ELISE IPPOLITO
and
For example:
HEIRLOOM FINE ART
PAINTINGS
Portrait Paintings as Investment.
When you buy a painted portrait in oil or pastel, you're participating in a grand tradition. Kings and queens, popes, chancellors, presidents, commanders and all of history's high society have stood where you are standing now.
Why is it that presidents and royalty, governors, CEO's -- and more -- still commission painted portraits in this day and age, when they could buy a book full of photographic portraits for the same price?
Like platinum, paintings stand the test of time. Oil paintings last hundreds and hundreds of years. Soft pastel is the same pure pigment as the chalk used for cave paintings uncovered from thousands of years ago. When an oil painting is expertly prepared and varnished, and a soft pastel is properly sprayed, matted and framed under high quality glass, the result is a work of art that will still be here when everything else on earth has changed past imagining.
It's because the painted portrait is like a platinum and diamond ring, an heirloom passed down from one generation to the next. There's nothing wrong with costume jewelry: it can be incredibly beautiful, of very high quality, and relatively much easier to acquire. But the painted portrait takes days and months of the blood, sweat and tears of an artist who has mastered the medium. The painted portrait... is not for everyone. That's part of the mystique.
Better than platinum, the fine artist's hand-painted work holds the potential to soar in value. Mary Cassatt's portraits sell today for up to $5 million, and John Singer Sargent's for up to $10 million. I'm young, still making a name for myself. I raise my prices every few years. My stock is going up, and one day your great-great-grandchildren may be exceptionally grateful for your good taste.