What to commission for an anniversary

The most common anniversary commission we receive arrives about eleven days before the date. It is an honest request, and roughly half the time it becomes a rush job with a $90 surcharge attached. The rest of the time the buyer quietly accepts a smaller canvas, a simpler composition, or a date that slips by a week. None of that has to happen if you work backwards from the calendar instead of forwards from the painting.

Start from the milestone, not the canvas

Anniversaries arrive with a brief already written into them. The traditional gift list — paper, cotton, leather, wood, tin, silver, pearl, ruby, gold, diamond — is not a marketing invention; it is shorthand for what the couple’s photographic history looks like. A first anniversary means two people with a hundred good phone photographs. A fiftieth means a wedding print from 1976 that has changed colour. Those two commissions want different canvases, different sources and different budgets, and starting from the milestone gets you to the right one faster than starting from a size.

What each milestone actually needs

1st and 2nd — paper and cotton

Newly married couples have the best photographic material of any client and the least need for repair, so the decision here is subject count. A single portrait of the person you married is the classic answer: one face, about three inches of head, a 12 × 16 in canvas at $289 or a 16 × 20 in at $389. If you want both of you on one canvas, the honest minimum is 12 × 16 in with two subjects at $379. Two people on anything smaller and each face falls toward the two-inch line where a portrait stops reading as a person from across a room.

5th and 10th — wood and tin

A tenth anniversary usually means children are in the picture, literally. The canvas has to grow, not because the buyers got richer but because the subject count went from two to four. Four subjects on a 16 × 20 in canvas is $749 and leaves each head about 2.2 inches; our composition guide calls that the floor, and it is the right word. Moving to 20 × 24 in gives four subjects heads of roughly 2.7 inches for $1,029, and that is the size at which a family portrait stops looking negotiated and starts looking comfortable.

25th — silver

Twenty-five years is the first milestone where the wedding photograph becomes a historical document. A colour print from 2001, scanned today, is often low in saturation with a yellow-orange cast and will not sit naturally beside a photograph taken last summer. Colour-matching the two sources and compositing them into one composition is a $60–$70 addition, the same service that repairs a crease or a faded corner. For two subjects, 16 × 20 in is $499 and 20 × 24 in is $699; with grown children, four subjects on 20 × 24 in is $1,029.

40th and 50th — ruby and gold

At forty and fifty years the canvas should be wide and the composition anchored on one figure. A 30 × 40 in canvas carries one subject at $1,090 and four at $2,090, and faces get three inches or more — the size at which a portrait works from the doorway as well as from the sofa. This is also the milestone where a pair of canvases beats one large painting: two 16 × 20 in single-subject portraits cost $778 and each face gets a full three inches, against $1,560 for one 24 × 36 in canvas carrying four subjects.

The photograph is where anniversaries go wrong

Milestone photographs divide into two eras, and the divide matters more than anything else about the file.

• Film prints, roughly pre-2005. Send the original print, not a phone photograph of it — a flatbed scan at 600 dpi costs nothing at any print shop. If the print has gone orange or magenta, that is normal ageing and it is correctable; our guide to painting from an old, damaged photograph sets out what survives and what does not.
• Digital originals, 2005 onwards. Send the original file, not a download from a social feed and not a screenshot. Messaging apps re-compress a photograph down to a fraction of its detail.
• Resolution has a floor. About 500 pixels across the face is the minimum we can work from honestly, and 1,000 pixels or more is comfortable — any phone made in the last eight years clears it. A face cut out of a wide group shot is usually only 300–400 pixels wide.
• One primary photograph per person, plus three to five alternates. Mark which file is the face to trust; our reference photo guide covers sharpness, direction of light and what to do when the only good photograph is a bad one.

One limit worth stating before you fall in love with a composition: a painter can invent a background, a jacket, a chair or a sky, but cannot invent the shape of a nose that is not in any photograph.

