Clinton Howell Antiques

Auctions Again and Forever

Many dealers blame the auction houses for their voracious appetites in gobbling up goods and clients and they are often stunned that an auction will sell things for more than similar items in shops. (See yesterday's entry.) I am neither amazed nor do I blame them for their success. I think auction houses do such a good job at marketing that they deserve their success. However, I do believe that the inherent contradiction of who the auction house serves, the buyer or the seller, is at the crux of any criticism that can be levelled at them. My regret is that very few dealers or their associations understand this point. Because dealers are competitive with one another, they will not join in a concerted effort to promote their expertise and their service and that gives the auction houses a decided advantage in marketing. I have to say that if I had a huge cache of virtually unseen high end English furniture to sell, I might consider the auction houses as a very good outlet. Indeed a number of very smart dealers have used this to their advantage by contracting with the auction houses to sell their goods. One London dealer did it twice, once with Christie's and once with Sotheby's. Give the man credit, he knew that he could rely on them to do a great job, better than he or any of the fairs he haas participated in, at selling his goods.

Auctions

The two sales, one at Christie's last Frdiay and one at Sotheby's on Saturday, were generally quite successful. How is it that they can be so successful when the market as a whole, particularly in London, is not? Good question. Is it the marketing or is it perhaps the hype that surrounds a sale? For example, Christie's had a section in thier sale of the "The Contents of a New York Townhouse". This townhouse was designed by Mott B. Schmidt in 1926 and was built for John and Evelyn Trevor. The Trevors lived there until they sold the house in the late 80's or early 90's. Evelyn Trevor was a decorator and was responsible for buying most of the furniture and fitments in the house. The house was sold once before the current occupant bought it in the 1990's and he hired a dealer to help him furnish the house. Why was this collection of furniture so popular? A nice blurb by Anthony Coleridge about satinwood perhaps when most of the furniture was actually harewood? Who knows, but a single inlaid pembroke table made $168,000 (Lot 250) and a single made $66,000 (Lot 246). I have a pair of satinwood pembrokes on my website listed at $145,000. What about the three pairs of hall chairs that made between $60,000 and $50,400 (Lots 220-222). I have a pair, probably by Ince and Mayhew for $48,500. Sour grapes? Not at all. I am pleased that the market is so vibrant as there has to be some unhappy underbidders. If only they could find me. Regardless, when it comes to marketing, the auction houses win hands down.

If you read Samuel Pepys' diaries, you will see how much pleasure he took in material things. Of course, although well connected, he was essentially a self made man and took great pride in his worldly advancement. Possessions counted for a lot, social position was certainly part of it as was good taste. Pepys was proud of the fact that he advised his cabinetmaker on the making of bookshelves, for example.

Auction houses came into being because the illiquid assets represented by worldly goods needed disposing. Bankruptcies and death were two good reasons for such places, but even people in tight financial straits used them. William Hamilton, husband of the famous Emma, Nelson's mistress, collected art while ambassador to the Court of Two Sicilies and had to use auctions to raise cash.

The story is not that much different today. Death still requires the dispersal of goods as does debt. However, the auction houses have taken on the role of experts to bolster their marketing. That there are knowledgeable people at auction houses is a fact but it is their job to move the goods that are in front of them, not to say that what they are selling might be the second best item they have ever seen. No, everything in every sale must go and the language of expertise and sales are manipulated to that end. So, who do they serve, the buyer or the seller?

I just had cause to look at a Christie's catalogue of English furniture from 1983 that was packed with great English furniture. There were several things that struck me. The first was the quantity of good things for sale. The sale, minor in that there were only 150 lots, would be considered major for the quality being offered. The second interesting thing was that most of the photographs were in black and white. The color photographs were of the items, I presume, that Christies thought to be more valuable. The funny thing is that they were not necessarily the best things in the sale. Further, there were no estimates and lastly, the descriptions were very basic, tersely written with no academic pretensions. The transition to today's full color catalogues, lengthy descriptions and bold estimates is about marketing--it is a statement designed to promote the expertise of the auction house.

