Art collection due diligence

A collection is rarely assembled with a sale in mind. It grows over decades, from dealers, auctions, friends and inheritances, and its papers show it: some works arrive with invoices and expert reports, others with a label on the stretcher, others with nothing but a family story. None of this matters while the collection hangs where it always has. It matters the moment someone else is asked to rely on it — a buyer, a bank lending against it, a museum accepting it as a gift, heirs dividing it.

A legal due diligence reads the collection work by work and then as a whole, to establish what can be relied on, what can still be put right and what must be disclosed before anyone signs:

• the rules on tracing each work’s chain of title back through its earlier owners, and on how much weight an unexplained gap can bear;
• the rules on security rights that a bank, a dealer or a storage company may still hold over works in the collection;
• the rules on the registers of stolen and missing works, and on what a search without a match does and does not prove;
• the rules on the papers a work needs to cross a border, and on works that have already travelled without them;
• the rules on the records behind each attribution and provenance — invoices, expert reports, exhibition history and correspondence;
• the rules on commitments already attached to the collection, such as works out on loan, promised gifts and rights of first refusal;
• the rules on reconciling the inventory with insurance schedules, accounts and estate papers, and on the valuations each of them uses;
• the rules on the warranties and indemnities to ask for when a collection changes hands, and on the disclosures that limit them.

Our lawyers can support you with this.