A couple of weeks ago one of my entries mentioned our pleasure in seeing a piece of our stock of English antiques in print in a national shelter publication, with credit and kudos to Chappell & McCullar. This pleasure has been countered this week with chagrin, finding two of our pieces in print, with neither of them credited.
When we began producing our own branded pieces, Contemporary Classics, given the amount of time, effort, and it goes without saying, money, spent in development, we naturally enough wanted to make certain that they weren’t knocked off. When we made alterations in our invoices to, amongst other things, retain the image rights, it occurred to us that we should do the same thing with our period pieces. Not entirely selfless, I’ll admit it, when our pieces are used in print, our ambitious and venal souls wish to be credited as the source.
Did I mention my chagrin at finding that we were not credited in two recent spreads? I might have done, but in one of the two occurrences it was only short-lived. It happened to be a painting we had sold out of our own collection to an interior designer who had wanted it from the instant he saw it. A good designer, he has the painting in his own home and treasures it, so much so he has used it in a number of shoots, one of which was just published. With all that, he continues to misdescribe the painting, the recent spread being no exception. This may make a difference to only a handful of people, including a surprising number of collectors who buy pictures for aesthetic reasons entirely, so the comparison between say, analytic cubism and synthetic cubism is most notably the difference in time it takes for one’s eyes to glaze over in boredom. Moreover, despite the numbers of paintings that we sell, we are not known primarily as paintings dealers, so in the instance of the designer not crediting us, we would just as soon let it go.
The other occurrence is a bit more complicated- a bit. The magazine that had published a spread using one of our pieces and crediting us last month this month has published another spread, featuring another interior, but clearly showing a bibelot, again something not in our usual stock in trade, that we had given as a gift to an interior designer- but not to the designer who had used it! Has ‘regifting’ entered the lexicon? Goodness knows all of us receive items that we either don’t need or don’t want that we then can pass on to others who can use them, or can’t, as the case may be, but to whom we owe some polite obligation that the giving of a gift would assuage. Moreover, I suspect that our gift was actually sold by the person to whom it was given. In this instance, this is a real shame for all the subsequent recipients, as the piece had a rather illustrious provenance. 
It was, in point of fact, part of a number of pieces we purchased from the disbursal of the property of one of the greatest actors of the last 100 years, Sir John Gielgud. Both Keith and I, diehard Gielgud fans who felt more than a bit wistful whilst attending the Gielgud disbursal, felt a wave of that wistfulness returning when our gift recipient was decidedly nonplussed when told of the provenance.
And so it goes. I shan’t cause anyone any embarrassment by making the provenance, and our link in the chain, known, and the chagrin and wistfulness will abate. Until, that is, the next wave of magazines reaches the newsstands.