This company helped me tremendously restore a beautiful painting lost in a fire. We have commissioned a new painting based on some old photos and they've created a wonder reproductin for us. Thank you 1st art gallery.

Ripoffreport.com allows any person to post on their website, without verifying their claims.

1st Art Gallery is a US based company.

Unfortunately one of our Chinese competitors is a mentally disturbed individual, who for many years has been trying without success to damage the reputation of our company.

It is easy to see that all the posts pertaining to our company were written by the same individual, all exhibiting the same childish language, ridiculous over the top claims, and the grammar of a ten years old.

His nonsense ranges from the company being owned by the Chinese Military, to stories of product recalls and toxicity, and posting fake reviews as if he was a real customer.

We have recently retained the services of an attorney in order to locate and prosecute this person but until then, please review the images attached to this response, showing that the images that this person is adding to his "complains" are fake images that can be found in numerous sources online. 

For real verified and unbiased reviews from real customer please visit:

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.1st-art-gallery.com

Where our rating is Excellent with a 9.8/10 score.

We are by far the largest and most respected art gallery in the world. We have more than 100,000 happy customers in more than 100 different countries. We operate online since 2003, the time before Facebook, Twitter or YouTube were founded.

No reproduction company in the world has the amount of experience we have and when it comes to the quality of the paintings or customer service we are by far your best choice.

Our testimonials page is packed with video and image testimonials which cannot be faked:

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/testimonials.html

Notice that we receive dozens of testimonials each month.

You can view hundreds of recently painted reproductions and judge the quality of our paintings yourself here: 

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/photo-testimonials.html

You can "test" our customer service by sending us an email to service [at] 1st-art-gallery.com . You'll receive a reply within six hours, usually much faster.

You may also call us during business hours at  1-888-4178278. If we're busy answering other calls, leave a message and we will return your call within a few minutes.

Our return policy and money-back guarantee policy can be read here:

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/100guarantee.html

Videos of paintings being made can be viewed here:

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/inside-our-studio.html

Our frequently asked questions page:

http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/faq.html

If you have any question or concern please contact us at service [at] 1st-art-gallery.com

Mike Mitchell,
Operations manager at 1st Art Gallery

I have made the same negative experiences. The quality is much below the guaranteed  "museum quality", if you complain a certain "David" quickly becomes utterly agressive and abusive.

They also refuse to disclose business contacts. 1st Art appears to be web company managed by just 2 persons: John and David, no surnames ever disclosed.

Be warned ! Do not buy from them !

These people really are the most tiresome sad lowlife. I said (completely truthfully – and provably) what I thought of these people 12 months ago and then moved on. But now I find that they can’t let it go, and now after a year they have unleashed another volley of insults and smears. They accuse me of having a personality disorder (actually they accuse virtually everyone who is unhappy with their service of having a personality disorder – it’s one of their standard ripostes, along with being in league with a competitor).

This is a quote from the Ripoff Report introduction: “All companies make mistakes. It is the ones that learn from their mistakes that will benefit the consumers the most.” f*g did make a mistake: they sent me a painting that was so far below museum standard (their main claim that persuaded me to order from them in the first place) that it was irredeemable. But they are totally unable to accept that they got this wrong, that they are anything other than faultless, and therefore have to accuse me of having problems. Look at the evidence; if there is a personality disorder, where is it more likely to be?

They have also accused me of telling a catalog of lies. I resent this, coming as it does from a company I regard as being the most dishonest I have encountered. I stand by everything I have said.

Their main point in this new rebuttal is that I claim that their good testimonials are faked. I have never done this; I have simply expressed surprise that the ratio of good to bad reviews is so one-sided, because I am certain that there will be many who have received paintings as poor as mine. But I have never doubted that the people who say they are happy with their picture are happy. But can these people tell museum quality from crap? I suspect that many can’t. Notice that none of their testimonials are actually from museums or art galleries. Their key witness: Chris Koster the Attorney General of Missouri – he’s a lawyer/politician: what does he know about art? Further, his testimonial was about a minor artist, George Caleb Bingham - ever heard of him in any art history class? It should not be too difficult for the Chinese artists to knock up something that would impress such a person. I was going to say that I can accept that the artists f*g use will produce many paintings to an acceptable standard, but I have just looked – really looked – at the testimonials on the f*g site, and I’m now sure that almost all the paintings are nowhere near museum quality. Look yourself - if you can’t see how lifeless and superficial these paintings are, then you will probably be happy with the cr*p these people deliver, but never, NEVER, show such paintings to anyone with an art / art history background. You possibly will never know it (depending on how polite these people are) but you will have made yourself a laughing-stock in the local cultured community.

