My blog entry yesterday brought some significant response that included my partner Keith McCullar, to whom I occasionally pay attention. He has a client, a real estate developer, to whom we’ve sold a huge number of French and English antique pieces and artwork. Although he is one of my favorite people personally, professionally his antiques purchases could hardly be considered connoisseurial. ‘Acquisitive’ more accurately describes this gentleman’s purchases. Mind you, amongst the items he’s acquired, he does have some fine pieces, but overall, the quality is, shall we say, mixed.
Moreover, he has no desire whatsoever to become a connoisseur. Development of taste is not his objective. We have encouraged him to weed out his possessions and upgrade, but with no result. He’s been lucky enough to travel widely, and, gifted with a winning, expansive personality, he enjoys nothing more than going into a dealer’s shop in, say, Bratislava, making the purchase of some bit of antique arcana and shipping it back to the US- usually telephoning us to arrange customs clearance while always missing critical documents. When one makes purchases after a long-ish lunch and topped-up with some Moldavian wine, one is apt to be forgetful.
Clearly, this was not the gentleman I was referring to in my last blog entry. Before I begin to sound really snotty, let me say whether a connoisseur or an acquisitor, our objective in the antiques business is to be, as best we can be, value-neutral and generally helpful. Our acquisitor may in fact become a connoisseur, as the thing that all our private collectors have in common is a high degree of physical and intellectual energy. They are never completely at rest, and this level of uber- activity can often masquerade as and be mistaken for a lack of focus.
I consider in this regard another gentleman who is now winding down his business career. Acquisitive over the course of the last two decades, he now sleeks to upgrade his collection, replacing period style with period pieces. For us, this is wonderful, as he knows what he wants, and knows that the pricing differential between period style- even something that is itself an antique from a now-century old wave of revivalism- is many times more than what he paid for the ‘looks like but isn’t’. Still, since he’s been sufficiently acquisitive he’s been able, consequently, to begin to develop an eye and also knows something about how pieces were used in historic context, so we are able to communicate with him in nearly the shorthand terms that Keith and I will use when we discuss the relative merits of a piece. The challenge so far has been replacing multiples and pairs of period reproductions, with multiples and pairs of period pieces. He now knows why so many sets of period material are labeled ‘matched’ or ‘harlequin’- the fashion for sets has long since outrun the available material.