Some very recent mention has been made in the antiques and art press about the participation of a particular New York dealer in one of the better London shows. That this dealer and his estranged brother, also a dealer, have scandalized the trade recently, caught selling shall we say ‘dollied up’ pieces, seems to have been forgotten.
Preaching a Jeremiah about the evil-doers in the trade is not the point of this blog entry, however. The recent press got me to thinking about the confections these gentlemen were marketing. They knew their market, of course, interior designers who are always looking for something outré as an accent piece. And why not? Distinctive design is what interior designers are paid to deliver. That they were duped by a nefarious antiques dealer does not, to my mind, make the designers who patronized them culpable.
As an antiques dealer who, while happy to cater to interior designers and goodness knows we have some excellent designers with whom we trade, tends to have a deeper affinity for private collectors, we tend to offer goods that are possibly a bit more conservative. Quality, yes, but not over the top. Frankly, if something is dramatically out of pattern for a particular historical period, we are immediately suspicious, unless it has some documentary support. This is certainly true for English antique pieces, given the wealth of information- original invoices, inventories, valuations- that survives in the records of the great landed estates. As well, I can’t think of any nation on earth that has its built environment better documented photographically than Great Britain, thanks in no small measure to Country Life. In what amounted to a luck of timing, the magazine began in the late 19th century to include excellent photography in its articles about country seats. The sell offs and contents disbursals beginning in the 20th century, the result of new and functionally confiscatory estate taxes beginning just after the Great War occurred, in many instances, after a thorough photographic record had been made.
The notion of an ‘important’ piece of furniture, absent of provenance, should always beg question. If it is of unusually large scale, of course, it must have been meant for a stately home with a scale to accommodate it. As well, marquetry, inlay, gilding, elaborate carving, and applied decoration were ‘add-ons’ required by the quality for conspicuous front of house display: the hall, the library, and other so-called rooms of state. Even pieces somewhat less grand, either for more private spaces in a stately home or for the smaller houses of the gentry, typically conformed at least in general outline to pattern books that were part of every joiner’s workshop. Using for a moment Chippendale’s Director, the patterns were always adaptable to include, or exclude, decoration depending on the requirements of the customer, or the limits of the joiner’s skill.
It is tempting to think that, as talented as were the likes of the leading lights of English furniture- Chippendale, Vile, Cobb, Mayhew, Ince, the Linnells- that they would for display in their atelier- if they had one- have the occasional outré piece that would show all their skills, crawling with marquetry and dripping with ormolu. Occasionally, a dealer in furniture would offer pieces from a joiner already made up, but these were typically standard productions- case pieces including chests of drawers, bureaus, and night stands, and possible sample boards of ‘fancy’ work. The notion of an exhibition piece is, moreover, largely a 19th century one- witness the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first showcase of British manufactures, and, so far as I know, the first such national exhibition ever mounted anywhere in the world.