If f*g are certain that I have lied, then I see that Ripoff Report now offer an arbitration service to assess the accuracy of reports filed here. I challenge them to use the service and to have an objective assessment of this dispute posted here. I would also remind them that I still have the painting they sold me, as they wouldn’t take it back, so I have hard evidence for my claims of sub-standard quality, in every respect: it is not museum quality canvas, not museum quality paint, and not a museum quality reproduction of the original painting.

Bring it on! Put up, or shut up.

Nobody can fake dozens of VIDEO testimonials:

1st-art-gallery.com/testimonials.html

And nobody can fake testimonials from people such as Chris Koster the Attorney General of Missouri. We would have been sued for millions. There are dozens of testimonials on our website from different organizations and prominent individuals, if they would have been fake we would have been sued. No other company has such testimonials.

From the style of writing and the amount of lies it is obvious that this person is either a fake customer sent by one of our competitors OR simply someone with a personality disorder who is looking for some significance and importance in by getting angry with no reason and spreading venom.

It was offered to him that we will improve the painting for free but he preferred paying more and waiting a few months for a different painting from somewhere else? This doesn't make any sense. Again, either a fake review or someone with a serious problem.  

With tens of thousands of paintings sold for more than 12 years you can be confident ordering from us. On the other hand if you're someone about to deal with this "Richard", I'd think about that twice.

Please call our customer support line at 888 - 417 - 8278 with any questions.

I was so pleased to read 1^st Art Gallery’s “rebuttal” of my complaint. Now everything I have said about them is publicly confirmed in their own words.

Their piece opens with the usual mixture of insults and venom, confirming their approach to customer service when faced with a complaint (I’m not alone – refer to other entries on Ripoff Report). As the Ripoff Report website says: “All businesses will get complaints. How those businesses take care of those complaints is what separates good businesses from bad businesses”. Now it’s clear how 1^st Art Gallery manages complaints, and what sort of business they are.

I made the point that you can get better than the rubbish provided by 1^st Art Gallery (F.A.G. for short); you do – reasonably - have to wait longer for a good artist to do justice to an art master, and you have to pay them more for their time, but it is still affordable and the wait is worth it. The very speed and cheapness of F.A.G.’s offering is a sure indication that the quality just isn’t there. And yet F.A.G. are still making a virtue of their speed and cheapness. They just don’t get it.

F.A.G. also have no understanding of the proverb “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”. I studied the History of Art at university level at a top flight British university, and I have a post-graduate degree in History of Architecture from another. I know what I’m talking about, I know what museum quality is, and I can recognize it when I see it. F.A.G.’s offering was so far below that standard that it was a poor joke, and an insult, both to the artist and me. The painting is just a crude reference to the original, very perfunctorily executed. I do not criticize the skill of the painter, who was clearly competent. But the time spent on the painting was about a quarter of what would have been necessary to begin to reproduce the original. It consists of daubs of paint mostly put in almost the right places, but with no detail whatsoever. It is terrible all over – it is not a case of a few details being wrong. There is no way F.A.G. would have paid for a complete and slow reworking of the picture, so to send it back at my expense would not have worked (and of course they know that).

Remember that I still have the painting – I can prove all this. This offer is merely a smokescreen, to make F.A.G. look more quality and customer orientated than they ever have any intention of being. “Send back (at your expense (to China)) the sow’s ear we sent you, and you will get a silk purse in return.” Really?? Is anyone on this planet stupid enough to believe that? And refer to other customers’ experiences when they tried to return paintings.

Now the best bit: these people cannot even understand their own product. F.A.G. claim that “After 11 years in business we have identified the optimal price to quality ratio and produce all our paintings to the same standard”. Yes! I agree! That is exactly what they do (although it’s a lie that they have identified that ratio). But that is so NOT “museum quality”. For any educated or intelligent person, this is a no-brainer. But two paragraphs later, F.A.G. say: “We advertise precisely what we sell, museum quality handmade reproductions”. Are they really so stupid? Can they really not see that within two paragraphs they have blown themselves out of the water? It seems so. And their profound stupidity gets worse.

I have been wondering for a while how a company as bad as this gets so many good reviews. I’m sure that a huge number are faked somehow or other, but I now understand why these people are so frantically aggressive in downputting anyone who doubts their credentials: they are the ultimate “Emperor’s New Clothes” in business.

