Author: Michael Chappell

My blog title is cribbed from an article by Malcolm Muggeridge in the December, 1966, issue of Playboy. For those of you who do not know me, I really did, in my salad days, read the magazine for the articles. For those of you who do know me, you will find this bit of intelligence hardly surprising.

‘Is my culture showing?’ was classic, midperiod Muggeridge- before his late in life conversion to Catholicism was his preferred topic of discussion- when well-formed, agnostic, generally contrarian opinions was what he was known for. That he was supremely well-informed on all matters was something that was hard to hide, as he could spout recondite bits of information, spun into prolix lines of reasoning that others found impossible to fault. In his vocation as journalist and professional pundit, he spent a career that spanned most of the last century pulverizing those whose opinions differed, and those who agreed with him, but did so less eloquently.

Not in the Muggeridge category by any means, but he always comes to mind when discussions about English furniture extend beyond ‘Isn’t it pretty?’ Not everyone is interested in discussions about the finer points of condition, or the thing I am guiltiest of, providing a context for 18th century English furniture within the history of material culture. While refining one’s eye for period pieces is enhanced, not doubt about it, with an understanding of why it was made and how it was intended to be used, few of our gallery visitors call on me to wax eloquent on the subject. Now I think about it, no one has, ever. Perhaps it is testimony to the general politeness and equanimity of our gallery visitors that, when they crank me up, they don’t quickly edge out the front door. Or, mercifully, it might be that Keith McCullar rapidly inserts himself into the discussion, and masterfully brings it down from the rarified into the, shall we say, intellectually accessible.

We continue to live in hope. As my devoted readers will know, part of my measurement of the health of the trade in English antiques is the demand for period dining tables. A working piece of furniture, period dining tables often have had pretty hard lives. Consequently, those that have survived in relatively good condition- original tops with nicely figured timbers all of a piece and not reshaped or repolished, original bases not badly dented and scuffed from generations of shoes kicking them- well, they cost the earth. As well they should.

And, in the last few hours, a number of good but not exceptional examples have sold at auction for plenty- and I do mean plenty. Of course, the auction purchase is at best a leap of faith for the buyer, whether dealer or collector, as one is never entirely certain of condition, and more importantly for the collector, how well it will articulate with the other pieces that will surround it and the décor into which it will ultimately be placed. No such thing as try before you buy from an auction house- all items are sold as is, where is.

Be that as it may, we are still encouraged because dining table sales wherever they occur bode well for the antiques trade, as the table is the first and most central item and the purchase of pendant items- wine coolers, cellarets, sideboards and side tables, and sets of dining chairs, soon follow. Did I mention we have a few of these items in our inventory?

We were pleased to find rather a sweet little 18th century Venetian view painting, a capriccio of the Grand Canal, centered by San Simeone Piccolo. Most people, I believe, would have something of a fondness for this rather top-heavy appearing church, with its elongated dome and classical portico overbuilt for its smallish site- a typical case of urban organicism, exacerbated no doubt by the demands of donors for Giovanni Scalfarotto to put all the architectural features possible on what is otherwise a rather small church. Even if quirkiness is not something always found endearing, its site, directly across from the railway station and consequently the first landmark one sees upon arrival in La Serenisima, renders it necessarily iconic. Interestingly, we have already sold the painting, and it is returned to Italy.

Possibly the painting, and possibly that it has been 3 years since we’ve been in Italy, has brought thoughts of the Grand Tour to the front of my consciousness. Between ourselves, I have suffered a continuous bout of not so low level anxiety since our last visit, as I failed to throw a coin into Fontana Trevi. I hope that my watching a DVD of ‘Three Coins in the Fountain’ every few weeks or so might function to compensate.

So now we’ve established that Keith and I are Italophiles. Our vocation as dealers in English antiques makes us, as well, Anglophiles. With the English milordi as arguably those by number and engagement who made the most of it, I write this by way of explaining my fascination with the notion of the Grand Tour. But, of course, a single line is inadequate explanation.

As it would have been for the young gentlemen whose experience of a lifetime, typically lasting two or three years, was the Grand Tour, with its ultimate destination Rome. Though fiercely anti-Catholic, an English aristocrat’s role within British world hegemony would result in ostensible affiliation not with the center of Catholicism but with the Roman Empire. This might have been part of the intellectual process of someone as thoughtful as Horace Walpole, but, as I think of it, his ability to simultaneously enjoy, in no order of preference, a warm climate, a picturesque environment, and his relationship with John Shute might have been the more compelling factors. In his dressing room at Strawberry Hill, during the gray days of the English winter, Walpole could have developed these more edifying tropes, using classical examples, in contrast to the studied Gothicism of his home, with which to compare then-contemporary British life, and committed them to writing. And he did.

For the moment, I am like Walpole, as memories of Italy are what I have to content myself with. Travel to and a gray November in England is what is pending for us.

Have any of my 20 or so devoted readers looked at the episodes of this Sundance Channel miniseries? A sort of fly on the wall view of the buying efforts of a gentleman who kits out the interiors of a smallish chain of lifestyle boutiques with ‘found’ items, all of which are then marked up for resale.

