We received a rather surprising telephone call yesterday from an interior designer with whom we do business from time to time. She had expressed strong interest in something from our personal collection, that because it no longer quite articulated with the rest of the material, we were willing to sell. Surprising in that, although the piece was exactly what the designer wanted, it was no longer required as she had ‘finished out’, her words, the client’s collection.
For an antiques dealer, this happens with some frequency, and not just when dealing with an interior designer. The designers’ brief, of course, is to deploy colors and movables in a particular space to pleasing aesthetic effect. Not that I don’t believe that is important, but the better antiques and art dealer usually offers material that is an extension of the dealer’s own connoisseurship, and, like us, an outgrowth of their personal collecting passion.
Since passion overrules intellect, it is, consequently, at least difficult for a dealer to understand when a collection, even when put together entirely for decorative effect, is ‘finished out.’ For the collector, and that includes virtually all antiques and art dealers, collections can never be finished out, as one collects continually, upgrading the quality of one’s collections as taste, discernment, and the range of interests change. Moreover, the true collector will always be looking for something, and shedding things that are either outside the current scope or inferior to other items. For Keith and me, our showroom is the ultimate outgrowth of our own interests. While we do need to sell a piece of furniture or a painting or two to earn our daily crust, we determined some time ago that if we acquire strictly commercial material, we do so at our peril. Our business with other collectors, and even our interior designers, will find that they are in no small measure driven to purchase pieces from us that we can speak passionately about. As we say so often, we avoid having anything in inventory that does not have a compelling reason for being here. Always something about the piece, be it furniture or artwork- color, condition, subject, provenance, attribution, and generally a confluence of these- compel us to try and acquire a specific piece.