Having my teeth cleaned is not distinctly pleasant, but a visit to the dentist yesterday provided a side benefit, allowing me during my outer office wait to browse a couple of magazines including the December issue of Vogue. Well, this is San Francisco… My perusal uncovered an advert featuring a well-known and beloved media person fronting for a line of cosmetics, posing the rhetorical question whether one wished to grow older or be thought ageless. Clearly the ad wasn’t directed to me, as I like being older. Life seems wonderfully compensatory in that regard, for that inevitable diminution in pulchritude is made up for by a comfortability of existing in one’s own skin including confidence in one’s taste and judgment. Frankly, that’s an aspect of our antiques business that we find consonant with our own outlook: everything ages but that it does time itself imparts a tangible dynamism.
Or might do…What seems to ameliorate any kind of ability to age is the unwillingness to. The irony is, a body’s conceit of oneself then becomes occluded, yielding a fair number of people whose age defying efforts result in effects not unlike those of Baby Jane Hudson. Baby Jane is a great metaphor, given the sadly still surviving efforts of some in the trade to fudge or tart up pieces of period furniture. ‘Unknown to nature’ is a phrase equally applicable to the color of a lady or gentleman’s coiffure or a breakfront bookcase. Best leave things alone and let time make an honest declaration.
And that is what makes anything- antiques, artwork, people- au courant, not that it or they aren’t growing older, but have achieved through time a classicism, becoming exemplars of age. We believe that about what we offer, that pieces will speak to our clients, as they have to us, as not only aesthetically pleasing, but, as with all things classic, enduring and iconic touchstones.