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1st Art Gallery The promise was quality, the reality was schlock Los Angeles, California
1st Art Gallery promises "museum quality handmade oil painting reproductions" and that its paintings "start and end with quality." It offers "100% satisfaction guaranteed."
However, what I received was schlock -- just awful, really. When I asked for a refund, I was told that my request was "immoral." Odd, because I thought it was immoral to take a guy's money and then present him with crap. The painting was so amateurish as to be an embarrassment to the gallery.
Except that the gallery wasn't embarrassed.
The story: About 3 weeks before Christmas I ordered from 1st Gallery a reproduction of the painting "Joan of Arc" by French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage. My fiancee loves the original, which hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York, and both of us have been privileged to study "Joan" in person. It is breathtaking. I asked for the painting to be rushed because Christmas was drawing near, and I wanted to present it as a gift for my fiancee. I knew she would be excited.
My heart sank after the painting arrived and I removed it from its mailing tube. If it had been a horse, I would have shot it. The subtleties of the original are gone. The colors are wrong. Joan's face, so captivating and wondrous in Bastien-Lepage's work, looks to have been drawn by an 8-year-old. The spirits that should mystically hover behind Joan instead appear menacing and heavy, as if they are about to mug her instead of inspire her.
Quality? Non-existent.
Satisfaction? Non-existent.
Instead I was told via email that a refund was "not possible" and that I was being "immoral" to even "dare to ask" for a refund because I had asked for a rush order.
Any number of steps could have been taken to avoid this mess. 1st Gallery could have rejected my rush order. 1st Gallery could have assigned the painting to a better artist. 1st Gallery could have recognized that the finished product was inferior, notified me by email and offered the choice of another attempt by a better artist or my money back.
None of those things occurred.
I might just frame the hideous thing and display it in a prominent place in my house accompanied by a placard: God-awful artwork courtesy 1st Art Gallery on the internet.
2 Updates & Rebuttals
Mike Mitchelle
United States of AmericaUnverified posts by our Chinese competition
#3UPDATE Employee
Sun, August 13, 2017
Attached to this rebuttal an image proving without doubt that all the reviews about our company are fake and were left by the same person, a Chinese competitor.
Mike Mitchell
100,000 happy customers can't be wrong
#3REBUTTAL Owner of company
Tue, September 17, 2013
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.
Our testimonials page is packed with VIDEO and PHOTO 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
http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/100guarantee.html
http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/inside-our-studio.html
http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/faq.html
Mike Mitchell,
Operations manager at 1st Art Gallery
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