5 reasons to start buying art for your family
Wanting to find art for your family? Take our advice to ensure you find an artwork that celebrates the love and connection of every family member, young and old, close to home or faraway.
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Blythe Bolton
Monday 14 July, 2025
We buy art for all sorts of reasons. Emotional connection, to brighten our homes, to reflect our individual style, or simply because we love it. There’s an endless list, and every art collector is different. By nature, art is made to be shared – it expresses feeling, communicates deeply, or perhaps documents a moment in time – that’s why, mostly, it ends up on our walls, not locked away in our cupboards.
Collecting art is so often thought of as a personal process, but that doesn’t mean it’s limited to buying art just for yourself, or with a partner. Whether it’s to mark an occasion, or simply demonstrate your gratitude, buying art for a family member can be a beautiful, intimate, and reaffirming thing. At our fairs, we see people buying art for their children, buying art for their parents, buying art for their siblings. If you see an artwork that reminds you of a particular family member, or a particular family memory, the connection to that piece can last generations. But, what else?
Here are our top 5 reasons to start buying art for your family.
1. Art helps us understand each other
Art is a famously good conversation starter. Asking your grandma about the little watercolour painting hanging next to her dressing table can a reveal a passion or personal chapter of her history you had no idea about previously. These are the conversations that can help establish more precious connections between us and our loved ones.
“Collecting art is so often thought of as a personal process, but that doesn’t mean it’s limited to buying art just for yourself”
2. An art collection can be easily shared
Unlike a statement light fixture or marble worktop, most artworks are pretty easy to take with us from one home to another. Typically, we buy art because we love it and, although we say it often, home is in many ways ‘where the art is.’
Just think, does your daughter want a photograph of her parents hanging next to her bed at university? Probably not. However, that little framed green and white collage her parents bought to celebrate their paper anniversary? The one that she has always liked? Well, it’s a pretty special way to send a piece of home away with her.
3. Art celebrates our ability to accept each other’s differences
My father loves boats and Gerhard Richter. My sister is often attracted to woodcuts, moons, and text. In most houses, there’s wall space enough for everyone’s tastes to be expressed and combined in a way that brings diversity, texture, and character to a living space. Searching for contrast in different tastes can create an aesthetic electricity that brings a wall to life.
If you’re searching for cohesion and harmony when on the hunt for art for your child’s bedroom, for example, the puzzle of finding artworks that gel together can be a fun one, and a great way for children to practice their communication and collaboration skills.
4. Art is a physical expression of your values
Buying art by living artists signals that we care about supporting creativity and celebrating the individuals who devote their lives to art, not only now, but for generations to come. This has never been more important in a world of digital maximalism and mass production.
5. Art keeps us alive, even when we’re dead
There’s a little watercolour my grandfather picked up on a work trip to South Africa in the 1970s that sits in my parents’ house. It makes me think of him every time I see it. I wonder who the artist was and whether my grandfather’s parents liked it. Our art collections hopefully outlive all of us, and I like to think that through my artworks, some distant grand-grand-niece might one day sit with a sculpture I bought on her desk and enjoy the same colours in it that I do.
If you set out with a family member to buy a piece of art together, prioritise each other’s inquisitiveness, talk to gallerists to understand the history of a piece, and share your memories as you peruse the aisles. There are 1,000s of artworks to explore at our fairs, so lean into the process of finding the one that’s perfect for your loved one.
Feeling inspired? Visit one of our upcoming fairs.
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