Michael’s Blog

The sideboard image in the last blog engendered a fair amount of response. While I had presented the image as an objective correlative, it struck a chord. Not only are we attempting to sell the love, lovers of English antiques love, it seems, sideboards. I guess at this point I can out myself as a lover of sideboards, too. Pembroke tables, also, but that’s the subject for another blog.

The advent of the ubiquitous late George III period mahogany sideboard seems to be a follow-on from the growth of cities, with that particular phenomenon an outgrowth of the change in England from an economy driven largely by agriculture into one where wealth was derived from manufacturing and trade. As these are occupations that the quality did not dirty their hands with, there grew up a wealthy middle class. While a country seat was the ultimate mark of material success, the middle class in the first instance required someplace to live in town. The terrace house became the standard plan, in London and virtually any other British urban centre. While convenient, even the largest terrace house can be somewhat less than commodious. Furniture developed, consequently, in scale and function that matched newly standardized living environments.

While the mammoth serving table with its acres of surface area for the ostentatious display of plate would be perfectly suited for a grand dining room in a country house, the city dining room with limited space had to combine beauty, function, and scale. What better multi use piece of furniture than the sideboard. The illustrated example contains a large enough surface area for a serving table, an arrangement of shallow but long drawers for the flat storage of table linens, and a deep and large cellaret drawer for the upright storage of anything in bottles. I should put –storage of huge amounts of intoxicating beverages, because the amount that was drunk was truly prodigious, dwarfing anything that today we would consider excessive. With the increase in gentility amongst the middle classes in the late 18th century, the custom of the ladies withdrawing became standard, with the gentlemen, as if they hadn’t had enough already, then left in the dining room not just to have the small glass of after dinner port, but to drink themselves into oblivion. Consequently, sideboards were frequently fitted out with a cubbyhole to accommodate, wait for it, a chamber pot. Well, when nature calls, and with the vast quantities of bibulous liquors consumed, one can surmise it called frequently and with some urgency. The irony is that an integral pot cupboard in a sideboard is today considered by collectors a desirable feature, and by me, too. Otherwise, I can’t say I am unduly enamored of late Georgian scatology.

The usefulness of the sideboard led to its manifestation in a variety of different sizes and shapes, but always with the same recognizable function. This smaller, Regency example, from the exalted firm of Gillows of Lancaster, despite its size still contains a range of shallow drawers for napery, and a large, deep drawer for bottles.  Note the locks on the drawers, another ubiquitous feature of sideboards. Despite the long-standing jokes about servants stealing the silver, sideboards, while the tops may have accommodated silver serving pieces during mealtimes, were never meant for silver storage. Silver, including all eating utensils, was held below stairs in either a vault or strongbox. Sometimes it was even held offsite in collective vaults, and brought out only for special occasions. The locks were to protect napkins and other table linens from pilferage. One forgets how extremely valuable cloth was, with everything woven by hand. Inexpensive cloth the result of the introduction of the steam loom was still decades away. The cellarette drawer when not used for the service of full bottles was for the (locked) storage of empty bottles. Bottles brought in full for dining were filled below stairs from a cask and, on the very odd chance the contents were not consumed, dumped back in. The empty bottles themselves were valuable- as with cloth, bottles were as yet handmade- and kept locked up when not in use.

The Georgian sideboard, with the forgoing an intriguing primer, but hopefully not more than my gentle readers wanted to know. For me, though, and for most of you doubtless, when does context not intensify feeling? Let me know if you don’t all now love sideboards just a little more.

The last couple of days have been taken up with travel back and forth to the family homestead in Fowler, a farming community in central California, just to the south of Fresno. Mother and Dad are fine, thanks for asking.

Although my trip was dutiful, the 7 hour transit time is made pleasantly productive as it exactly coincides with the length of a taped Wayne Dyer seminar derived from his book There’s a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. I’ve lost count of the numbers of times I’ve listened to these tapes over the course of the last 8 or 9 years, and always find them refreshing in the rehearing. Certainly coming back to the galleries after having heard Dr. Dyer is the reminder that, spiritually, what one puts out one receives in return, and that’s what all of us in the trade in any of the decorative and fine arts, times being the way they are, tend to forget. For us, we are in this business because we love it, and love the items we handle- and love it when the purchaser is someone to whom our pieces speak. And, ultimately that’s what’s fulfilling about this business and, and, I’ll venture to say, makes a good dealer a better dealer- perhaps not as much in money but in largeness of spirit- that he has a love of what he does, and it is that love that sells a piece, possibly as much as the piece itself.

Of course, we have bills to pay just like everyone else, and our pieces do need to make the occasional one way trip out the front door to pay for our daily crust. But I have to tell you, although we may not be possessed of enough spiritual swag to change everyone’s attitude from negative to positive, we nevertheless, sometime with Wayne Dyer’s reminding us, love what we sell and what we do.

The short answer is, seemingly, everything. Certainly witness the phenomenal success of Picasso’s opus, just knocked down by Christie’s for $106.5 million to an as yet unknown buyer. While the Picasso has the distinction of now being the most expensive work of art yet sold at auction, the buyer has the distinction of paying the most for any work of art purchased at auction.

Combining the Picasso auction record with uncertainty in European sovereign debt, exacerbated now by the free for all following the British elections, there seems a profound disjunct that is as yet impossible to get one’s head around. Except that the records set- not only for Picasso but also for Matisse and Braque- were for artists and works well established in the canon. Buyers have turned their backs on contemporary art, except at the impulse buy level, making, it appears, defensive investments in fine art. English antiques cannot be far behind.

And why not? In uncertain markets, the traditional wisdom is to maintain liquidity so a significant investment in an illiquid asset might not make much sense. But with sovereign debt run amuck amongst nearly all countries of the world, in whose currency would one want to park a large amount of cash?

With the impressionist and modern sales occurring in New York as we speak, I would wager that it is more than just Christie’s and Sotheby’s whose breath is baited pending the outcome. No question, the Henri Matisse ‘Bouquet de fleurs…’ at Sotheby’s has the potential to be a record-breaker, but no one’s fortunes in the art and antiques world are made from the sale of one stellar item. Even so, trade sources are touting the possibility of the gaggle of sales in both rooms making in the $1billion range, and that should make even the most cash-strapped a bit more flush. Mind you, rents on the upper east side of Manhattan can rather quickly flatten even the fattest wallet.

My purpose in mentioning the spring impressionist sales is not, however, to comment on the fortunes of the major salerooms. It is that, for the art world, high profile sales are our equivalent of TARP money, with some huge dollars spent in any venue signaling to the larger art and antiques market that the bear is morphing into a bull. In the financial markets, Keynes referred to a change in perception as animal instincts, and while it would surprise me, albeit pleasantly, if the New York impressionist sales instigated a stampede of buyers, they might provide just the slightest nudge in the posterior of the too many still-hesitant punters. And we know you are out there…

Keith and I do not work well together. We do, most things, but when it comes to physical labor, our routines are not the same- I push when I should pull, and he the same- so as a consequence, Keith will set up our stand at an antiques fair with assistance from someone- anyone- other than my own good self. The trade in English antiques, as you can see, is fraught with domestic discord.

Keith does, fair to say, get the booth right, well, virtually all the time, and his placement of these mirrors was certainly clever. Of exquisite rococo form with warmly glaucous early period plate, while lovely seen straight on, Keith had them positioned so they could also be seen reflected in another mirrored piece, the doors of a George I bureau cabinet.  Masterful, but in a subtle way, as the brilliance of the mirrors was intriguingly modulated through the filter of the period glass fronting the bureau cabinet.