Sizes: decide from the wall, not the price list

An anniversary painting is usually the largest thing in the room, so it has to be sized for the room and not for the budget. Two numbers do most of the work: hang the centre of the canvas 57 to 60 inches from the floor, and let the width run to two-thirds to three-quarters of the furniture below it. Above an 84-inch sofa that means a 24 to 36 inch canvas — a 24 × 36 in, not a 16 × 20 in. A canvas narrower than two-thirds of the sofa reads as a misplaced postage stamp however beautiful the faces are. The full arithmetic is in our wall-art sizing guide. Measure the wall before you choose the gift, and send us a photograph of it with the width written down.

What it costs, and what the money buys

Price depends on two variables and nothing else: the canvas size and the number of subjects on it. Style, background, colour work and how many reference photographs you send do not change the number. The full table is on the custom portraits page; this is the part that matters for gift planning.

Read it in three bands. Up to $499 covers a single-subject portrait as large as 16 × 20 in, or a two-subject portrait at 12 × 16 in — the entry band, and enough painting for a first, fifth or tenth anniversary. Between $549 and $1,059 is the middle band: three or four subjects, or a large canvas carrying one. Above $1,090 you are buying wall presence as much as faces, which is the correct band for a fortieth or a fiftieth. Painting takes three to five weeks plus three to five business days in transit, and there is no surcharge for a crowded composition. Larger commissions can be split 50% to begin and 50% before dispatch. Stretching onto bars at a local framer runs roughly $35–$75 at 16 × 20 in and $70–$140 at 24 × 36 in.

The deadline arithmetic

Work backwards from the date on the card, not from the date you plan to order.

1. Six weeks before the anniversary is the comfortable order date: five full weeks of painting, a week for transit, and room for the one round of adjustments you are entitled to.
2. Five weeks before is workable if you send good photographs in the first email and approve the mock-up within 48 hours.
3. Three weeks before means the $90 rush option, and only if the commission is booked before painting starts. Rush brings the painting into a three-week window; it does not shorten transit.
4. For a late-December date, the comfortable cut-off is around 14 November and the absolute cut-off with rush is roughly 1 December. Every year we refund two or three people who waited until the first week of December.
5. Local stretching and framing adds three to seven days. If the painting is framed before the date, add that week to the plan.

Five ways an anniversary commission goes wrong

• Choosing the canvas before deciding who is in it. A couple’s portrait that becomes a family portrait halfway through the conversation is a size up, and the size up is not always on the original budget.
• Using the wedding photograph because it is “the” photograph. It is often a full-length shot where each face is 300 pixels wide; a good head-and-shoulders photograph from the same year almost always exists.
• Sizing from the price list instead of the wall. The most expensive mistake in this article, because it stays invisible until the painting is hanging.
• Treating a surprise as a secret. A portrait is a gift the recipient looks at every day for thirty years, so at minimum involve them in choosing the photograph. If the surprise matters more, we can produce the digital mock-up for one partner to approve without revealing the finished painting.
• Forgetting that the frame is local. A canvas that arrives six days before the date with no framer booked is a canvas you hang unframed.

What to send

1. Who is in the painting, and the date. “Our parents, twenty-five years, 12 April” is a complete brief; three paragraphs of adjectives is not.
2. One marked primary photograph per person, plus a few alternates, sent as original files by email or as a cloud folder link.
3. Relative heights, if the sources come from different years. A photograph flattens them; one sentence does not.
4. The date it has to arrive, not the date of the anniversary. Those are usually different, and the difference is a week.

Send it to the quote page or straight to [email protected], and you will get a fixed price, a recommended canvas size and an honest verdict on the photographs, usually within 24 hours.

The short version

• Start from the milestone: paper means phone photographs, gold means a wedding print that needs colour work.
• Two subjects need at least 12 × 16 in. Four subjects want 20 × 24 in or larger.
• Send originals, never screenshots or social-media downloads. Faces need 500 pixels minimum, 1,000 comfortably.
• Order six weeks ahead, and leave another week if a framer is stretching it.
• Size the canvas from the wall first, then read the price list.