Talk of the brown
Georgian and Victorian furniture is out of fashion, meaning well-crafted pieces can be picked up for a fraction of the price of new ones, says a resolutely jolly Roger Field
IT’S May and the sun should be shining. Hurrah! Boris has produced a ‘roadmap to recovery’. Double hurrah! Although I wonder how many in these days of computerised talking maps can navigate a paper map, let alone a Bj-inspired ‘happy days are here again’ roadmap. But, let’s not carp. Talking of which, the fishing season is here again and I for one cannot wait for my first trip to the bank to go mano a salmo trutta (brown trout). So, after a long winter of tedium, I’m putting all my negativities aside and I am going to be super-duper positive this month. I will even avoid my ongoing: ‘Why are people paying so much for antiques at auction?’ puzzlement. That said (sorry), I discovered the definitive answer to that question in a recent newspaper headline: ‘Households are sitting on £180 billion of savings’. That buys armouries full of swords and guns, and warehouses of vintage cars and fine claret, at auction. But let’s put that aside. I’ve had my arm jabbed by a charming nurse. It’s even stopped hurting. The summer awaits and I’m now Mr Positive.
So maybe, just maybe, another reason for the high sums being paid at auction is that, after decades of falling prices for all but the very best, and objects that are à la mode for whatever reason inspiring buyers at any given moment – some positively dubious (“Kick on, Roger, you promised to be positive,” Ed) – a younger generation is finally learning to appreciate just what good value antiques can be. For starters, our craftsman ancestors lived in a world in which apprentices spent at least seven years learning the trade before they could claim to be masters. The end result is that they handmade things far better then than most are capable of doing today.
I was once lucky enough to handle the Staffordshire Hoard – a huge haul of circa AD600-700 Anglo-saxon artefacts, much of it gold and silver – deep in the bowels of Birmingham Museum. The conservators were astonished by the quality and complexity of the workmanship. They showed me a sword hilt made of gold, studded with garnets from Sri Lanka. Their microscopes revealed that the smith had punched
the gold into minuscule pyramids so that when the sun shone through the garnets it bounced back, making the hilt gleam red. They had no idea how he had managed to do this.
The difference in quality of bog-standard Georgian and Victorian furniture (for example) might not be as dramatic as this, but the workmanship is often exceptional and can offer incredible value. Most provincial auction rooms offer plenty of this ‘brown furniture’ most months. For example, Tennants’ 27 February Antiques and Interiors sale had the following items on offer, pieces that will not only look great in most domestic settings but are thoroughly useful and useable: a Georgian, mahogany, bow-front, hanging (screw it into the wall) corner cupboard with doors sold for £80 – there was no reserve or estimate and it came with a ‘spare’ walnut, period mirror. I’ve got a near-identical one that is elegant, space-saving and used for my wine glasses and whisky tumblers. Or, an early-19th-century ‘dwarf’ mahogany linen press. Again, I’ve got one. The shelves in the upper cupboard section slide out, making it perfect for stacking and, just as important, being able to see my shirts without creasing them. It sold for £420, over its £200 to £300 estimate, meaning that, on a ‘good’ day, you might have got it for £200 or less. Hardly pricey for such a useful hunk of furniture. Most bedrooms need a sturdy chest of drawers. I suspect you’d pay far more for a flimsy, stapled together, ‘supermarket special offer’ than the £130 paid (estimate £150 to £250) for the Victorian mahogany chest on turned feet that Tennants sold that day. Or, try taking the £300 paid (estimate £150 to £250) for a versatile, mahogany, Georgian ‘D end’, extending dining-room table – with an extra leaf and six Georgian dining chairs (wow!) – into your local high street and see what you end up coming home with for that amount. Also, how much furniture today is made of magnificent mahogany? Cheap as chips the lot of them.
However, when rich folk want really fine furniture the sums paid can go ballistic. On 19 January, Christie’s sold a Regency (circa 1810) mahogany, combo-games and writing table estimated at £5,000 to £8,000. With its exquisitely inlaid chess and backgammon boards this table would be desirable at any time. It fetched a meaty £13,000; a big chunk of change I grant you, but I wonder how much a new one from a smart West End shop would cost? And which would look better?