An ostensible sort of green endeavor, reusing old items, and laudable, as far as in keeping with what we aim to promote, that antiques are the original green product.  But what I found disturbing to the point of nearly rising from the sofa were the forays into the Paris flea market. Certainly given how difficult it is to sell good quality period material, that anyone in their right mind would buy junk, albeit artfully arranged junk, from Parisian, or London, or Roman, market traders astonishes me.

Yet it happens countless times every day. We had lunch not so very long ago with a very nice local person whose major effort over the past year has been the redesign of her home. Someone certainly friendly to Chappell & McCullar, she nevertheless has not traded with us much. She did, though, delight in telling Keith what a wonderful pair of mirrors she had bought from a Paris flea market dealer. We had the opportunity to see these, and, no surprise, they turned out to be something of comparatively recent vintage that had been tarted up for sale. What she paid to have them shipped cost many times what they could, should she so desire, be sold for- and that doesn’t begin to consider what the trader gouged out of her. Well, I suppose everyone needs to possess something that will make a good addition to a garage sale that will, probably sooner rather than later, constitute someone else’s flea market ‘find.’ Who knows? They may eventually, passed from hand to hand, even become antiques.

Some of you may know that our London base is hardly a stone’s throw from the bottom end of the Portobello Road market. What you might not know is we haven’t been through the Saturday antiques market for years. It might be because there are very few antiques actually there, despite the huge number of market stalls. The last item I even remember picking up was a Georgian style silver salt, missing its glass liner. At best a £5 item, the trader was asking £30. Perhaps I looked as though I could, or would, pay £30. He was wrong.

My point is, well patronized flea and street markets have long since ceased to be worthwhile venues, unless you like to be jostled by crowds, have money gouged out of you, risk having your pocketbook stolen, or are bound and determined to be able to tell your friends of your astonishing foreign purchase.

The latter is, I would speculate, what drives much, if not all, flea market purchases by foreigners, the ability to make a story out of it and also to seem, by association, a knowing citizen of the world. What was formerly the delight of the fashionable, ‘antiquing’ (a word I find as excruciating in the hearing as fingernails on a chalkboard) in the Cotswolds, has now become- what’s the term for purchasing cack in the Paris flea market?

A couple of weeks ago one of my entries mentioned our pleasure in seeing a piece of our stock of English antiques in print in a national shelter publication, with credit and kudos to Chappell & McCullar. This pleasure has been countered this week with chagrin, finding two of our pieces in print, with neither of them credited.

When we began producing our own branded pieces, Contemporary Classics, given the amount of time, effort, and it goes without saying, money, spent in development, we naturally enough wanted to make certain that they weren’t knocked off. When we made alterations in our invoices to, amongst other things, retain the image rights, it occurred to us that we should do the same thing with our period pieces. Not entirely selfless, I’ll admit it, when our pieces are used in print, our ambitious and venal souls wish to be credited as the source.

Did I mention my chagrin at finding that we were not credited in two recent spreads? I might have done, but in one of the two occurrences it was only short-lived. It happened to be a painting we had sold out of our own collection to an interior designer who had wanted it from the instant he saw it. A good designer, he has the painting in his own home and treasures it, so much so he has used it in a number of shoots, one of which was just published. With all that, he continues to misdescribe the painting, the recent spread being no exception. This may make a difference to only a handful of people, including a surprising number of collectors who buy pictures for aesthetic reasons entirely, so the comparison between say, analytic cubism and synthetic cubism is most notably the difference in time it takes for one’s eyes to glaze over in boredom. Moreover, despite the numbers of paintings that we sell, we are not known primarily as paintings dealers, so in the instance of the designer not crediting us, we would just as soon let it go.

The other occurrence is a bit more complicated- a bit. The magazine that had published a spread using one of our pieces and crediting us last month this month has published another spread, featuring another interior, but clearly showing a bibelot, again something not in our usual stock in trade, that we had given as a gift to an interior designer- but not to the designer who had used it! Has ‘regifting’ entered the lexicon? Goodness knows all of us receive items that we either don’t need or don’t want that we then can pass on to others who can use them, or can’t, as the case may be, but to whom we owe some polite obligation that the giving of a gift would assuage. Moreover, I suspect that our gift was actually sold by the person to whom it was given. In this instance, this is a real shame for all the subsequent recipients, as the piece had a rather illustrious provenance. It was, in point of fact, part of a number of pieces we purchased from the disbursal of the property of one of the greatest actors of the last 100 years, Sir John Gielgud.  Both Keith and I, diehard Gielgud fans who felt more than a bit wistful whilst attending the Gielgud disbursal, felt a wave of that wistfulness returning when our gift recipient was decidedly nonplussed when told of the provenance.

And so it goes. I shan’t cause anyone any embarrassment by making the provenance, and our link in the chain, known, and the chagrin and wistfulness will abate. Until, that is, the next wave of magazines reaches the newsstands.