The question I would ask is, who is the auction house serving--the buyer or the seller?

The concept of antiques as investments took off in the 1980's. The number of people that saw opportunity  in buying and selling English furniture permanently altered the market and propelled prices skyward. A sleepy, often genteel trade became a market.

There is a flaw in selling decorative arts, particularly furniture, as investments. The flaw is that not all people see things in the same way. Put aside the charlatans whose intent was to defraud and you still had people looking at furniture from different points of view. Any ten dealers will disagree on what constitutes good color, proportion, quality, timber choice and, of course the style that is their favorite.

Everything has a value of course. Antique dealers see value and try to maximize it in their trading. That is not investment, it is a business. For buyers, antiques should be a stylistic preference. Personally, I like good design of any era and any country and I will buy it if the intrinsic nature of the item truly appeals to me. I am on a budget but most people are. For me, that is all the investment I need.

I recoiled from the rococo style when I first came upon it in the 1970's. I thought it frou-frou, kitsch, frivolous and marginal. I didn't get it at all. Well it can be frivolous, and frou-frou and even kitsch, but if it is done well, it is never marginal. Not unlike any style that is debased by bad copies, rococo really suffers when it is poorly executed. Every style needs to be done well and when it is, it really sings. But rococo is fabulously beautiful when everything is right. By everything, I mean the craftsmanship and design have to be intensely symbiotic. Look at the Thomas Johnson candlestands in the Philadelphia Museum of Art with stalactites, stalagmites, dolphins and scrolls. As Martina Gruenewald my intern says, "they look like they were born, not made".

Understanding the rococo style is not easy. Reading Fiske Kimball on rococo is even denser. If you are in New York and have the opportunity to get to Christie's before April 14, I strongly recommend a visit to see the rococo brackets (Lot 200) that Christie's attributes to Matthias Locke based on a 1752 drawing by him. Locke's ability to understand and execut e rococo design is magnificent.

I would suggest to anyone trying to appreciate the rococo style that they focus on structure and how the visual weight of a rococo object is sustained. When it works well, the object has a certain weightlessness, or more accurately, the object has enough drama so that it doesn't need supporting. For anyone that really wants to be wowed by rococo, a visit to Claydon House is a must as there are roomfuls of it.

I am often asked who the best shipper is of antique furniture. The best shipper is always compromised by his weakest link which can be anyone on a bad day. But no bad days is what you are paying for from a good shipper. I have several suggestions, however. If you are shipping from New York to London, for example, it really helps to have someone that you can contact locally, i.e. a company with offices in both places. The frustration of having to call someone on English time about a complaint or enquiry in New York can be beyond aggravation. The second suggestion is that if you purchase something in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, it pays you to contact a local shipper to do the freighting and not to use a New York or London based shipper. It will save you money and if you are explicit, in writing, with the local about packing, method of shipping and insurance, you will probably get as good a job as you will by arranging it with a larger shipper. I once had a sofa table shipped from Oregon for $200 because I liked what the shipper said to me about how he packed. The table arrived unscathed in triple weight cardboard with the table double boxed. I had a shipper in Detroit send me a mirror that was broken in the packing because he was so inept. The box he put everything into was unscathed. I lay the blame with myself because I should have issued written instructions about how to pack the mirror.

It is a charmed person that can elude shipping problems. They happen. If you want someone to blame, hire a knowledgeable agent. One of the best is Mark Aiston. If you want a good shipping company, hire Art Logistics which are in both London and New York. Both Mark and Art Logistics have been very good to me.

The Coniferales are the order in which yew (Taxus) is found. In non-botanical terms, yew is considered a softwood meaning that it is a timber without pores. Standard misconceptions about softwood are that it is soft, yew for one is particularly hard and dense, and that they are evergreen. Larch or Laryx is not an evergreen and yet it is a softwood. Hardwoods can also be evergreen and they can also be soft. Balsa wood is a good example of a soft hardwood.

