Art: The Value Of A Smile

Turn that frown upside down!

Matisse: Interior with Etruscan Vase

I have always enjoyed the saying 'Smile at the world and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone'. Those words fit in with my positive outlook and approach to life and seeing the world as a reflection of how you engage with it.

Matisse: Tabac Royale

Philip Hook's engaging art memoir 'Breakfast At Sotheby's' has an intriguing tale of the difference in the value of a painting based on the subject's facial expression. "Generally, people prefer happiness in pictures, serenity rather than conflict, intimations of pleasure rather than of pain."

Michaella

According to Philip, the line of a lady's mouth turned down into a scowl potentially reduces the value of a painting enormously as seen above with Michaella and below with Lorette.

If those ladies had only straightened their mouths into neutrality as the model in Mediation has it would have been enough to double or even treble the painting's value.

A smile as seen in Woman Sitting Before A Window would have quadrupled the value.



Matisse himself knew the importance of keeping positive when in 1940 he was forced to flee Paris from the Nazis. He continued working despite the horrors nearby and took his solace in his painting and the models sitting for him. " "That’s what keeps me there, surrounded by my fruit and flowers which I get to grips with little by little, almost without noticing and then I wait for the thunderbolt that is bound to follow.”

Do you agree that a facial expression should make such a disproportionate difference to a painting's value?