Author: Michael Chappell

In this age of 9 figure art sales, it surprises me that we still have occasional price resistance in our substantially less vaunted, but still respectable, sphere. Even our more astute clients will ask us, from time to time, if they’ll be able to get their money out of a purchase made from us. Of course, I can’t guarantee that any more than the salesrooms can about the work of Munch or Rothko or Cezanne. With all that, I’d assume that a money good purchase for, say, $125,000,000 would be of greater concern than a $12,000 Pembroke table, n’est-ce pas?

While none of us could guarantee the future value of anything- even cash- I will venture out on a fairly sturdy limb and promise that, when it comes time to sell the furniture purchased from one of the prominently advertising pseudo-chic chains, the value will be less than that for an equivalent avoirdupois of firewood. It mystifies me why and how the ability to purchase a roomful of strictly color and style coordinated cack so captivates prospective punters.

With all that, despite the prospect of getting better value from any member of the accredited antiques trade, making a purchase of a period article does have aspects that tend to, if not perplex, than to give the first time buyer a degree of pause. For example, using my favored exemplary Pembroke tables, we always have several on the floor. Always good representatives of what they are, but at varying prices. This sometimes begs question, as we would expect it might, and we cheerfully explain that it has everything to do with quality, condition, and rarity. We have a pretty good quality early 19^th century example that is fairly priced at $2,500  but near at hand is an earlier example for $12,000. When one understands that the earlier piece, when new, represented a ground breaking design, that it is possessed of its original leather-wheeled casters, and has solid matched timbers to its top and leaves, the pricing difference is a bit easier to understand.

For us, and those dealers who survive in business, pricing is critical and, unless one wants to pursue this business as an expensive hobby, everything needs to be priced to sell. The dealer who upon pricing an acquisition using some kind of keystone formula with no consideration of reasonableness is what we would term in the trade ‘now defunct.’

With some frequency, we’ll get calls from people wanting our counsel on the restoration of a furniture item. That’s actually an overstatement. If the queries could be boiled down to one simple inquiry, it is ‘Could you recommend a good restorer?’ The answer we provide, invariably, is an equivocal one- yes, we know lots of good restorers, but no, we can’t recommend one.

The why of this may mark us as inordinately cautious, but as with physicians, our aim is to do no harm. While we might in the short term satisfy an inquiry with a recommendation, we would rather risk an immediate disappointment by declining to provide information than risk the possibility of a larger one when the restored piece fails to satisfy the punter.

The simple truth is, ‘restoration’ in the antiques trade is at best an amorphous term. There exists no standard protocol, so what is meant, and in fact what we mean when we discuss restoration in describing our own stock varies with virtually every piece of furniture or period artwork we’ve ever handled- and the accomplishment of the restoration is always preceded by a considerable amount of palaver with the restorer(s). We have a number of people who work for us on projects, but the young man who is primarily responsible for putting our furniture pieces in good nick is a graduate cabinet maker, trained at the North Bennett Street School in Boston. He’s a talented carver, wood turner, and can do pretty fair marquetry. That said, we have never, ever just turned him loose on a project, nor would he want us to. As with my meeting with him this morning, we had to discuss the level of distress on a table top, whether to leave it as is or to ameliorate it, and if so, how much.

Our overriding restoration principle on period pieces is just enough to make it visually appealing, but not so much to occlude its age. Easy to say, but hard to accomplish given the myriad circumstances- with at least one new one arising with each piece we acquire- that make a standardized restoration regimen impossible.

Always a little slow on the uptake, it is then not surprising that I continue to be surprised by the amount of sales activity we enjoy the result of our website. With the establishment and the proliferation of online sales platforms, it had originally seemed to me that these were designed for the sale of shall we say cheap and cheerful items of limited antiquity. Consequently, it appeared that successes were achieved mostly with that darling of contemporary design, mid-century modern furniture, and items of no great age that would be produced in multiples. With the dealers with whom we have a good relationship (read ‘those who will actually tell the truth’) it is the general consensus that, while an occasional better sale might be achieved utilizing a sales platform, it is mostly for the sale of what we refer to as price point merchandise.

