A chance encounter with my school music teacher gave me my first real insight into how industry specific language, particularly the language of cataloguing, can work perfectly well inside a professional bubble while being deeply unhelpful, and even misleading, to the public.
“Bearing a signature” is a descriptive devoid of value other than that the work has a signature on it. The term “Attributed to”, by contrast, indicates a level of confidence that it is by the attributed party.
She was reminiscing about an estate auction she had attended many years ago in Melbourne and laughing about a section of porcelain items catalogued with the initials “AF”, which happened, coincidentally, to be her own initials.
She assumed the pieces were initialled “AF” and had once belonged to someone with those letters or perhaps were marked by an artist or owner. In fact, “AF” was an old cataloguing abbreviation meaning “as found”, later more bluntly expressed as “all faults”: a warning to prospective buyers that the item may be damaged or imperfect in some way.
Only after purchasing several pieces did the auction house clarify for her that each item was indeed damaged, to one degree or another. My teacher, a person of great humour and spirit, found the situation hilarious. She had learned a lesson and laughed it off. But not all cataloguing language is so harmless.
One commonly accepted, and far more problematic term is “bearing a signature.” Auction houses use this phrase when an item carries a signature that is not regarded as authentic, or when authenticity cannot be verified at the time of cataloguing. It may mean the signature was added later, is by another hand entirely, or is considered too weak or uncertain to stand behind. In other cases, it simply allows the auctioneer to acknowledge the presence of a signature without taking responsibility for its legitimacy, while leaving open the possibility of “future research.”
The difficulty is that we now operate in a 21st century marketplace where most buyers are private clients – not seasoned antique dealers – and professional advisers are far fewer than they were even fifty years ago. As a result, this sort of language has become increasingly obscure, ambiguous, and misunderstood.
My concern is that an unsuspecting buyer may easily read “bearing a signature” as an implicit assertion of authenticity. To understand what the phrase truly means, one often has to dig into a catalogue glossary or fine print, something few buyers would think to do, or even realise they must do. In my view, that is a fundamental failure of communication that needs to be rectified.
In truth, “bearing a signature” is a loose, brittle, and hollow addition to the cataloguing process. More often than not, it obscures rather than clarifies, and it carries a very real risk of misleading the buyer, even when no deliberate deception is intended.
My advice is simple: when you see the expression “bearing a signature”, assume that the signature is more likely inauthentic than genuine. The auctioneer is effectively distancing themselves from the claim, relying on an antiquated expression that no longer serves a useful purpose for today’s buyer, except, perhaps, to pass unnoticed.
By John Albrecht, Managing Director & Head of Important Collections
Top Image: Attributed to JACOPO DI CIONE (Florence, active c.1362-1398/1400) St Romauld (or Beata Jacopo Geri?), St Mark, and St Paul the Hermit. Sold for $550,000
June 2026