And now for something as far from mahogany furniture as it is possible to get. Jim Fees was a real-life Jason Bourne, described in one book as, ‘one of America’s greatest intelligence officers’. His boldest coup, perhaps – although who knows anything when it comes to the CIA? – was
A tiny lunar sphere sold for £500,000
‘at the height of The Cold War… his acquisition of a Russian MIG 23 fighter plane for the US Air Force to understand and learn to combat with’ (Tom Cruise went up against them in the film Top Gun). These CIA bravery medals are known as ‘jockstrap’ medals because they are not only awarded in secret but cannot be displayed in public. Little surprise then that when Dix Noonan Webb sold his three medals on 17 February there was massive interest, not least because the ever-secretive Fees had cunningly mounted each medal behind a lithograph of the Middle East – one of his favourite stomping grounds – so that it is only when you open the print-covered ‘door’ that you discover the medal and citation hidden within. What a guy. They garroted their £2,000 to £3,000 estimate to sell for £22,000. Surprisingly, perhaps, to a British collector who is ‘fascinated by spy-related items’.
Been looking for pots of gold at the end of rainbows of late? The real gold, it transpires, is to be found by chasing meteorites and scooping up the debris at the strike site. Christie’s proved this when it auctioned off 75 lots of interplanetary ‘waste’ in New York on 23 February. Maybe buyers spent the lockdown gazing at the moon and stars because they all sold and, with many of the lots, it was a question of adding a zero to the already chunky top estimates. An extreme example of space one-upmanship was the tiny – only 1.66 inches in diameter – Lunar Sphere (moonrock) found in the Sahara, which trashed its $25,000 top estimate to sell for $500,000. I sort of get it because – sorry Christie’s and moon junk crazies – most of these bits looked like rather dull bits of misshapen grey rock and iron. At least someone had turned this into a ‘nice’, smooth globe to try to make it look pretty; doubtless infuriating the scientists… That said, I’ll stick with the far larger, deep blue, lapus lazuli sphere my daughter gave me for Christmas. It looks the dog’s cojones and doubtless cost rather less. Relatively cheap in comparison at $32,500 (estimate $3,000 t0 $4,000) was the 4½in long by 2in high chunk of asteroid iron found
in Siberia after a meteorite strike in 1947. I only wish I had found it. Finally, the fourth largest ‘slice’ of moon rock ever found, also in the Sahara, and an impressive 16in x 14in. This also shattered its upper estimate of $325,000 to sell at $525,000. Eyes to your telescopes, readers. You never know when you might strike it lucky.
Which is more than can be said for that most exceptional of men, Captain Noel Chavasse, VC and Bar, MC; the most decorated soldier of World War I and the only person to win a bar to his VC in that war. It is heartbreaking to read how he, a doctor, met his end in 1917, carrying in the wounded under heavy fire in spite of being grievously wounded himself. Born one of a pair of sickly twins who were not expected to survive, both brothers went on to become British Olympic 400 metre runners. His medals sold in 2009 for a world record £1.5m and it was therefore little surprise when another, rather more personal item of his sold for £1,700, almost triple its £600 top estimate, at C&T on 18 February: his ‘tippling stick’, complete with a brass-covered glass compartment in the centre that unscrews to reveal a doubtless much-needed grog holder. Hardly expensive given who it once belonged to.
You must think I’ve gone ‘soft’ as there’s been no cutting steel or things that go ‘Bang!’ so far this month. So, to finish, here’s a gratuitous something that not only goes ‘Bang! Bang!’ but also incorporates sharp steel: a super rare, over-and-under percussion blunderbuss with a folding bayonet, made by Rigby, Dublin, circa 1823, that Bonhams sold on 3 December. ‘Good’, single-barrel blunderbusses with bayonets usually sell in the £1,000 to £1,500 range but this was exceptional, hence it bagging a mid-estimate £15,000. Here’s hoping we will all be bagging lots of game afore too long…