I quoted €900 for a portrait study and the client asked if that included the frame
The frame question is the one that gets me every time. Not the haggling, not the silence after I say the number. The frame.
A woman came to the studio in March for a portrait of her father, head and shoulders, 35x45, a study really, alla prima, maybe four sessions. I said nine hundred euros, canvas and my time, and she nodded and then asked, very reasonably, if that included the frame. And I had to say no, and watch her face do the thing.
Here is what I should have said and didn't: nine hundred for a painted head is already cheap. My frames come from a man in the Croix-Rousse who does them by hand and charges me 180 for a simple moulding in walnut. So if I'd said eleven hundred, or twelve, and included the frame, she would have felt taken care of and I would have made the same money minus a conversation I did not enjoy.
Instead I said no, frame is extra, and she looked at me like the painting had shrunk.
I've been doing this twenty years and I still price the paint and forget the object. The frame, the stretcher bars, the varnish, the six weeks the canvas sits drying on a rack in my studio taking up the wall I could be working on. None of that is in the nine hundred. I know this. I say it to students.
She commissioned it anyway. I'm not asking for advice, I know what the advice is. I'm mostly annoyed that I'll have this exact conversation again in six months with somebody else.
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The frame question is such a trap because it sounds like a small logistical detail and it's actually the moment the whole thing gets reframed as a product. Like suddenly you're not selling a painted head, you're selling a thing that arrives complete and could've come from a store. And nine hundred for four alla prima sessions at 35x45 is genuinely not a lot, so her face doing the thing is her comparing it to a frame she could price in five minutes, not to four sessions of your life.
I paint in watercolor so I get the framing conversation constantly, and the only thing that's helped me is quoting the number and then immediately saying "that's the work, framing is separate and I can send you options" before the pause gets long enough for them to ask. Takes the sting out of it for me more than them honestly.
"Reframed as a product" is exactly it, and I hadn't found the words for that. A painted head becomes a thing that arrives complete, and if it arrives complete it can be compared to other complete things. The frame is where the comparison gets invited in.
Your watercolor point lands harder than you maybe meant it to. A sheet of paper is a rectangle you can price, so of course the frame becomes the conversation. At least with oil the surface already has some weight to it, people can feel that they are buying an object and not a print. Though bof, half of them still ask.
You cut off before the useful part though. How do you quote it? I have been saying the number and then mentioning the frame as a separate thing afterwards, which is clearly the wrong order because it gives her the surprise at the worst moment.