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.

World financial markets are right at this time doing what they do annually: ‘correct’ (in quotes, note, as in this instance ‘correct’ is a euphemism for the more exactly descriptive phrase ‘drop like a rock’). Will any of this correction be as pronounced as at this time last year? Doubtful, with US consumer confidence, most notable in the purchase of new and resale of existing homes driving up the markets that the lack of sales drove down beginning in late 2007. The naked exposure of the subprime mortgage market that was as complete and as obvious as that of the storied Emperor, and that ultimately led to the erosion of world financial markets generally is likewise behind us- is there a pun there?-  with no more shoes, or knickers, expected to drop.

While we may be feeling sunnier about things generally, none of us feels our chequebooks bulging quite yet from an excess of black ink, and the market in English antiques is hardly exceptional in this respect. In discussions with two colleagues in London yesterday and today, their general assessment of how they are faring- and both used this phrase although I do not believe they know one another- is ‘bearing up.’ Though the present state of the antiques trade is not remotely of the same magnitude, I believe that was the standard rejoinder used to describe one’s personal condition during the Blitz.

I can’t say that Chappell & McCullar is exactly at ground zero either in terms of the trade in fine art and English antiques or world financial markets, but our venue of Jackson Square does geographically at least achieve a confluence of these worlds, sited as it is conveniently amongst the offices of quite a number of boutique fund managers and venture capitalists. Some of our best business has been done over the years with financial types brought to our neighborhood ostensibly to hash out varying kinds of bond indentures, LBOs, or prospectuses.

We are always on the lookout therefore for cars and drivers, and the increase in the numbers of black Lincolns and Cadillacs always bodes well. In earlier blogs I’ve cited the frequency of dining table sales as immediately precedent to an overall increase in our business, but I must say that the limousine count is possibly our DEW Line, if any of you are Cold Warriors. Distant Early Warning system, perhaps, because the arrival of the limousines and their capitalizing occupants not only represents the presence of money, but optimism about the making of money, and enough of it, God be praised, to buy our gear. Anecdotal, of course, and not wanting those of you members of the trade who are reading this to become giddy over future prospects, but the street parking in front of our galleries has lately, and today despite the October correction, been crowded with a bevy of Town Cars.

We took a busman’s holiday yesterday afternoon. Yes, the afternoon, at leisure, the two of us, much to the delight of my nephew and gallery colleague Jack Tremper, who gets to see more than he’d like of Keith and me.

The glories of our business, we never take time off, or seldom anyway, and when we do, we do things that are related to what we always do. A movie, yes, but not having had enough of the beautiful people who form the core of our business, we saw them distilled to their very essence in ‘The September Issue.’ For the benefit of those of you fashionistas who’ve been on a desert island for the last 6 months, the documentary is entirely devoted to the production, from concept through design and execution of the ‘big’ issue of the year for Vogue. Although most reviewers have focused on Anna Wintour, devil theorists may be interested, if not disappointed, to find that the magazine’s creative director Grace Coddington figures nearly as large. Moreover, though Wintour is the lightening rod, Coddington makes it happen.

We may be stepping way up in class, but I mention busman’s holiday in that, in our own little creative sphere, we are always interested to see how someone else does it, and what we might learn thereby. Given that we spent two hours in our workshop with our cabinet maker and a client this morning solely for the purpose of finalizing the carving on a six square inch area of a chairback- this is God’s honest truth- we have something of a feel for how subtle, tediously collaborative, and downright fiddly the creative process is.

While Wintour is famously regarded as less than warm, the people we know who are friends of hers are, incongruous as this seems, warm and friendly. I was therefore also keen to consider how she came across on film, and how that might then articulate with her relationships with others. In my own life, those people with whom I’ve established lasting friendships are those whose acquaintance, at first face, I didn’t particularly care for. Outspoken to the point of brusqueness seems to be a common feature of most of my nearest and dearest. My devoted readers may, or may not, find that this is a central feature of my own personality- or so Keith tells me, ad infinitem. With Anna Wintour, I found plenty to admire. Outspoken, but hardly loquacious, decisive, and confident in her own vision. In a business as fickle as fashion, who can argue with a vision that has yielded her successful 20 year tenure? And what a synchronic partnership with Grace Coddington, likewise outspoken, but friendly in a way that gets the most out of the no-doubt maddeningly fickle creative types whose constant and always disparate inputs are daily essential and concomitant feature to the running of the magazine.

It is this central constancy, in my opinion, that people find- well, I’ll say it- endearing. Knowing what to expect, face it, is comforting where erratic is not. With Vogue as the ultimate expression of the vision of Anna Wintour, while it may be exciting, it is never, as its readers comfortably realize, ever erratic.

A youngish couple, embarking on a family, purchasing a new house- and one of the component pieces of this confluence of events is a stop in our galleries. With the initial purpose of looking at to purchase a painting or two, this visit has then segued into a larger discussion about long-term collecting objectives.

This is the second time within as many weeks we’ve had someone pleasingly describe their experience with us as ‘one stop shopping’. Who coined that phrase, anyway? While we don’t consider ourselves anything like a supermarket, a supermarket analogy is not entirely misplaced. Where one trades is not just a function of convenience, but as much about shopping where one can expect to get the types and quality of goods one wants to acquire- at a price one wants to pay.

Will that price be a bargain? I doubt it, because if it were, we couldn’t carry on in business. Will it represent value for money? As much as we can possibly make it, yes, because it is the relationship Keith and I seek in every sales transaction, with the client recognizing not only that he has purchased something priced fairly but that it also includes a fair profit for our gallery.

And, of course, that is the nature of a lasting relationship, where it carries on as it is beneficial to both parties. For those who seek to deal with our gallery in the manner in which the invading army relates to the young maidens of the town, one will find us, shall we say, less than compliant.