Clinton Howell Antiques

When discussing the incident I wrote about yesterday with a British dealer, he told me that there were a great many fakes coming out of Ireland at the moment. He had an experience with an Irishman who tried to sell him an early Regency serving table that had come from "a private home in Ireland".

My friend looked at the table and it tweaked a memory of a sale he had attended in the country. He still had the catalogue and went into his office to look it up. It was the same table and the Irishman had clearly been the consignor as the table had not sold. When he pointed this out to the Irishman, he discounted his lies and admitted that he had put it into auction. My friend was appalled at this conduct.

These are cautionary tales. Anyone who thinks they can get something on the cheap is just kidding themselves. When we willingly suspend common sense because something is too good to be true, it is too good to be true. But this story is re-played again and again as human nature is, particularly for trusting people, open to believing in miracles.

An expanding circular table, one of the fakes that has been circulating around London, is coming up for sale soon in Stamford, CT, courtesy of the Irish mob I met the other day. It is a modern table and nothing more.

It isn't often that you get to see a reasonable fake, but there is a group of Irishmen wandering around that is peddling some reasonably good fakes. Their modus operandi is to show you what is in the back of their truck and to not mention anything about what they are selling. It is simply furniture and they let the dealer make the assumption that it is antique. The price is an antique price so the dealer thinks that it is antique, but the pieces are not antiques, they are well crafted fakes.

A year or two ago there was a story about a table that was sold by a London dealer for a huge price but that when they were offered a second, virtually identical table, they realized that the first table was a fake, i.e. a piece made to deceive one into believing that it was two hundred years old. I mention this because this particular group of Irishmen know that story and it makes me think that they were either the ones who sold the table or know the person who made it. That table was an extending round table.

These Irishmen caught a dealer friend of mine in their web of deception by selling him a four pillar dining table, but he stopped the check he gave to them on determining the piece was not an antique. Because I aided him in discovering this, they came to my shop and aggressively claimed that they had never said the table was antique but that it was circa 1880. Even this assertion is false as the pedestals on the table are no more than twenty or thirty years old, if that. Oddly enough, they caught another dealer in the same web of deception after claiming they had bought the piece just eight or so miles from his shop. The lies they told him were similar but different.

These Irishmen are taking their shot at the American trade. Either they think the American trade are too stupid to tell the difference or that they can pull off a sale with their lies. In either case, they will not be allowed into my shop again. Their aggressive and threatening demeanor is no joke and belies their innocence. I hope that no other dealers get caught in this web.

There is a set of Chippendale dining chairs at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire that are made by Thomas Chippendale. It is a large set and most of the chairs have been kept around the table. However, several of them have been placed in the window alcoves for the last two hundred and fifty years and because of that have been bleached by the sun. They almost look like different chairs because the color of the chairs is so different.

I was once asked to go to Louisiana to look at a John Cobb commode. It was a period commode, serpentine shape with marquetry inlay. Unfortunately, the engraving on the commode had been re-done, most likely because someone had sanded the original surface and caused it to be erased. It was badly re-engraved and looked terrible.

The thing most ignored by people who are lumping and splitting to further define their furniture is the condition that the furniture is in. The Cobb commode was a good period piece, but it was drastically damaged by the poor re-engraving. The Chippendale chairs are just fine in my opinion, but if I was selling them, I know that most potential clients would have problems with the chairs that were sun bleached.

Every piece of furniture is different, not just because it was made one piece at a time, but because it has survived to the present age differently than the piece that might have been made right along side of it. Even, as is the case with the chairs at Nostell, if they have lived in the same room for their entire existence! Split and lump as you like as it is important to make definitions, but choose your furniture according to the condition that it is in today.

While reading a book on the contents of the Harvard Natural History Museum, I came across the distinction made by paleontologists of people who, on seeing a new skeleton found in the field, either try to define a new species (splitters) or lump the skeleton into an existing species (lumpers). This applies to how furniture is seen by the antiques trade, according to which category best advertises the piece of furniture.

For example, Thomas Chippendale made very distinctive feet on a great deal of his furniture, regardless of the form. If the legs were straight, the feet were often blocked and if turned, the feet would be bulbous at the ankles. I have a supper table at home which has straight legs that are blocked at the ankles so I lump it into the Chippendale category. Other than the high level of craftsmanship of the table and the good timber it is made from, there is nothing else that relates to Chippendale.

