What is one to make of the fate of the antiques trade? We’ve just come from previewing the sell-out of Ed Hardy San Francisco, with the auction scheduled for next Tuesday. We’ve also received a letter in the mail from Dillingham and Company, with Gaylord Dillingham himself notifying everyone that he will cease trading as of the end of May. That these two particularly well-known and high profile dealers have decided to vacate the business at the same time points to how deeply in the doldrums the antiques and fine art trade must be.
Ed Hardy, with his landmark villa-like showroom premises in the midst of the San Francisco design district, has been a featured destination for interior designers particularly on the West Coast. With frequent functions hosting, for instance, book launches, the most recent being Stephen Salny’s opus on Michael Taylor, Ed is intimately associated with interior design at the highest levels: no AD 100 designer on the coast has not done significant business with him. Responsive to trends in design, Ed has offered in recent years more 20th century material, with his present stock in trade including offerings from Fornasetti and Gio Ponti.
What Ed is to the designer, Gay Dillingham is to the private collector. I have never seen a piece of furniture that Gay has offered that was not of exquisite quality, both in terms of design, color, and condition. If anyone has an eye, it’s Gay. Not surprising, he’s a tremendously respected figure in the antiques trade internationally. It is seldom that any press publications about the Winter Antiques Show, for instance, do not contain extensive quotes from Gay. Although Kentshire and Hyde Park Antiques have a larger stock, no one, in my opinion, has a better, more precisely curated stock of 18th and early 19th century British and European furniture than Gay.
At the highest end of the trade, these two soon to be former antiques dealers compose the entire spectrum of the business, from interior designer to private collector. Although this blog entry can certainly be read as an encomium to Ed Hardy and Gaylord Dillingham, it is also a mayday for the trade. When is this going to end?