Dear Old Things
It has become a minor sport. From the artfully decorated boutiques of SoHo and Greenwich Village to the flea markets of London and Paris, from upstate New York to the rolling tarmac of Los Angeles, hundreds of thousands of hopeful and acquisitive people spend their weekend afternoons sifting through the relics of other people’s houses. Indeed, so popular has the sport become that it has spawned its own ungainly verb. We go antiquing.
What is the allure of eighteenth-century chamber pots, worm-cracked and fuzzy mirrors? Do we need, in our comfortable and well equipped homes, an umbrella stand made from an elephant’s hind leg? A refectory table with a one in ten gradient? A battered saucepan that is guaranteed to wobble? A spittoon? A sconce? No, of course we don’t need them. But we snap them up—often at ridiculous prices—and congratulate ourselves on our good taste and keen eye. This ancient object, encrusted with grime, smelling of a hundred years’ of dust and in need of a complete overhaul, is a great buy.
A flourishing international industry has grown up to service our magpie instincts, shipping dressers from Wales to California, quilts from Pennsylvania to Geneva, cherubs from Italy to Manhattan—criss-crossing the Atlantic, with a few zeros added to their prices each time they change hands. And still we buy. But why?
The reason most commonly given is a tribute to man’s eternal optimism (which history has proved to be a dangerously misguided sentiment): we believe we’re getting a bargain. Other people make expensive mistakes, but not us, even though all our experience tells us that bargains are as thin on the ground as free lunches are.
And if, in the face of a friend’s disbelief at the price we paid for an Art Nouveau coat-rack, our conviction about the short-term-bargain theory should falter, we can always fall back on the long-term-investment excuse. Maybe it seems like a lot of money now, but just you wait five years. According to the dealer (a professional optimist with a fine disregard for architectural possibilities), coat-racks are ready to go through the roof.
There is always a chance that they will and that a few hundred dollars will turn into a few thousand dollars. But unless you happen to be in the business of buying and selling, that is not the real motivation. The true antique addict is an amateur in the proper sense of the word. He does it for love, as a pleasant indulgence, as a hobby that rewards him with a number of satisfactions.
The first of these is a preference for the old over the new. Naturally, the antique pine chest of drawers won’t be as functional as something that was put together last week in a factory in North Carolina; it will be a little warped, the drawers will stick, the knobs will come off. Despite all that, it has a charm that can’t be reproduced, which compensates for its eccentricities. The wood has the glow and smoothness that come from years of use. The shape is not quite regular, because it was cut and planed and finished by hand. It has a little of the maker’s personality in it, and that makes it unique.
So you decide to buy it. And this—the foreplay leading up to the purchase—is a pleasure in itself for the amateur. Putting aside for the moment his role as connoisseur of all that is old and beautiful, he becomes the hardnosed haggler, the prince of negotiators, the bargain-hunter extraordinaire—or he would, if he could understand the gibberish that is written on the price tag.
It is a tiresome habit of many antique dealers to mark their prices in code. Sometimes it is a straightforward substitution of letters for numerals, so that A equals 1, D equals 4, and so on. More often, the letters are given complicated values that make no sense at all to anyone other than the dealer, and so we find that our chest of drawers is clearly marked ‘XPT.’
What does that mean? Would he accept XOS in cash for a quick sale? Why can’t the rascal mark his prices in dollars and cents like they do at Bloomingdale’s? What is he playing at?
The game is called ‘matching the price to the customer.’ While you have been looking at the chest of drawers, the dealer has been looking at you, and you’re both considering the same question—how much?—from different points of view. Depending on how you’re dressed, how interested you seem to be in buying and how interested he is in selling, the price might fluctuate significantly. But you’re not to know that. It is one of the dealer’s little secrets.
Don’t let it worry you because you can play the game too. Call the man over, and get a price from him. Whatever figure he mentions, brush it aside. No, no, you say. Give me the trade price. (Normally, quite a lot less.)
The dealer will look at you through narrowed eyes. Are you really another dealer, or just a robber in a well-cut suit? You give him a business card and show him your cheque book, and there it is, printed proof: ‘COOPER ANTIQUES, PERIOD FURNITURE, VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.’
