April 19 2020 - A Doll's House

We saw an Antiques Roadshow highlights program last night and the highlight was a 311 year old doll's house valued at £150,000.  A camera crew went to the home to film the object.  They weren't called doll houses in the 1700s, they were called "baby houses".  This one was considered to be of national significance. Can you imagine the person valuing the object had seen pictures of it in a 1950s book, but no one knowing if it still existed or where it might be?  There are no follow-up articles on whether this went to auction or was donated to a British Museum.  All those listings are repetitions of just one article. What you can look through, though, are summaries and highlights of the most valuable items found on the show.  Here's the article of the top 16 items HERE.  The top one listed is a model of Antony Gormley's Angle of the North with an appraised value of $1,565,000 and sold for $2,946,300, then a pocket watch by Patek Philippe made in 1914 for entrepreneur George Thompson, sold at auction for $1,541,212 and so on. Part of the fascination of this show is each person's story of the object.  The 1904 Diego Rivera's oil painting with a $1,000,000 value hung behind a door for decades in the parents' home.   And this one:  A young man named Richard Hobbs went down in Roadshow history when, in 1993, he presented silver specialist Ian Pickford with a carrier bag full of pieces he didn’t think would be worth much. It turned out to be the show’s most important silver collection. Hobbs discovered that his father had been secretly collecting silver and stashing it under the bed in shoeboxes. The family had very little money and never went on holiday or had any luxuries — and it was suddenly clear where the cash had gone. Richard and his mother Margaret later sold the silver for a total of £350,000. In 1917, cousins Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths took five photographs to prove that fairies existed at the bottom of their garden in the woods of Cottingley, Yorkshire. It was widely believed to be a hoax at the time, until Arthur Conan Doyle said he believed the story and also set out in 1920 to prove it, giving the girls better cameras to take more fairy photographs. In 2008, the daughter and granddaughter of Frances caused amazement when they turned up on the Roadshow with the photographs and camera. One of the greatest pranks of the 20th century was valued at £25,000. The Antique Roadshow came to RBG in the Autumn 2019 and let's hope something fascinating turned up there. Today we have a colourized bark abstract.

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The Gilded Age is History

What about the 'social value' of antiques? By that I mean: How furniture and accessories are intertwined in our social lives and represent our personal voice.   The Decoration of Houses was written by Edith Wharton and Odgen Codman in 1897.  Wharton was in her 30's, a wealthy socialite in Manhattan with a passion for architecture and interior design, not the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist she became later.  Her family was so wealthy and so (self-) indulgent that the coining of the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses" was about her family. This book became what Architectural Digest terms "the King James Version of the Bible."  What Wharton espoused was things like: pleasingly proportioned rooms inspire when on a budget invest in comfortable chairs and sofas and not accessories build and decorate houses based on individual needs not trends This was during the Gilded Age of mansions such as The Breakers in Newport, Biltmore in Asheville, Nemours in Delaware.  There were hundreds of these homes dominating the design scene. The 'palace' look remained a prized style for decades and decades. In my youth, people had reproduction antiques into their homes to achieve European elegance.  Our small suburban houses were built on the same principles as the gilded age 'temples.' What were they?  The explanation comes from Wikipedia's commentary on the gilded age houses: "All these houses are "temples" of social ritual of 19th-century high society, they are the result of the particularization of space, in that a sequence of rooms are separated and intended for a specific sort of activity, such as dining room for gala dinners, ballroom, library, etc." Aspirations of architectural grandeur continue today.  So what's different in our home design and decor?  Edith Wharton's principles have taken over.  This means 'dark rooms' are gone. Our commonly accepted social style is contemporary and current.

Jan 3 - Antiques are Past

Our social values have shifted drastically when it comes to possessions that are 'old.' What used to be considered valuable as  'antiques' has definitely changed. Now the value of experiences overrules the value of possessions. We lived during this transition -  it happened in just 20 years.  Since the turn of the 21st century, the value of 18th and 19th century furniture has plummeted.  Quoted everywhere on the internet is that the prices for average pieces are now "80 percent off". There used to be a Winter Antiques Show in New York that once required that exhibited pieces be at least 100 years old.  In 2009 they changed the date to 1969 to include midcentury objects.  In 2016, they removed the date restriction entirely.   In the last 10 to 15 years, the change in taste and collecting habits has settled into a two-tiered market.  The antiques of the wealthy and famous (whether owners or creators) still attract exceptionally high prices.  These antiques are increasing in value all the time. The other tier is the low end.  Antiques of the every-day ordinary have dropped significantly. They may be good quality and by known makers, but they have fallen on hard times value-wise. We can turn antiques into an  'experience.' The Original Round Top Antiques Fair is in Round Top, Texas in January.  It is celebrating its 50th year, specializing in Americana antiques. Its promotional pictures show fields of bluebonnets (lupins) - these would likely be during the spring show.   Let us turn to a more prestigious experience, though. This is the antiques experience known to all of us - The Antiques Roadshow.  It remains an entertaining show with interesting items that dealers and experts bring to life for us.  The show will be at the Winterthur Museum on June 18th. This is an impressive venue: Winterthur houses the most important collection of Americana in the US and is considered the greatest naturalist garden in North America. Near Philadelphia, it is just a few miles from Longwood Gardens.   So we move onwards in our social and cultural lives. Owning antiques has declined, yet they remain part of our culture - through experience.  This is our social environment now - where experience is more important than things - where things are curated into experiences. Our pictures show the Niagara Falls Christmas display this year.