notes

My last blog entry brought a spate of e-mails- admittedly a smallish spate, as I have only a handful of dedicated readers. The e-discussion centred on how I had brushed aside dining tables, focusing on sideboards as the primary dining room debacle. I readily agree with my readers who point out that dining tables can be more than a little problematic. As well, they are such a bane that a number of fine quality dealers rarely even offer them.

I say a bane for a number of reasons. First, while a sideboard was of some roughly typical dimensions determined by the purposes a sideboard served, a period dining table can be of widely varying dimensions, explained by considering their original context. As with so much multi-use 18th century furniture, an early dining table may not have been used exclusively for that purpose. The earliest dining table we’ve ever handled is presently in our inventory and is shown here fully extended. As such, it can handily seat 20 people. In its incarnation illustrated, it is composed of two demilune ends, two drop leaf center sections, and two leaves. With a little understanding of 18th century usage and room arrangement, one would surmise that the table was seldom fully assembled in its early life, and, when not in use, its components might have been deployed as follows- one of the drop leaf sections was in use for dining, accommodating 8 people around all four sides, with the other drop leaf section, with one leaf dropped, functioning as a side-serving table. The two demilune ends were probably used as pier or console tables, possibly on either side of a chimney breast, possibly in the dining room but just as possibly in some other room. The two leaves? Probably stored- and stored flat, apparently, as they haven’t warped in 250 years.

Regency period tables- those of the splayed legs that seem to inform the image most of us have of a ‘proper’ dining table- are then often times huge pieces of furniture, purpose-built for the now-standard purpose-built dining rooms that accommodated them. While of course length is an issue, the problem we typically encounter most often is depth. Our recent experience tells us that the optimal depth for even a grand modern house is something in the neighbourhood of 40” to 48”. Long and narrow is now what’s wanted to accommodate formal dining. However, formal dining in the Regency heyday of the dining table could not be accomplished with anything so shallow. Part of the dining experience was pageantry on a scale that none of us has ever experienced, unless you regularly attend state dinners at Windsor Castle. 10 courses or more would not be unusual, with a separate beverage for each course. Each place would have been laid with flatware, cutlery and drinking glasses to accommodate the whole of the meal- and a goodly number of the plates, too- all part of the panoply of dining. Consequently, the space required for this massive number of accoutrements was huge, extending an arm’s length from the outside edge toward the centre of the table. A 48” depth would be barely adequate- 60” is more like it.

Even with infrequent use, dining tables have traditionally had hard use. This, then, brings us to the second big issue surrounding period dining tables- their condition. Table tops were most at risk, with wine stains a particular problem. The alcohol in the wine has the unfortunate effect of dissolving the shellac of the table top, allowing the wine access to and absorption by the raw wood. A table cloth will have made matters worse, soaking up wine and keeping it in contact with the table top longer than if the wine were spilled and then mopped up from a bare table. The tannins and oxidation of the sugars in the wine will always leave a dark stain. Although modern restoration using chemical methods can generally ameliorate stains, the more typical method has been a mechanical one- strip off the old finish and then aggressively sand the entire table top to down below the level of the stains. Tragically, this effects to remove all the patination- but not always the stains!-  and a good bit of the figuring in the wood. Adding insult to significant injury is that this ‘restoration’ is frequently followed by the application of impermeable plastic finishes to ‘protect’ the top from future stains. Of all the items that are the victims of botched restoration, I think, as a class, dining tables rank fairly highly amongst the ranks of most frequently botched.

Did I mention, as well, that dining tables take up a lot of a dealer’s floor space? They do, of course, monopolizing space that could accommodate a number of other, smaller items.  So, a costly item, hard to find in good condition, with dimensions that are unlikely to match what’s required by the client, and hard to display. A bane. But, of course, the offset is the magnificence of the best tables: nothing that I can think of offers the expanse of fine quality matched timbers- and this is what makes them sought after, and makes a dealer swallow hard, take the acquisition plunge, and put them on display.

We had an inquiry from one of our better interior design customers a few days ago, asking after a shallow sideboard. That modern day dining rooms are narrow always begs requests for sideboards and dining tables that are shallow. We are able to shift 40” to 48” deep dining tables with alacrity- one of the finest tables we’ve ever handled is 54” in depth, and, despite the oohs and aahs from punters, it’s still here.

Purpose-built dining tables have always varied in dimension, but the fact is, the standard six-leg sideboard was meant to be a fairly deep piece of furniture, something in the neighborhood of at least 24” to as deep as 40”. Its original function was to serve as an in-dining room butler’s pantry, holding extra napery, with its cellaret drawers divided into bottle-sized divisions, lead-lined to hold water for keeping various types of firewater cool. A side note- sideboard examples from the north of England and Scotland, while containing drawers with bottle divisions, frequently do not have the lead liners- presumably it was so cold there that artificial methods for chilling wines were unnecessary.

