attached.

So write it down. A paragraph is plenty. Tape a card to the back of the frame or keep a file with a photograph and a few lines for each piece. Twenty minutes of work turns an inheritance into something with a voice in it.

Ask them, do not assume

This is the hardest part and the one that prevents the most damage.

Parents tend to assume the eldest should have the largest piece, or that everyone wants the one that cost the most. What actually happens, over and over, is that nobody particularly wants the big one and two of them quietly want the same small one that hung in the kitchen.

Ask directly. Ask them separately, so nobody is being polite in front of a sibling. Write down what they say and keep it with your papers. If it turns out that nobody wants a particular piece, that is genuinely useful to know now, while you still have every option open and nobody has to feel guilty about it.

Give it while you can watch

The best argument for doing this early is a slightly selfish one, and I think that is fine.

You get to see it on their wall. You get to visit and find it hanging in a hallway in a house you did not choose, in light you did not plan for, doing something you never expected. You get to hear what their friends say about it.

None of that happens if it moves in a week when nobody can see anything clearly.

The practical part

Whatever documentation exists goes with the piece and not in your filing cabinet: the certificate of authenticity, the original receipt, any appraisal, and the story card. Documentation that stays behind may as well not exist.

If a piece is valuable enough to matter for tax, speak to your accountant before you hand anything over, because there are real rules around gifts and they change often enough that I am not the person to tell you what they currently are.

And if it is travelling any distance, treat the move seriously. More paintings are damaged in transit than in every other circumstance combined.

What this actually is

This is not really estate planning, whatever it looks like on paper.

It is deciding what your family remembers, and choosing to be in the room when it happens. That is a much better thing to spend an afternoon on than most of what we spend afternoons on.

If a piece of mine is part of what you are passing along and you need documentation for it, write to me and I will put it together for you. Provenance is something I keep, and it belongs with the work.

And if you are thinking about a piece made deliberately to be handed down, that is very often what a commission turns out to be, whether or not anyone says so at the start. You can also see new work as it is finished through the Collector's Circle.

Warmly,

Dani