So why the prejudice against softwoods as a primary timber in the 18th century? Part of the reason has to be that pine and all the conifers do not take stain well and yet they are excellent for paint or gesso and hence you will find mirrors carved in pine and painted furniture made of pine. The grain of softwoods also could be considered too bland. Further, however, it must be understood that the economy of imported timbers dictated what timbers were used by the high end furniture trade. There are several articles in the Furniture History Society journal of 1994 by Adam Bowatt and John M. Cross which are illuminating on this subject.

Yew is a beautiful and native timber and was not subject to import levies in the 18th century. However, because native woods were closely guarded by their owners, it is unlikely that it was readily available commercially. It might also not have had as much eclat being a native timber. In addition, yew was a traditional grave yard tree which might have cast a pall on the material at least for the end user. Finally, it is not an easy timber to work as the grain is anything but straight. That yew was used in the country is understandable, but it is exceedingly rare to find it used in high style furniture. The yew banded satinwood card tables which started me off on this diatribe, at least from the point of view of their timber, are very rare indeed.

I made a big deal about yew wood yesterday because I so seldom see it used in high style English furniture. Occasionally yew inlay can be found on good, but not really high style furniture and even  that is the exception and not the rule. It is seldom as prominent as the banding on the pair of card tables I wrote about on April 4. For the most part, yew is found in country furniture such as Windsor chairs or Welsh dressers and, for the most part, it is sensational looking. Despite this and because it is a softwood and because the primary role of softwoods in high style furniture is either in the carcase or to be painted or gilded, there was likely to have been a prejudice against the use of yew. (A Brooklynite phrase if ever there was one.) This presumed prejudice is nonsensical as another softwood, thuya wood from North Africa, was highly prized for inlay. In my opinion, yew and thuya are very similar in appearance, both are beautiful and age very well. Antoher softwood that was extensively used was Bermuda cedar, but only in Bermuda. And yet high style Bermuda furniture is gorgeous.

The beauty of yew lies in the small knots that look to be the result of small burrs (or burls if you are English). In fact, they are the result of the berries produced by the tree that drop into the rough bark and germinate into the body of the tree. Most of these mini-trees die off leaving little knots which cause the grain to whorl around the knot making for more interesting timber. In addition to this beauty, the grain has great tensile strength and was prized for bow making. I'm sorry that Gustave Thonet did not make his bentwood furniture from yew. I think it would have been much improved aesthetically.

Ronald Lee was a dealer in London who I met in the late 1970's. He had been dealing English furniture for at least 40 years at that time. He had a passionate interest in the subject. I remember his showing me the configuration of mouldings on a bureau bookcase that he said he had seen just once before, some time in the 1950's. He remembered just where he had bought the other piece and was interested that the one he currently owned was bought on the other side of the country. He believed the mouldings to be particular to the Cheshire area and was curious how his current bookcase had migrated to Lincolnshire. His interest was always intense and very contagious.

I recently bought a pair of card tables that made me think of Ronald Lee, or at least of his sense of curiosity. The tops of these tables are wonderfully faded and very beautiful because of the fading. The woods used in these tops are West Indian satinwood and yew wood. This is a very curious combination, something that I have never seen before and which I never would have believed could be so stunningly successful. I only wish that I had Ronald Lee to talk to about this rarity. He might have known where they came from.

Dick Turpin died this week. I believe that he was 79 years old. I once started an interview with him for Art and Auction magazine but they pulled the plug on those interviews for some reason and Dick, who was by far the most colorful dealer I have known, got left out in the cold.

