Sotheby’s has announced further downsizing, including cuts in the number of sales in London and Amsterdam, with the concomitant decrease in staff, and its desire to limit consignments to those items with a minimum valuation exceeding USD$5,000. Nothing really surprising here, with the salesroom ostensibly returning to its former (profitable) business model. The fact is, none of the major houses has ever really been equipped to sell primarily decorative material. Face it, it takes as much time and effort to consign, catalog, and market a $1,000 item as it does a $10,000 item, with the better item, at least for the auction house, far more remunerative. Sotheby’s has for several years now sought to get out of the retail auction business, and one wonders if Christie’s, faced with the same high overhead as Sotheby’s, won’t, finally, follow suit. Christie’s still offers its ‘Interiors’ sales at its South Kensington, Rockefeller Plaza, and Paris locations, but the frequency of sales, and the exotic magazine format catalogs, must surely dig deeply into the +/- 30% buyer’s commission the house charges on most of the lots on offer. Bonhams? With expansion in New York and maintenance of so many smaller regional houses in England, it cannot help but feel a pinch.

Times being the way they are, it is easy to conclude that sales activity has been insufficiently brisk to justify operating at the levels to which the auction houses have expanded in the last several years. No doubt, everyone at all levels of the antiques and fine art trade has felt some considerable contraction. With all that, one also has to realize that, in the auction field there has been a considerable rush to the center and the lower end of the trade, too, with an increasing number of players offering online auction or auction-like platforms. The first and largest of these has made money, although a bit less now than they were, but some of the other newcomers, whose revenue is derived mostly from those in the antiques trade who are obliged to compensate the platform whether they sell anything or not, are doubtless seeing their revenues shrink as their participating dealers go out of business. Even so, we see online platforms introduced nearly weekly. Virtual sites are cheap to establish- and can disappear, along with those responsible for the establishment and operation of the site, without a trace.

Although the actual amount of antique and fine art material available on the market at any given point in time, I’d venture to say, is fairly constant, overexposure on the worldwide web makes it seem as though there exists something of a glut. As serious collectors and surviving dealers of English antiques can tell you, there is if anything a dearth of fine quality material coming up in the auctions that are a traditional run-up to Grosvenor House and Olympia. An expression we hear in England, ‘spoiled for choice’, is appropriate to quote here, as it appears that downsizing in the auction business has possibly as much to do with competition amongst sales platforms than it does with general economic malaise.

The social networking phenomenon is a fact of modern life, even if your life is devoted to the sales of 18th century decorative arts. Odd, isn’t it, that as ordinary life experiences become more intrusive, people wish to expose what’s left of their private lives, even their private parts, to complete strangers.

With all that, keeping our galleries as spaces open to whomever, we’ve got used to being public people. Consequently, we shall bow to the moving spirit of the age, and let those of you who are interested keep tabs on the latest developments in our world on Twitter. Our ‘tweets’ may not be as exciting as those from John Mayer- who, I understand, is a twitter-holic- but for those of you who access our site with some frequency, they will be convenient- specific site updates including new inventory, information about the art world generally, and, finally, and specifically for you, my 20 or so devoted readers, blog updates. As well, we’d like to introduce Twitter as we move toward our antiques show season, starting in a couple of weeks with the Los Angeles Antiques Show. With a number of new dealers at this year’s show, tweets will include particularly noteworthy gear at the show. Noteworthy in a good way, of course- something along the lines of must-have.

Click here to follow us on twitter:  http://twitter.com/englishantiques

We wistfully attended a preview last evening that marked the beginning of the closing down of a well-established antiques gallery. In the design district, their target market was, naturally enough, interior designers who turned out for the closing party in force. Collectors? If there were any, their numbers were rather thin on the ground, but that wasn’t this dealer’s client base.

While I didn’t see any sales made, I presume there must have been some. Amongst the throng, some members from prominent firms were in attendance- not the principals, mind you, but people we nevertheless recognized. Unfortunately, a number there were what might be termed ‘the usual suspects’- people Keith always says would go to the opening of an envelope.

What’s more interesting, for those designers with whom we engaged, all of them told us how busy they were with projects. Yet they are attending a going out of business event- at least the third in the neighborhood in the last couple of weeks, and the design firms themselves are laying off staff right and left. What’s wrong with this picture?

What’s wrong, of course, is the unsettled state of the economy, with fear driving the designers’ clients. Frankly, I believe the designers who told me they were busy were telling the absolute truth. Those who’ve survived are busy- albeit with ongoing projects for the same clients. What’s happened is their clients wish to keep projects alive by chalking up an hour or two of design fees every month, but the clients are either not making or are postponing any real decisions (read ‘anything that would cost money’) for an indefinite period. Design firms can survive this by contracting staffing levels down to only the senior designers and firm principals. The busy-ness for the designer comes from the same pool of work, but shared by fewer designers, and those fewer doing grunt work that, until a few months ago, was delegated to their minions. Unfortunately, those trades people and vendors whose revenue is dependent on the designer’s clients making some big money decisions- the antiques trade, the fabric houses, etc. – are, in this environment, sunk.