I know a man who has been doing this for years, and he has now completely refurnished his house at special trade prices, even though he’s no more a dealer than my butcher’s dog is. When I asked him if he thought that this was the kind of sharp practice that an unsporting judge might describe as fraudulent misrepresentation, he just grinned. Didn’t I know? Most antiques bounce back and forth between dealers for years before they find places in private houses. All he was doing, in his own small way, was helping to speed up the turnover of stock, giving the dealers the money to go out and buy more antiques from other dealers. The way he saw it, he was doing the entire business a service.
Even if you’re not prepared to disguise yourself as a gentleman dealer, you must still resist the impulse to pay the asking price. Make an offer, but not before making a few disparaging remarks about rickety legs, dents, scars and interesting blemishes that have accrued with the passage of centuries. The dealer expects it. In fact, he might be hurt if you didn’t point them out, because he may have spent several days in his workshop putting them on.
The process of aging an object or a piece of furniture overnight—or ‘distressing’ it—is an art in itself, and it is miraculous what a talented distresser can do with rusty nails and pumice stone and a mixture of soot and beeswax. More miraculous still is how three-legged chairs can suddenly sprout a fourth leg, marquetry with a bad case of acne can regain a smooth complexion, and tables originally constructed for midgets can grow to adult height.
Inevitably, some killjoy will try to belittle these marvels of inventive restoration. We all have at least one acquaintance who is a self-appointed expert and whose mission in life is to tell you that you have bought a fake. Shaking his head at your foolishness, he will point out in great detail what you were too dumb to see for yourself. It’s not a bad piece, he’ll say, but you could hardly call it an antique. But what the hell. Does it matter? If the piece pleases you, if the faking has been done well, who cares? You bought it to live with, not to sell. The antique know-it-all is a pest who should be locked up in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum to study pre-Columbian bidets.
Occasionally the situation will be reversed and a genuine piece will be treated with as little respect as would a sheet of plywood. I was once in a Manhattan antique shop when a decorator came in with his client. (I knew he was a decorator by the effortless way in which he spent thousands of dollars in the first ten minutes.) He paused in front of a magnificent fifteenth-century oak dining table—absolutely authentic in wonderful condition, a piece of great rarity. He heard the price without flinching. “We’ll take it,” he said, “but you’ll have to cut two feet off the end so that it will fit in the breakfast alcove.”
The dealer was in shock. I don’t like to see a man wrestle with his conscience, so I didn’t wait to see whether he sold the table or whether his principles got the better of him. Personally, I like antiques to be used rather than worshipped, but I did wonder how the table’s maker would have felt about his work being chopped up and put in a breakfast nook.
Over the years, I have been attracted to a wide variety of antiques, an admirer of all and an expert on none. I have liked Chippendale chairs, Chinese porcelain, kitchen artefacts, Lalique glass, Georgian commodes—just about everything except art, which is a separate and overpriced world of its own. Unfortunately for my aspirations as a collector, I have realised that nature did not equip me for the task. I can’t stand living with objects that I have to tiptoe round and hardly dare to touch. I like to be able to sit on chairs, eat at tables, drink from glasses, and collapse onto beds without feeling that I am committing sacrilege or risking breakage and financial ruin. I now live with furniture and objects that are either virtually indestructible or easily replaceable. Old, perhaps, but sturdy. I avoid fragility.
And there is something else that I avoid and that, if you are only a moderately rich millionaire, you should avoid too: the chic auction.
The people who go to the big sale rooms, glossy brochures tucked under mink-clad arms, are not like you and me. They might be upper-crust dealers, professional bidders for foundations of just Grade A plutocrats, but they have one thing in common: they are loaded. And when loaded people get together in the over-cranked atmosphere of competitive bidding, prices disappear upwards within seconds. If you should decide, out of curiosity, to be a spectator at one of these million dollar orgies, the golden rule is to sit on your hands. One absentminded scratch of your ear might catch the auctioneer’s eye and you could find yourself with a twelfth-century bleeding cup and a bill the size of a mortgage. You’re safer with Art Nouveau coat-racks.