Buying Art Online: What a Painter Checks Before the Canvas Ships

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 18, 2026 | 4 MIN READ Buying Art Online: What a Painter Checks Before the Canvas Ships At a Glance A screen shows composition and palette, but it hides the three things a painting actually lives by: surface, scale, and true color. Here is what I check, and what I ask for, before buying art online. The last painting I shipped left the studio still smelling of oil. Under the north window its surface did three different things between morning and afternoon: the thick passages threw small shadows, the thin glazes went almost to glass, and one cadmium red sat a half-step warmer than the screen beside it could ever show. None of that travels through a product photo. That gap, between the paint in the room and the image on the glass, is the whole problem with buying art online, and it is also where a painter’s eye earns its keep. I am not warning anyone off the internet. I sell from it, I buy from it, and most serious work now passes through a screen before it reaches a wall. I just want to name what the screen quietly removes, so the canvas that arrives is the one that was actually ordered. What a screen can’t show you when buying art online Start with color, because it is the part people trust most and should trust least. Almost every image on the web is encoded in sRGB, the color space proposed by HP and Microsoft in 1996 in a paper titled “A Standard Default Color Space for the Internet - sRGB” and later fixed as the IEC 61966-2-1 standard in 1999. It became the default precisely because it was narrow and safe, something every cheap monitor could agree on. A painter does not mix inside that narrow box. Saturated cadmiums, the deep phthalo greens, a real ultramarine at full strength: these sit outside what sRGB can describe, so the screen rounds them inward to something it can display. The painting on the page is already a polite translation of itself. Then resolution. Web images are still built for screens at roughly 72 pixels per inch, which is plenty for a photograph and nowhere near enough to read paint. Impasto, the ridge a loaded brush leaves standing, is a physical event measured in millimetres of relief. A flat 72-PPI file presses it down into a printed texture. It reads as a picture of the surface, not the surface itself. A photograph shows the image. The painting is the part the photograph leaves out. And scale. A canvas cropped to fill a phone reads as intimate; the same canvas at 180 centimetres changes a room’s center of gravity. The screen is a confident liar about size, because it makes everything one size: the size of the screen it is shown on. Buying original art online: how to read a surface you can’t touch When I am buying original art online and cannot stand in front of the work, I stop asking for prettier photos and start asking for honest ones. The single most useful image a seller can send is a raking-light shot, the surface lit hard from one side so every ridge and scrape throws a shadow. That one frame tells me whe