When Christopher Gilbert did his research on Chippendale, one of the discoveries he made was why the rails of his chairs were notched. Gilbert said this was to secure the chairs in the packing crates. Before you knew it, every chair with notches in the rails was made by Chippendale. The lumpers were happy to know this fact.

The late dealer Ronald Lee loved focusing on details and had a wide knowledge of distinctive traits on furniture from eccentric mouldings, unusual hardware, odd feet, etc. He was a splitter who would try to pin down a maker through his details. The problem was that the information was useless without the identification of the maker and a lot of Lee's knowledge died with him.

More on lumpers and splitters tomorrow.

The English fairs in June, Olympia and Grosvenor House, are in full swing as I write this. They are the main event for many in the English antique furniture trade until the November Olympia. The better financed dealers show at the International Fair in New York in October. Both of these June shows are good with Olympia currently pushing towards a more high end image. I am not certain they will ever be able to challenge Grosvenor House because of existing perceptions that second tier furniture is exhibited at Olympia. Not true at all, but perception is reality.

Suffice it to say that a great many dealers at both fairs are worthy of a visit. I saw new things, or at least I saw forms that I have heretofore only seen in books which is always worth the trip. However, I think the English should invest more in air conditioning as last Friday to Monday in London was unbearable unless you were wearing what my friend Gaylord Dillingham wears around the house, a pose pouch and a tank top. I haven't graduated to that clothing standard yet.

Speaking of Gaylord Dillingham, the BADA fair in New York at Sotheby's in January is canceled. Dillingham derserves credit for leading the charge against the fair. I think, however, that the expense of the venue was what did the fair in. Many at BADA have said the fair is "postponed", I prefer to say canceled.

A niece's husband likes to think about infinity. I can identify with that, but I also have to say that a beautiful piece of mahogany furniture has far greater interest for me. Infinity has a scope that precludes reality for those of us who are not physicists or theoretical mathematicians but good color is very real.

The decorative arts is tactile and visual. Fine art makes you feel as if it is tactile, at least good fine art does. And both the decorative and fine arts, when they are good, make you think that the creator of the chair, the canvas or whatever was thinking in some way beyond the moment of creation.

And that is what makes us interesting. Infinity exist in what we are creating, not in who we are or what we own. It exists in our children and their children. Unfortunately, it exists in hate, but it also exists in love. The answer does seem pretty simple.

The NY Times reported that Mayor Bloomberg in a speech at Johns Hopkins yesterday "urged an end to the political manipulation of science". It is about time someone said something about this. Faith based science is, I believe, an oxymoron.

Speaking of morons, I agree with Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks about being ashamed that George Bush is from Texas. I am ashamed that the university that my father attended and esteemed also is the alma mater of George, Dick Cheney and Joe Liebermann. These Elis have made Yale look badly as none of them seem to rely on their brains or education. Everything they do harks back to their "faith". What faith is it---that we should believe they know more and should be allowed to do as they please? I had that faith in my parents as a child. I won't have that kind of faith in my politicians. (Richard Nixon where are you?)

Faith is important, don't get me wrong. Faith is essential to humanity. But to insist that faith in a politician, or God for that matter, is essential for our survival on this planet is short range thinking. I would rather believe in the antiques trade which is hard enough as it is.

My friend, Gaylord Dillingham, has been venting his spleen about the forthcoming BADA Show at Sotheby's next January in the Antiques Trade Gazette. Glenn Randall has thrown a little fuel on the fire by lumping Gaylord and my positions together and then inaccurately commenting on them. (Glenn should know better as he is the proverbial pot--maybe he should join BADA but I don't think they would have him.) Gaylord can't let go because he truly feels that the BADA has been, at the least, duplicitous.

I am not sure that I agree with him. The Brits are the very first at making the antiques trade, known as "the trade" sound like one big happy family. It isn't. It is cut throat and competitive. The Brits are no more interested in making nice to American dealers than they are in making nice to American clients. They see "the trade" as business, nothing more, nothing less. That they can be polite to their competitors is a trademark of British manners. That they undermine you is a factor of business.

I have had many conversations with Gaylord over the years about seeing the Brits not as friends (although some of them certainly are) but as businessmen, intent on making a living no matter what. The passion that most of us have in this business is certainly a strong glue, but that glue has no value when it comes to doing business.

In talking to a British dealer this morning about the forthcoming BADA Show, he said that the only sensible comment he had heard was what one dealer wrote in to the "Antiques Trade Gazette". Why is Sotheby's recording record profits while the trade is struggling. The mere fact that BADA is paying Sotheby's for exhibition space is an enormous capitulation.

