THE ANTIQUE TRADE
By CYRIL RAY
WHERE does it all come from ? Four million pounds' worth of antiques are on show at the Antique Dealers' Fair at Grosvenor House, which the Princess Royal opened on Thursday. The estimate is unofficial but informed, and the figure is likely enough ; a hundred of the most eminent dealers in Britain are exhibiting, and the biggest of them are certainly showing more than the average of £40,000 worth apiece. Anyone moved to take such figures further, however approximately, would reach staggering conclusions about the capital value of Britain's antique trade. The hundred exhibitors at Grosvenor House have more stock in their shops than on their stands ; five times as many dealers are members of the British Antique Dealers' Association as are exhibiting at the Fair ; and although most of the best-known dealers, big and small, are members of the Association there are plenty of reputable firn,s outside it.
The gloomier sentimentalists pipe their eyes over the collapse of a way of life ; to them the antique shops are filled with treasures sold to meet death duties and current taxation, while the homes they furnished for centuries have been abandoned to dry rot or the Coal Board. Money made at the greyhound tracks or on Wall Street is buying silver engraved with the arms of Queen Anne's courtiers or the Waterford glass from which eighteenth-century bucks took their claret. Some of this is only partly true, and some not true at all. Many a bearer of an ancient name is more interested in horses than in Hepplewhite, or in motor-racing than in Meissen. If he breaks up an ancestor's collection to finance his own pursuits some pieces will go to a museum, some to young couples of good taste and small means who want a Georgian breakfast-table or a Sheraton bookcase for their new little flat in Chelsea, some pieces of china to a collector or to an art-historian writing a monograph. A good thing, too, and not only to the auctioneer and the dealer through whose hands they will have passed. A specially fine piece, it is true, may find its way to America, but only if the Board of Trade and the advisers from the museums permit. Nothing is likely to go to the dog-track millionaire, who has other and more immediately amusing uses for his winnings.
The basis of the antique trade, anyway, is elsewhere. Collectors of silver or snuff-boxes or china send their duplicates to auction, or sell two good pieces to buy one better one. A lady falls out of love with her Sheraton satinwood and sells it off piece by piece to achieve a drawing-room in George I walnut. Collectors and country gentlemen die, and their heirs may not share their taste in pictures or have room for a set of Chippendale chairs. This is the constant flow that keeps the trade flourishing and provides most of the exhibits at the Fair, which for a fortnight is the most fascinating museuni of the arts, the domestic arts and of social history in London—a museum in which every piece, as carefully authenticated as anything at the V. and A., can be handled, bought and taken away. And bought not only by the fabulously wealthy. Only a fairly rich man, it is true, could aspire to the Verzelini goblet,
or the Old Pretender's mirror, but now that the best of our con- temporary workmanship is for export, or carries high purchase-tax at home, a Georgian decanter at five pounds, say, a Sheraton tea- caddy at ten, or a Chippendale tea-table at forty is by way of being a bargain. Much of the £4,000,000 worth is made up of pieces like these.
Where the Fair is more interesting than any museum is in its reflection of current taste. This is seen most clearly in the exhibits of furniture and of china. There is always a market for great rareties of almost any period and provenance, but amongst the Venetian glass, the thousand-year-old T'ang horses, the seventeenth- century Dutch flower paintings (and how sought after they are I), the Hispano-Mauresque pottery and the ormolu rococo of Louis Quinze can be discerned how firmly the English taste for English things is rooted now in the eighteenth century and the Regency. Within the range of furniture that stretches from Queen-Anne walnut to Regency rosewood the demand is all for small pieces ; given the same style and condition, a bureau-bookcase three-foot-six across may well fetch twice the price of one that measures four-foot- six. Walnut of this period, incidentally, keeps its value in spite of there being no American demand ; the veneers will not lie down under American central heating. At the other end of our golden age in cabinet-making there is more Regency furniture on show this year, I'd be prepared to wager, than there was at the first Fair, in 1934. The demand then was only just beginning, and it has been the stand-by of the fashionable interior decorator for not much more than a dozen years. Here, too, the good little 'un is more prized than the good big 'un. Modern ,homes have no room for the massive pieces such. as Knoblock, the playwright, collected long before the vogue became general—the collection that Arnold Bennett described in The Pretty Lady.
Compared with its predecessors, the Regency style in furniture is flashy, in a sturdy English sort of way. In the collecting of china modern taste takes the other turning ; it is all for simplicity and naturalistic decoration. The fifty guineas that one exhibitor asks for a pair of Nantgarw plates is justified partly by the rarity of that factory's products, but partly, too, by the refreshingly simple border of roses that Billingsley painted on them. The dealers tell me that all the famous English and Continental porcelains retain their popularity, except that fewer but more expert collectors are buying Sevres, which needs so much more knowing than the others. There has been so much faking, that is, and so much white Sevres has had decoration added later. In porcelain of all kinds figures are harder to find than ever, and more expensive in consequence.
Lovers of china find the varying beauties of the material at their most concentrated in the figure. There is more room for it than for big vases or services or bowls in the small house ; there is an insatiable American demand. One indication that investment as well as " hobby " money is finding its way to the antique-dealer (and another cause of rarity) is that figures must be perfect. In the old days a collector who wanted a specimen to illustrate a period, a paste, a decoration or a glaze would be happy with one that was cracked or had been repaired. Today even collectors hope for capital appreciation, and play for safety ; nothing so safe as perfection. The small slump of this last couple of years in the antique trade has been partly due to the small boom of the year after the war, when mushroom firms sprang up and did much, before they collapsed, to raise prices all round and a little to shake public confidence in the trade generally. Actually, the integrity of the trade is probably higher in Britain than anywhere else, thanks partly to a long tradition, partly to the principles of English law, partly to such institutions as the Fair and the B.A.D.A.
It is certain, at any rate, that before the war overseas buyers pre- ferred to buy even Continental antiques in British shops or at British auctions rather than in the country the pieces came from. We are in some danger of losing the position we have held so long as the world's entreptit for the trade in fine arts and antiques ; if the Government can find its way to lifting the present ban on the free importation of works of art there will be dollars in it, as well as an end to such slight danger as there may be of Britain's being denuded of her treasures,
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