During our tenure in business, we’ve sold a lot of paintings, from our own stock and sourcing pictures for clients. We do this with some facility, as our background is in the fine arts. However, we had chosen some time ago to have our main area of specialization the decorative arts of the 18th century in England. Our present exhibition of art work from McColl Fine Art has reminded us of why we made this choice.
There are things generally a bit more matter of fact about the sale of 18th century furniture that makes it a bit- actually, a considerable bit- easier to shift than pictures. A Regency period dining table, for instance, naturally goes into a dining room. The client, whether interior design or private collector, tells us room dimensions, how many people they wish to seat, and their budget for such an item, and, well, there will doubtless be some palaver, but you get the general idea.
Not so with artwork. What we’ve found is that everyone, and I do mean everyone, is an art expert. While Keith and I bring the same sort of selection criteria to art as inventory- with price based on quality, condition, and rarity- people insist on waxing eloquent about pictures. As well as throwing out a bunch of adjectives, it is amazing the numbers of people who still try to achieve a site of meaning by examining the painter’s motive for painting. In that most of the painters whose work we represent are long dead, I am sometimes tempted to suggest a Ouija board, but have so far been able to restrain myself.
The adjectives and the communing with the dead together form a methodology we always term ‘appreciationism’, referring to that long-practiced schools and museum education department pastime of art appreciation. I can still see troops of small children, and women and a few men of a certain age, making their way through the National Gallery, listening with rapt attention to the marginally informed docent spill some sort of palaver about the artist suffering from tuberculosis, or syphilis. One thing that is worth pointing out- TB and VD were major killers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries- that an artist was suffering from either or both does not, in itself, signify any more than that a grocer was likewise afflicted.
Moreover, the production of art was and is a way to make a living. Admittedly, a talent for painting, for instance, is certainly a help, but, at the end of the day, paintings were and are produced for sale with the artist using the money- wait for it- to pay rent, buy groceries, or straighten the childrens’ teeth. We’ve all seen the movies of van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec driving themselves crazy with drink, which drink is, presumably, a palliative consumed by the artist to assuage the pain of ripping out their souls and placing them in artistic form on a canvas. It is my understanding that, in truth, it is far more likely to be the artist’s childrens’ dentist who is so in need of a palliative.