Dick looked a little like a Cossack except that his eyes were not hard. He had a large moustache that a dealer friend of mine told me a wonderful story about. He was chatting with Dick, Dick's stories could be quite long, when a little spider showed himself from the interior of the moustache, descended a little ways on his thread and then re-ascended to disappear back into the jungle of Dick's moustache. Dick was always very intense when it came to talking about antiques. He was the law as far as he was concerned and what he said was the truth, even if it wasn't. he used to call me the horse and ask me which races I was running in whenever he saw me. I will miss him.

Stephen Joseph

Stephen Joseph died this week. He and his wife Iona of Iona Antiques, the premier dealers in primitive 18th and 19th century animal paintings in the world, were a fixture at the Grosvenor House Fair and the International Show in New York. A warm, modest, charming man with a lovely laugh and a tremendous sense of humor, I will miss him as well.

The importance of vetting cannot be overlooked. The most disheartening thing for an antique dealer is to have a piece that is truly wonderful undersold by something that is at best second rate and at worst a mongrel of indeterminate background or origins. Worse yet is a dealer playing his piece against yours when the comparison is spurious. Protecting the customer is a happy by-product that helps in promoting antique shows. Few buyers, however, understand how vetting helps them and even fewer seem to care about it. Most buyers make decisions based on the trust they have in the vendor not because a show is vetted. Despite this and despite the fact that vetting is uneven and means different things at different fairs and that it can be political and is also difficult to do, it is very necessary. Non-vetted fairs are an expensive luxury for a serious dealer. It just doesn't pay to have your goods looking expensive just because they are as they are described on the ticket. Give me the headache and inconsistency that vetting represents any day.

Having talked about vetting yesterday, I should probably talk about how difficult a job it is. The number of permutations and combinations that may have happened to a piece of furniture is endless. Fire and flood, adaptation causing reconstruction (think of it happening on a piece made in 1740 and which was then adapted within the next 130 years), endless tinkering (I have relatives who tinker rather than call a restorer--they are dangerous) replacement of drawers for doors and vice versa, reduction in height, a more a la mode foot, the list is virtually endless. And then there are pieces that were made out of their original period but which look the part. It was thought in the 1970's that the first Chippendale "reproductions" were made in the 1830"s. Show me someone who claims to know the difference between something made in 1760 and 1830 and I would have to question their knowledge. Production techniques were identical in the two periods and a good quality cabinet shop would copy every detail to the very last millimeter. Indeed, many great Chippendale pieces are thought by a number of academics to have been made in the 1870's and these pieces continue to cause arguments among experts. Their flaw is usually one of scale, but sometimes it is quite hard to substantiate any real difference from those items made in the 1750's and 60's. The pieces weren't made to deceive anybody and they are old enough to pass as the real thing. Vetting is no fun and it is hell to make a genuine mistake both for the vetter and for the vettee.

I will write more on the subject later.

Vetting is the process used at fairs of looking at an object by a committee of experts to determine both the authenticity of a piece and the accuracy of the label describing the object. It was the cause celebre of the International Show when it was started in New York some fifteen years ago and was supposed to assure the buyer that they were buying the "real" thing. It was enough of an issue to cause the prestigious Winter Antiques Show to adopt the practice despite the enormous amount of time and effort it entails. The Grosvenor House Fair, the Biennale in Paris and Maastricht all subject every vendor to vetting.

I would never want to throw out the baby with the bath water so to editorialize on vetting, the first thing I have to admit is that vetting has raised the standard of quality at various antique shows in the last ten or fifteen years. However, vetting is not unbiased. At times it is political, sometimes naive, sometimes ignorant. The first vetted fair that I was in was a baptism of fire. All of these "old hands" were telling me to just accept what I was being told. As if I somehow knew less all of a sudden. Why had I been invited to the fair in the first place? Indeed, one object that was vetted off my booth--thrown off the floor of the fair--was subsequently accepted at the same fair four years later. Indeed, at the second fair, one of the vetters asked me just what the reasons were for vetting the item off in the first place? It was a perceptive question.

More on the subject to come.