Of course, there were in evidence at the function a number of free-loaders, but aren’t there always? But I think the significance of the prominent designers in attendance, though, is more worth noting, as it bodes well for the near-term. Yes, there are fewer of them still in employment, and yes, they may not have many new projects, but the mere fact of their attendance last night means that purchases are in the offing. Even at a no-pressure, ostensibly social event, the better interior designers have always been notoriously shy about attendance if they have no work. The reason is obvious- if asked if they are in work, and they are always asked, they wish to be able to not obfuscate but answer a resounding yes.

That familiarity with period revival pieces might begin to equip someone who wishes to move toward collection of period English antiques evinced some surprise amongst my 20 or so devoted readers.

Certainly, the availability of multiples is greater amongst period revival pieces, and a low table that may have been a non-existent period form might have been available as a period revival piece but the person who has decided to change out revival for period has, often as not, already been apprised of these facts. Consequently, as a dealer, some of the hard work has already been done for us. Someone else has probably told them the things that, even gently put, often give offense. To wit- there is no such thing as a ‘period’ coffee table. A low table that is represented as period is doubtless something that has been adapted for the purpose and, the result of that adaptation, is not the type of thing we would handle. When confronted with a set of side chairs sans armchairs, we’ve had discussions without number about the original function of Chippendale period chairs, specifically that they were only incidentally for dining, more likely for arrangement at the side of a drawing room or parlor, hence the name ‘side’ chairs.

In any event, the person that becomes the collector has invariably been a party to these kinds of discussion at least once before, so we are not then the bad-news messengers who get shot. At this point, let me say thank you, you  proud but battered nameless antiques dealers and auction house experts, who have subsequently been shunned by a client merely for telling them the truth: you’ve done yeoman work.

Mercifully, for the sometime concern expressed about pricing, we’ve only seldom had to remarket material on behalf of a client- even non-period material- where the client did not recover their initial investment. This may get me into trouble, as this is no guarantee that a Chippendale revival piece from 1900 will be worth tomorrow what a body paid retail for it today. However, the passion for interior design has exponentially increased the demand for period look, if not price, and has certainly fueled a price escalation for pieces with some age and venerability that, in terms of percentage, might even be in excess of the appreciation for 18th century pieces. Further, there were some excellent makers in the period revival business- Edwards and Roberts, and even the vaunted Gillows of Lancaster and London, not to mention the Parisian firms of Linke, and Sormani, with anything stamped by these makers in high demand. James Archer Abbott’s 2006 monograph on Maison Jansen has had a marked effect on pieces made by or for that remarkable and prodigious interior design firm. At the most basic level, of course,  even period revival pieces are in finite supply, with demand continuing to increase.

That a private client can upgrade with oftentimes no loss on their initial purchase makes the prospect of purchasing finer quality period pieces an even happier prospect.

My blog entry yesterday brought some significant response that included my partner Keith McCullar, to whom I occasionally pay attention. He has a client, a real estate developer, to whom we’ve sold a huge number of French and English antique pieces and artwork. Although he is one of my favorite people personally, professionally his antiques purchases could hardly be considered connoisseurial. ‘Acquisitive’ more accurately describes this gentleman’s purchases. Mind you, amongst the items he’s acquired, he does have some fine pieces, but overall, the quality is, shall we say, mixed.

Moreover, he has no desire whatsoever to become a connoisseur. Development of taste is not his objective. We have encouraged him to weed out his possessions and upgrade, but with no result. He’s been lucky enough to travel widely, and, gifted with a winning, expansive personality, he enjoys nothing more than going into a dealer’s shop in, say, Bratislava, making the purchase of some bit of antique arcana and shipping it back to the US- usually telephoning us to arrange customs clearance while always missing critical documents. When one makes purchases after a long-ish lunch and topped-up with some Moldavian wine, one is apt to be forgetful.

Clearly, this was not the gentleman I was referring to in my last blog entry. Before I begin to sound really snotty, let me say whether a connoisseur or an acquisitor, our objective in the antiques business is to be, as best we can be, value-neutral and generally helpful. Our acquisitor may in fact become a connoisseur, as the thing that all our private collectors have in common is a high degree of physical and intellectual energy. They are never completely at rest, and this level of uber- activity can often masquerade as and be mistaken for a lack of focus.

I consider in this regard another gentleman who is now winding down his business career. Acquisitive over the course of the last two decades, he now sleeks to upgrade his collection, replacing period style with period pieces. For us, this is wonderful, as he knows what he wants, and knows that the pricing differential between period style- even something that is itself an antique from a now-century old wave of revivalism- is many times more than what he paid for the ‘looks like but isn’t’. Still,  since he’s been sufficiently acquisitive he’s been able, consequently, to begin to develop an eye and also knows something about how pieces were used in historic context, so we are able to communicate with him in nearly the shorthand terms that Keith and I will use when we discuss the relative merits of a piece. The challenge so far has been replacing multiples and pairs of period reproductions, with multiples and pairs of period pieces. He now knows why so many sets of period material are labeled ‘matched’ or ‘harlequin’- the fashion for sets has long since outrun the available material.