With a consistent lukewarm response from peers, we’ve relied on our own website and seen, for a few years, roughly the same result- the occasional spot sale, usually for not very much money. What we have seen ongoing, though, is the phenomenon of any actual darkening of the gallery door preceded by a browse on our website. This, coupled with follow-on sales through our website related to an initial gallery visit has made our website a useful tool. While the virtual hasn’t replaced the actual, our website has, in the ten years we’ve maintained it, consistently been an excellent adjunct to our bricks and mortar.

That is, until recently. Markedly over the course of the last year, we are achieving a significant and growing proportion of our sales from website activity unaccompanied by an in-store visit. We always assume that the buyer of traditional material will continue to utilize a traditional method of making a purchase, with four if not five of the senses- not all of them internet accessible- informing the punter’s decision to buy.

In all this, I am reminded of a phenomenon of the ‘60’s, with the American public, largely unused to wine, suddenly exposed to it in greater volume. While it was assumed that the glass of tawny port consumed at Christmas had irrevocably shaped the American palate, sage oenophiles knew that consumers would over time achieve a comfortability with more sophisticated wines. The fortunes of the wine industry in California have certainly borne this out. Similarly, it seems that the internet has exposed so many prospective buyers to art and antiques that, over time, the purchase of items of increasingly better quality using the same method with which their exposure is ineluctably linked appears now to be a natural adjunct.

Though we had assumed that the nature of our internet sales would inevitably be dry and arid, as opposed to the intimate conviviality of our face to face client relationships, we’ve found that the internet is anymore the growing entre to interaction that is just as rewarding as before. Moreover, whatever it is that disposes a client to establish a relationship with a particular dealer seems, for Chappell & McCullar at any rate, to transcend our galleries, somehow infusing our website and those who browse it. I am possibly penning this blog entry too late, as we’ve renewed our lease and we’ll be ‘actual’ for a few more years yet. I suppose I might have got better terms from our landlord had this blog entry appeared a few weeks ago. Still and all, we cannot deny that in the fullness of time the virtual may make the actual gallery if not obsolete then the adjunct that the internet was formerly- even in what we have always steadfastly maintained is the highest of high touch businesses.

For nearly a month, the art world’s been abuzz with word of the purchase by the Qatari royal family of one of the five renditions of Cezanne’s Card Players for what is reported to be in excess of $250 million. This at least doubles the known record price for the purchase of a work of art. Reportedly the painting will be displayed in a public collection being developed by the Qatar Museums Authority. Although acquired by private treaty, it is rumoured that Christies had a hand in facilitating the purchase. Not surprising this, as the Qatari royal family has a strange and mystical relationship with the auction house: the executive director of the Qatar Museums Authority is former Christies chair Edward Dolman.

Although pundits have all described the work as iconic, citing the illustrated presence of any one of Cezanne’s Card Players in virtually every art history survey text, the fact of its inclusion either avoids or at best abbreviates any consideration of why it might be. It’s been a few years, but my own experience in a foundation course in art history began with an examination of the function the discipline serves, specifically to determine how an artwork came to be created, and why it looks the way it does. Within the context of material culture, art historians, using a variety of methodologies, attempt to achieve when considering a work of art a site of meaning. That Cezanne created five similar depictions of peasants playing cards in  Aix-en-Provence would seem a prima facie argument for some considerable degree of significance, but anything associated with an art historical consideration of the work will now forever be occluded by the fact of its acquisition for a record setting amount of cash.

The fact of this is neither unique nor surprising. One wonders, for instance, the expense involved in the transportation by the Romans of huge Egyptian obelisks for display. Cultural swag, of course, in the same way that national art galleries to this very day serve less to showcase native born talent than to display the masterworks produced in distant and disparate- and declining- cultures. The work of Cezanne now on view in Qatar is no less unusual than Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment in London. As many times as I’ve passed Cleopatra’s Needle on my way to Somerset House and the Courtauld Institute- itself an enormous repository of foreign art- I’ve never thought of the obelisk as anything other than an expression of 19^th century British political, and concomitantly cultural, hegemony. As much as I enjoy visiting the National Gallery in Washington, I’m never there without knowledge that the leading lights responsible for its creation in the early years of the last century did so because they thought that it was something that was an appropriate accoutrement for the world power the United States had become.

Certainly, with its huge oil reserves Qatar’s rapid acquisition of the trappings of western culture is done because it can. Does its acquisition also portend a culture on the decline? Arguable, I suppose. For the immediate future, it seems a shame, though, that in the case of The Card Players, site of meaning  will certainly be bound up with $5/gallon gasoline.