They mention “our studio”. There is no such thing. I was invited to send my painting back to an address in China. Since this fiasco began, I have done some research, and found out how these people work. There are numerous studios with skilled painters in countries with lower wages – a lot in China, but also India, South East Asia, possibly Russia – wherever painters can be commissioned for low rates of pay. And they all paint to the same level. There are also many fronting companies, just like F.A.G., that exist to take customer orders and route them to such a jobbing studio. But since the studios will take any commission from anyone, and since the fronting companies will send their commission to any studio, what added value do companies like F.A.G. provide? Well, just two things. Firstly, taking and routing the order and payment. And secondly, managing the customer experience until they are satisfied. Oh dear. It seems that F.A.G. have taken the one thing that could really make them stand out, and made them stand out in a really bad way.  Stupid, or what?

You can go to any of the outfits offering “high-quality” oil paintings at really low prices and get just the same standard, very possibly painted in the same studio, and also very possibly by the same painter. F.A.G. are absolutely nothing (in fact I think they are only two people – David and John). They are only a front for this process, and the industry of the Asian studios. They never even see the paintings; they are shipped directly from the studio. It is the Asian studios that have identified and follow the optimal price to quality ratio that F.A.G. claim for themselves. So it becomes clear why they are so obsessed with building a convincing website and testimonials, and why they are so aggressive and paranoid when anyone questions their infallibility. One effective p***k and they deflate completely.

Ok, the bottom line. F.A.G. have lots and lots of glowing testimonials on their website (of course), and also on sites like Trustpilot. But I have in front of me a painting sold to me by F.A.G., and it is glaringly obvious that it is rubbish – painted to a totally unacceptable standard. And yet F.A.G. claim that all their paintings are produced to the same standard. These facts cannot be reconciled, so there is a big lie somewhere. Is it me? Am I so sick and twisted, as David claims, that I would spend my time inventing a complete fabrication to get at a few insignificant people who live on another continent? I can assure you that I have many better things to occupy my time, but these people’s dishonesty, aggressive bullying and hypocrisy have riled me, so I’m spending more time than I would really like in trying to bring them down a peg or two. I am not lying. Dishonesty angers and disgusts me; these are profoundly dishonest people.

So why so many rave reviews for these shysters? There are numerous ways these fraudsters have perfected. Everyone who orders from them is encouraged to write a favorable review. We already know that the studios paint to a standard that is ‘good enough’ for many people not to notice that it’s actually quickly and cheaply done. So out of these customers, some will be of the ‘raving‘ sort, who like to see their names on the web being positive about this mediocrity. These, of course, are the reviews that appear on their website, and are further posted on sites such as Trustpilot (although I suspect that many entries here are not from genuine customers). As for the really unhappy customers, like me, all I can say is that F.A.G. have managed, at the time of writing this, to get my review removed from Trustpilot. They know how to play the system – it’s all they do all day.

F.A.G. are devoid of all business ethics. They are also capable of being spectacularly devoid of business etiquette.

Don’t use them: there is no value they can add, and you risk having a very unpleasant experience if you hint at any dissatisfaction with them. 

1st Art Gallery receives very few negative reviews because only very few people are sick and twisted enough to give such a review when it is undue.

This person admits that he was late to contact the company in time to enjoy the full money back guarantee that we offer. He confirms that he declined the offer to ship the painting back to our studio so it could be improved until he was 100% satisfied with it and he admits that it took him many months to receive a painting that he was happy with and that he paid a significant higher amount for it.

After 11 years in business we have identified the optimal price to quality ratio and produce all our paintings to the same high standard that results in hundreds of satisfied customers each month and an endless stream of repeat business.

We display on our website dozens of Video Testimonials and thousands of pictures that were sent to us by satisfied customers as they showoff their beautiful paintings hanging on their walls. Unfortunately a small minority of individuals is loud, rude, and violent. We accept that as part of our business and are grateful that we rarely encounter such persons.

We advertise precisely what we sell, museum quality handmade reproductions, and we will continue to serve our tens of thousands of happy clients who return to us whenever they are need for high quality art.

We therefore would like to warn anyone from dealing with this individual: Richard Seed 649 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester, M20 6BA.

And finally, here is a testimonial from Chris Koster the Attorney General of Missouri: "George Caleb Bingham is one of the State of Missouri's most well-known artists. He takes on additional significance because of the role he played in state government, serving as Treasurer of our state during the middle 19th century. This conference room within the Attorney General's office is dedicated to his work. 1st-Art-Gallery's reproduction of his paintings are impressive and extraordinarily well done. Your work is greatly appreciated. "

To read thousands of additional testimonials please visit: 1st-art-gallery.com/testimonials.html