Authencity
How We Verify Authenticity
House of AshVed
The short version
We don’t buy from dealers, estates or the secondary market. We go to the artist — to their village or their studio — meet them, watch them work, and document the piece at the moment it’s made. That’s not a claim we make after the fact. It’s how the work reaches us in the first place. Everything else — the certificate, the archive, the guarantee — is built on top of that.
Why this starts before the sale, not at it
Most galleries verify a work after it arrives — checking a signature, comparing a style,
trusting a provenance chain someone else wrote. That works when you’re dealing in resale.
We don’t deal in resale. Every work in our collection comes to us directly from the person
who made it, which means the question “is this real?” is answered at the source, not
investigated later.
What we actually do
We visit. For folk and tribal artists, that means going to the home or workshop where the
work is made — not a showroom, not an intermediary. We spend time there. We watch the
process, not just the finished piece.
We film it. Where the tradition allows, we record how the work comes together — the
artist’s hand, the materials, the stages. This becomes part of our record for that piece, not a promotional afterthought.
We ask, and we listen carefully to the answer. Who made this. Alone, or with family. What materials, what techniques, what the subject means. Where it sits in the artist’s own body of work. We record this in the artist’s own words wherever we can, because that account is itself part of the provenance.
We build the relationship before we build the inventory. Of the artists we work with, mostsell to us directly and exclusively for the works we hold — a handful, already committed elsewhere, sell to us outright so there’s no ambiguity about the work’s status. Either way, weknow precisely where each piece came from, because we were there when it left the artist’s hands.
Two traditions, two kinds of verification
Folk and tribal art is often made within a family or workshop practice, and that is not a
complication to hide — it’s the tradition working as it always has. We describe this honestly: by the artist where we’ve verified a single hand, from the workshop of where family orapprentices contributed under the artist’s direction. Both are real, both are disclosed, and both are documented against the named artist’s archive.
Contemporary art comes with its own trail — exhibition history, gallery representation, the artist’s own signature practice and documentation. Here our verification leans on direct
studio relationships and the artist’s own record-keeping alongside ours.
Neither category is treated as more “authentic” than the other. Both are documented to the same standard: source, process, and the artist’s own account, captured at the time of
creation.
What you receive
Every work is sold with a Certificate of Authenticity recording the artist, the art form, the
materials, dimensions, year of making, and its provenance as known to us. This isn’t
generated from a template — it’s built from what we documented on the visit.
Behind the certificate sits a permanent archive for every work we’ve ever sold: images,
video where available, materials, the artist’s own account, and every subsequent transfer we learn of. This record doesn’t expire, isn’t for sale, and is what makes a work insurable,
exhibitable and resellable decades from now.
We’re also building toward a digital, tamper-evident version of this record, so that a
certificate’s authenticity can be verified independently of us — details to follow as this rolls
out.
What backs it
Documentation is only as good as what happens when it’s questioned. If a work’s
authenticity is ever genuinely disputed, we don’t ask you to take our word for it — an
independent, recognised authority in that art form settles it, and if we disagree with your
expert, we jointly appoint one whose finding binds us both. Our authenticity guarantee has no time limit and passes to whoever inherits the work. The full terms are in our Terms of Service and Refund Policy.
What we don’t do
We don’t deal in antiquities, undocumented secondary-market pieces, or work we can’t
trace to its maker. If a piece’s origin can’t be verified this way, it doesn’t join our collection — however good it looks on a wall.
Verification, at its core, isn’t a document. It’s a relationship with the person who made the
work, recorded honestly, kept permanently.