This is a pointed and very good question you could ask the antique trade and all the various organizations that dealers belong to. It is the point that is being ignored, the BADA Show notwithstanding. Why are the auction houses so successful?

I look at the dealers that are doing well in the English furniture trade and I see them offering great service. Sotheby's recently offered their best clients free delivery within certain perimeters of where the sale takes place as well as limited free storage. It doesn't seem like a lot and most dealers are willing to do the same, but it resonates with the clients.

The British dealer that came in to my shop this morning feels that the auction houses live in an ideal world. Clients looking at something will be told if other bidders are interested in it which only stokes the competitive desires. He also feels that there is a fraud perpetrated as well. None of the auction people, he feels, deserve the title, expert.

Think about that for awhile.

The British Antique Dealers Association are projected to do a show at Sotheby's in January of 2007. It has roused passions among dealers on both sides of the Atlantic with the American trade, particularly those exhibiting at the Winter Antiques Show, feeling that BADA has sand bagged the Winter Show which opens two days later than the BADA Fair. The English trade feel it is their right to do the show.

Of course it is their right to have the show. I, and I wrote a letter to this affect to the "Antiques Trade Gazette", believe that BADA has committed themselves rashly and thoughtlessly. They could have opened the following week, they could have opened the show to American exhibitors, they could have found a better venue than Sotheby's and they could have been in consultation with the American trade organizations.

The "Gazette" is making hay off the controversy as the sun shines. The latest letter I have heard about but not seen comes from Glenn Randall which attacks Gaylord Dillingham and me for the letters we wrote to the Gazette about the issues in the previous paragraph. It is very rich that Randall, whose exaggerations might fill a book about whoppers and not the beef kind, is standing up for the British trade who were infuriated many years ago that he was showing a three quarter size lacquer cabinet on his booth at the Winter Show without mentioning that the crest and feet were replaced. That exaggeration eventually cost Randall his place in the Winter Antiques Show, his membership in NAADAA and a great deal of money as the cabinet, alleged to have sold to the late Wendell Cherry for $1,000,000, was returned.

I remember Glenn telling me in an interview I did for "Art and Auction" over twenty-five years ago that he had been the silver medalist in the Olympics in the pole vault. When Randall's name surfaced in connection with his letter to the ATG, I thought I might google his name in the Olympics. He was never there. Oops! To have confidence in Glenn is to be conned by Glenn.

The issue remains, however, that BADA has been snarky in the extreme. It appears that the snarkiness comes form the executive board in particular who did not let their membership know about the decision to do a show until it was announced. That's a democratic organization for you! I am on the board of the League and NAADAA and we feel that our constituents should be the first to know about developments, not the last.

You could toss up my trade show experience in Dubai as either inspired or really dumb. So far, the needle is leaning towards really dumb, but then the clock has, and probably never will, run out on the experience. I hope it will be like the buying trip I took to Tasmania which actually turned a profit, but not right away.

Dubai is said to have a third of all construction cranes in the world. They are building fast and I don't see many signs of an infrastructure. When you think that virtually everything is brought in by plane, you can imagine how soon they will be needing a second airport and a lot more lanes added to the main highway. You would think that a spot of English furniture would also go down well, but that hasn't happened yet, at least as far as I am concerned.

Meanwhile think about possibilities and imagine the BADA doing something like starting a new fair in Monaco, Nairobi or Oslo, but never, no never, at Sotheby's in New York at the same time as the Winter Antiques Show. Talk about sleeping with the enemy! A letter by a John Adams to the editor of the "Antiques Trade Gazette" in response to letters written by Gaylord Dillingham and me called us "imperialistic whingers". Whew, William Safire is still on top with his inspired phrase, "nattering nabobs of negativity". This chap, Mr. Adams, should realize that he needs to work on his insults before I think of replying to him. By the way Mr. Adams, I think you are the imperialist in this situation.

It would be legitimate to think that my words of yesterday were directed at someone. That is not the case. I view expertise as an overused term that has lost its meaning, unfortunately. I would rather that expertise was venerated, but my point is that as a concept, it is not something the usual buyer can understand. The nuances of great expertise are difficult to define and arer really understood only by the cognoscenti.

There are also various facets of expertise as I said yesterday. There is market expertise which is both important and necessary for the dealer. I have to laugh when Americans go to England to buy thinking that they can beat the market. The market is just not that provincial anymore. Prices for top lots are universal. People buying and selling at auction are equally provincial in their thinking if they think that they can "beat" the dealers.