The other item that is a frequent accoutrement of a sideboard is a cupboard for holding a chamber pot. Yes, you’ve read correctly. Why on earth? you ask. Well, after the ladies withdrew following supper, the gentlemen remained to drink themselves legless, and, naturally enough, needed something near at hand for relieving calls of nature. Depending on how grand the house, footmen were sometimes on hand to assist by holding the chamber pot in near proximity. Presumably another footman would hold on to the otherwise swaying gentleman, as well, to ensure a true and accurate arc.

All of this Georgian scatology, though, is by way of indicating that the original purpose of the sideboard tends to make it perforce a complicated and large piece of case furniture that cannot always be accommodated in a 21st century dining room. Sideboards couldn’t be accommodated in 20th century dining rooms, either. Consequently, for at least a century antiques dealers have blithely butchered these pieces, more than any other type of item than I can think of. Given how complicated the sideboard is in its original incarnation, one can understand, then, and appreciate to what extent a sideboard would have to be altered to decrease its original, purpose-determined depth.

In making a sideboard shallower, the back portion of the piece is sliced off lengthwise, eliminating any rear gallery, and requiring drawers be shortened, as well. Precise Georgian dovetails joining the drawer linings are eliminated, and typically replaced with- well, something less than precise. Bottle divisions and the linings are almost invariably stripped out, too- who needs them anyway, since champagne is kept in a refrigerator. Gone, too, would be the pot cupboard, sited as it typically was on the side and toward the rear of the original piece.

Unfortunately, this penchant for alteration has gone on so long that even heavily altered pieces can now look venerable. What would have seemed obvious when first done, with a number of years worth of subsequent use now looks old. Bottom line, though, is that a sideboard altered in the early 20th century is not any more valuable or desirable than a piece despoiled just yesterday.

As a child, my favorite Walt Disney movie was Pollyanna. Sorry she was an orphan, of course, but the prospect of being ensconced in Aunt Polly’s astonishing Victorian house looked, to my young eyes, too good to be true. Of course, that was the hallmark of any Disney movie of the time- or Disney anything including Disneyland, for that matter- an idealized image of turn of the century America that did not include things like, for instance, horse manure.

But let’s not soil poor Pollyanna with horse manure. It is, actually, Pollyanna’s ‘glad game’ that I’m in mind of. For you poor souls that don’t know about it, or know why an optimist is sometimes unfairly dubbed a Pollyanna, she was, you might find interesting to know, given to looking on the bright side of everything. Pollyanna would, as the old joke would have it, ask for a shovel and then dig like mad when confronted with a manure pile, as, presumably, where there is dung, there will be a horse. On yesterday morning’s news show, a psychologist was featured who took the view that our present morass of economic problems was made worse by our general perception that they are problems- what exacerbates any economic woe is our societal refusal, as it were, to indulge in the glad game. Well, of course, it is hard to feel glad about $5 per gallon unleaded gasoline, isn’t it? I am, though. Frankly, I wish it were something closer to the $11 per gallon our friends in England are paying. As I got off the San Francisco Municipal Railway this morning and walked up Sansome Street to our Jackson Square galleries, I had to dodge a half dozen people who were so, shall we say, plump, they impeded the passage of everyone on the sidewalk. If you haven’t noticed, we are replete with fat people in this country and why? As a nation, the private passenger car is still seen as the only reasonable way to get from one place to another. Consequently, we seldom walk and get only the least possible amount of exercise, piling into our cars for even the shortest trips, usually to the grocery store to stock up on frozen pizza, potato chips, and Coca-Cola.

Don’t get me wrong, though- I’m not criticizing Coca-Cola. Although it has been a significant fellow traveler along with automobiles in making us a nation of porkers, I am glad the corn that is used to make its major ingredient- impossible to metabolize, spare tire around the middle producing high fructose corn syrup- is now being price-co-opted into the  manufacture of ethanol, a renewal energy resource. Doubtless Coke will be forced to return to reliance on its traditional sweetener, sugar, resulting in, I’m glad to say, a return to boom times for the moribund sugar industry in Hawaii.

But, of course, ethanol cannot be produced in unlimited supply, and its use in transportation fuel will only function to moderate the rate of increase of fuel costs- not make them any lower. And this brings us around to the point of the beginning- they shouldn’t be any lower, as the increased cost will, at long last, force fat Americans out of their cars and onto the sidewalks, I’m glad to say. Horse manure? I prefer to indulge in the Glad game.

My partner is a CPA whose post-collegiate experience in audit came from Price Waterhouse. 20 years of my working life were spent in commercial lending with now sadly departed First Interstate Bank. I say this by way of indicating that explicit disclosure is how we are experienced in doing business. Those of you who have made purchases from us know that, whatever the type or scale of transaction, it is accompanied by a signed invoice.

And why not? I ask rhetorically. A signed invoice wherein are disclosed all the terms and conditions of the sale is a pretty basic contract, outlining as it does the mutuality of agreement between buyer and seller.

It is surprising, therefore, when I read today about a solicitor speaking to a conference of UK auctioneers who cautioned that it is not okay to pay a ‘gratuity’ to someone who directs to them a possible consignor. What a surprise. The auctioneers are further advised to disclose the payment of any such gratuity to all parties.

