Tide of Taste
By CYRIL RAY
BUSINESS is brisk in the great ballroom at Grosvenor House, where the Antique Dealers' Fair, which opened on June 10, goes on until next Thursday. There have been more visitors each day than on the corresponding days last year, and they are spending more : one firm that specialises in fine porcelain did only twenty pounds less business on the opening day than in the whole fortnight of the Fair in 1958. Some say that it is the line weather; some remember that there was a bus strike last year; supporters of the Government put it all down to Mr. Amory's tax reliefs; professional pessimists say that when the knowing ones put their money into works of art you can bet that there is disaster round the corner—seeing in their minds' eyes, no doubt, Greek shipowners sailing for strontium-free South Sea islands in ocean- going yachts loaded to the, gunwales with Chippen- dale break-front bookcases, Adam chimney-pieces bearing garnitures from Sevres, and Gobelins tapestries a dozen feet high.
At any rate, a silver-gilt toilet set made in Augsburg in 1759-61, engraved with scenes from La Fontaine's Fables, was soon snapped up at £10,000, and Prides of London showed no sign the other day of offering to knock the odd shillings off their price of 3,250 guineas for a set of eight Hepplewhite chairs. But I must not frighten away potential visitors to the last few days of what is always an enchanting exhibition : Batsfords may still have some of their eighteenth-century French coloured engravings of birds, mounted, at ten shillings apiece; and I saw Georgian-silver wine- labels at a couple of guineas, and caddy-spoons at not much more.
The tide of taste is ebbing away from the Regency at last, back to the simpler and slenderer elegances, leaving stranded, like a couple of un- gainly behemoths, on one of the most expensive stands, a pair of vast chairs that derive from that morbid passion of the self-styled virtuoso Thomas Hope for size and sphinxes—pieces of furniture the vulgarity of which is patent, and the extreme discomfort presumable, their legs as elephantine as those of Prinny himself, and strong enough to bear two of him, and a brace of Carolines of Brunswick on each Hanoverian knee.
Nowadays, though, it is the Chinese taste that is all the rage, whether truly Celestial, or the Chip- pendale fantasias upon the theme. There are Chinnery portraits of Chinese gentlemen; Chinese mirror-pictures in simulated bamboo frames; eighteenth-century Chinese chairs in brown lacquer, with scroll backs: and Chippendale mir- rors framed in gilded chinoiserie, to embellish
walls already hung with authentic Chinese wall- paper.
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For those who like to discern, in the artifacts of the past, intimations of our present-day ingenuities, there is a sofa-table that can be manipulated into being, in fact, a sofa, as what we now have to call a studio-couch can sometimes be persuaded, by the mechanically minded, into being a spare bed. There is a set of pen-and-ink draw- ings, done by Fanny Burney's cousin in the year of Waterloo, of a space-helmeted hero being rocketed to the moon, equipped with the oxygen- tank and parachute of our time and the Wel- lington boots of his own, which ought, surely, to go to the Science Museum. And I wished to see, but did not, a dapper military figure with a trim moustache and an eyeglass investing some of the proceeds of all those evening-newspaper articles in the silver cup, engraved with the figures of Truth and Justice, that had been presented in 1818 by Joseph Bacon to his Friend Joseph Phelps, as a sincere but inadequate token of Esteem and Gratitude, for his active and disinterested exer- tions in Effecting a Compromise, whereby the greater part of a Residuary Property was rescued from the grasp of a rapacious and unprincipled Attorney, who, by imposing on Age and Imbecility, had fraudulently attempted to appro- priate it to himself, under the Mask of Residuary Legatee.
TRADE UNIONS IN A FREE SOCIETY, by B. C. Roberts, which was referred to in our leading article last week is published by the Institution of Economic Affairs, at 9s. 6d.
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