Real furniture expertise from the understanding of style, construction, materials, condition as well as knowing what to do with something that is in a bad way is very hard earned. It takes a lot of years and a lot of looking to earn it and most of the top dealers in London and New York have it in varying degrees. But this is a tricky business. Just because someone is right once does not make them right every time. I would have to include myself in this assessment.

The delusion that all antique dealers are expert in what they do is a hard one to erase in the mind of the public. Why would I want to erase such a presumption? I don't really, but in fact, and this is very true in the antiques business, the presumption of expertise is assumed and seldom proven. Does a business that has been around for fifty years mean that the current owners are experts in what they do? I don't think so.

Of all the businesses I could have chosen to be in, English antique furniture is among the more difficult for the simplest of reasons. I am American and for many buyers of English antique furniture, particularly the English public but also American buyers of English furniture, there is a presumption that the English know English furniture better than anyone else. That is why there is no one in England who knows how to speak French, Italian or any other language.

I got into the business through studying antique restoration at a furniture college in London, England. Specifically, I learned how to polish. (Because it was French polishing, I was obviously not as good at it as the French, but then......) I learned a great many things at the London College of Furniture, the foremost being that there is an exception to most rules when it comes to antiques be it in the construction, finish, hardware or design. We also learned that the antiques trade usually needed advice on how to restore things properly.

There are shibboleths that I have referred to in past blogs that adorn the antiques trade. One is red walnut. There is no such tree or wood. Another is French polish which is shellac and that it was used only after 1810. That is rubbish. Shellac has been used for centuries upon centuries for finishing. Another concerns why walnut was supplanted by mahogany as the primary cabinetmaking wood in the 18th century. It wasn't because it carved better or took a better polish but because of a tax levied on walnut timber. There are lots more of these and they continue to be sacrosanct to many dealers and that belies expertise. It instead professes ignorance.

The expertise most antique dealers have is in marketing--knowing what to buy and how to sell it. It is a very important skill and I would not undervalue it. Some dealers, the best in my opinion, know that they often need help to reason out why an antique looks the way it does, what restoration has been done, whether it has been fiddled with etc. Having a soundboard to bounce ideas off of increases knowledge. There are many dealers who do not have that interest, however. Their expertise is in finessing the buying public into getting them to believe that they are experts.

Every once in a while, you come across a company that treats you well, even though they don't really know you that well. Samuel T. Freeman and Co. of Philadelphia are just such a company. This is their two hundredth year in operation and I suspect that they have lasted so long because they are customer friendly.

I went down to Philadelphia to view the Freemans sale a week ago Sunday and returned thinking that I would arrange phone bids on several lots. I was less interested in purchasing the items that I was in listening in on the sale. If the lots went cheaply, I would bid.

As it was, I found that one of the lots I was bidding on was going incredibly cheaply so I bid and bought it for a ridiculously low price. However, when I got the bill, I found that I had bid on the wrong lot. Because I had specified just what I was bidding on, Freeman's accepted the mistake as their error. I am very thankful and I appreciate their customer friendly attitude.

How future societies will view the last half of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first, if we aren' blown to bits first, will be ripe fodder for contemporary artists. I can already see the sculpture (it probably already exists) of world leaders with their heads in the sand. Or perhaps a group of spiritual chaps, choose whatever religion you wish for this piece of art, trying to drown out others with their words as the waters of global warming rise to drown them.

No, I don't believe in an afterlife. I was reading an editorial about how atheists have, by default, become the most tolerant of beings on this planet. I am not sure its true, but I am dead certain that the fundamentalists of all religions would rather talk and walk their own game than listen to anyone else's. This would make a good painting as well.

Politics are another ripe field for art. I will never forget the photograph of the heads of the tobacco companies being sworn in to tell the whole truth about tobacco. Senate subcommittees are like a breed of animal which is good for photo ops and that is it. The baseball players talking about sterroids certainly learned that to their chagrin.

Moral outrage, not religious based but humanity based, has ceased to have any sway in our society. We are lied to continuously and we are asked to continue to listen to lies in the belief that they may come true. When I was a kid, my parents saw through that tactic when I tried it on them as self defense. Artists, the contemporary ones who are so good at mirroring our lives, need to step up and do something. Please, however, make it really good, well crafted stuff so that it won't accidentally be mistaken for junk. We don't need any more of that.