That this would have to be the subject of a public forum leads one to surmise that, in England at least, payments of what I would term kick-backs must be terribly prevalent. Very sorry to hear it, and very sorry to hear that auctioneers must be at least be reminded, if they even knew in the first place, that they have a fiduciary responsibility to their clients that obligates them to disclose all aspects of the sales transaction.

Perhaps I’m being too hard on auction houses, as kick-backs within the trade can take many forms. I am reminded of a discussion we had fairly recently with one of our lawyer-neighbors on Jackson Square. A nice guy, but as a litigator, he’s a bit of a bulldog- rather what you want, of course, if he’s on your side. He was inquiring about the extent to which we had done business with a prominent local interior designer. As it happened, he named someone we knew, but had never done business with. The lawyer went on to mention that he had prosecuted the designer, on behalf of the designer’s former client, for taking kickbacks from a couple of dealers in mid-century modern furniture that were used in the client’s home. Would the designer have used items from these dealers anyway? Perhaps, but that isn’t the point- the designer had not disclosed the receipt of this ‘gratuity’ to his client, which gratuity, of course, enriched the designer at the client’s expense.

Unfortunately, we have antiques dealer colleagues, not so many in this country as abroad, who love to pay kick-backs to anyone, interior designer or otherwise, who bring buyers into their shops. This may be considered by the dealer as a cost of doing business, but, of course, it is the buyer who ultimately foots the bill. One wonders, of course, how many and how much in ‘gratuities’ were paid by the dealer(s) involved in the evolving scandal mentioned in an earlier blog, and reported extensively in The New York Times involving the sale of fudged-up ‘antiques’ at inflated prices.

What was announced officially yesterday was something that the trade knew for a while now- venerable dealers, and their own near neighbors in Knightsbridge, Hotspur and Jeremy will cease trading soon. Their remaining stock will be sold at Christie’s in November.

Doubtless trading conditions have been tough, but the principals of both firms cite as their reasons for closing that they are in their sixties, are tired of working 7 days a week year-round and would like to retire.

Based on our experience with even our short tenure in the trade, I am more than inclined to take them at their word. As much as we enjoy what we do, it is all-consuming. And in spite of general complaints about difficulty in current trading conditions, I don’t know, even in better economic times, when it ever was not all-consuming.

In what were, arguably, the good old days in the art and antiques trade in the early years of the last century, even the redoubtable Joseph Duveen, for all his elaborate sales and showroom apparatus, was essentially a one-man band. Although he had a worldwide network of ‘runners’ scouting items to purchase, it was largely Duveen who negotiated the deal. On the sales side, Duveen’s involvement was even greater. Virtually nothing closed without his direct involvement. As he made his peripatetic way from his galleries in New York to London to Paris, he knew, as his staff knew, that nothing of importance would occur unless he was there in person. It was a punishing existence that forced him to interrupt his schedule for six weeks every summer to ‘de-tox’ at one of the European spa towns. There were, of course, other Duveens in the business, but the patriarch was more than primus inter pares, and even the younger family members bit the dust before Joseph Duveen.

Depth and continuity of management in the art and antiques trade is a tricky proposition, and for successful galleries it has traditionally spanned generations. Duveen’s success was built on the two generations before him. I mentioned Galerie J. Kugel a couple of blog entries ago- they represent 5 generations, and Robin Kern of the aforementioned Hotspur is the third generation of his family operating the business. The why of this is hard to put a finger on. What I do know, however, is that the successful dealer must possess an encyclopedic knowledge about his particular field. He must not only know about the objects he represents, but must also have an exhaustive knowledge about the historical period from which they came. It occurs to me that, once acquired, knowledge about the business and the reams of auxiliary knowledge that must also be part of a dealer’s stock in trade is most successfully passed on to the dealer’s progeny who’ve acquired it by a constant exposure akin to osmosis. Although successful, even the best firms are seldom very large in terms of staff. They do, however, tend to punch above their weight, probably as a function of the high profile material they handle, and the high profile collectors from whom they derive their patronage.

Doubtless this note of affiliation with the great and the good has required that so many successful dealers traditionally were composed of the younger sons who, thanks to primogeniture, stood not to inherit but could at least take advantage of family connection to make a go of it in the art  and antiques trade. Now, it seems as if the sexier activity is hedge fund management, so the trade is bereft of a lot of its outside pool of staff support.

Frankly, lots of people who today might formerly have worked in the retail trade also find they have a home at the major auction houses. With their efforts to market their services to the retail buyer, the auction houses are much larger staff-wise than they used to be. The prospect of a regular paycheck, and regular working hours, are too good for the present generation of would-otherwise-be dealers to pass up.

The long and the short of it is, of the dealers we know, very few have involvement in the business save the present generation. Once the existing ownership decides to hang it up, the only prospect is to sell the storefront and consign the stock to auction. Unfortunately, this has happened fairly often in the last few years and the prospect is that it will continue apace. None of us in the trade are getting any younger.