Collecting only the best and rarest may be satisfying to the egotist or to the person needing aesthetic stimuli to get him through the misery of life in a world of mediocrity, but it does nothing for anyone wanting to know what it was like to live in other centuries. The individual connoisseur is entirely free to collect as he chooses and as his pocket permits, but it is questionable whether today’s major public museums should seek and cherish only the superb to the exclusion of the ordinary. There is no denying that the best must be preserved and that museums offer necessary sanctuaries, but at the same time it is important to remember that the character of the museum-visiting public has changed appreciably in the present century. Whereas in the past the majority of visitors were members of the so-called educated classes, and even when they came as school groups there was a sporting chance that Mummy had a Wedgwood vase at home quite as good as the one in the museum or that Daddy’s great-grandfather was painted by Reynolds, today’s visitors come with no such built-in points of reference. But if they are to learn to appreciate the best, they must be shown it in the context of the average, and if they are to better understand the opportunities and problems of twentieth-century living, they need to know what life was like for people such as themselves in past generations. In an age wherein visual aids have become essential education crutches, today’s museums have a chance to contribute as never before. Nevertheless, many of them still see themselves primarily as repositories for great objects, following the instruction of the sixth-century Chinese philosopher Hsieh Ho, who in spelling out the six canons of aesthetics said: Collect masterpieces.
118. Barbed wire has not yet been sold at Sotheby’s, but it is both collected and historically informative. These pieces, from top to bottom, are examples of Edward M. Crandal’s “Zigzag” patented in 1879; Thomas V. Allis’s “Buckthorn” variation patented in 1881; and Michael Kelly’s “Staple Barb” of 1868, the fifth barbed wire design to be patented in the United States.
In 1904 the new handbook of English pottery published by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London grandly dismissed the ceramic products of the first half of the nineteenth century in the following sentence:
[From] about the year 1790, the careful and elegant and rich wares which had held their own for nearly half a century were gradually displaced by more gorgeous productions covered with gilding, and possessing even less freedom and spontaneity than the works of Chelsea and Etruria, in fact, vulgar when not merely feeble.4
Nine years later, the museum’s keeper of ceramics reminded his superiors of Hsieh Ho’s advice about collecting masterpieces, adding that this should be “the first principle of any good collection…. Only masterpieces,” the curator went on, “are the source of inspiration—and by the number of its masterpieces a collection is finally judged.”5
“By whom?” we may ask.
“Why, by our peers,” the curator would reply.
But publicly funded museums are, by definition, for the people, and do not exist for the benefit of connoisseurs or curators—though one might have thought so from reading the Victoria and Albert Museum report of 1913. In it the keeper of ceramics pleaded for increased funds both to buy the best and to keep the curators happy who, he said, were “gifted by nature to feel the difference between a masterpiece and an average work—and entitled after years of training to become heads of departments.” The same spokesman argued that it was folly for a great museum to “fall back upon what is cheap—the fatal snare of the second-rate collector” who “soon finds his collection déclassé.”6 The italics were the curator’s, but they might as well be mine, for the word then, as now, referred to social class and not to the quality of inanimate objects. Thus, therefore, spake the antiquarian snob. An aesthete, a student of aesthetics, is, by definition, one who has or professes to have a high degree of sensitivity toward the beauties of art or nature. But beauty is a matter of taste, and taste is subjective, enabling Professor Church, who so flatly panned English ceramics of the first half of the nineteenth century, to go on to say that “The decadence…continued without intermission until the new renaissance of the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then,” he went on, “International Exhibitions, loan collections, and the multiplication of Schools of Art have greatly changed the character of English ceramic productions.”7 It is true that there were changes—but for the better?
I, for one, would disagree, and I suspect that there are scores of collectors of early-nineteenth-century pottery and porcelain who would join with me. My point, however, is that museums should not make those kinds of judgments for us and certainly should not build their collections on the basis of them. Taste and fashions change with greater rapidity than ever before, and no museum that purports to preserve the art or industry of a nation can afford to leave gaps because they may not be to the taste of a curator, any more than they should deny those of us not “gifted by nature to feel the difference” between masterpieces and the “inferior production of a mere imitator” the opportunity to see the fine alongside the not-so-good, and the mediocre beside the downright shoddy. Only in this way can we improve ourselves and be worthy of the curator and his museum. I am not denying that the goal should always be to secure good, well-preserved examples of whatever it is one collects (whether we do it for ourselves or for a museum), for as a rule, damage detracts from the object and makes it something less than it was. On the other hand, a certain amount of fair wear and tear evident on an object made to expect it enhances rather than detracts from its interest. A butcher’s block without the marks of his cleaver, or a tavern table without the stains of mugs and bottles, is sterile and somehow unworthy. But if the block has been split in half and nailed back together, or if the table has had its top replaced by an overzealous restorer, then neither is good of its kind.
The individual who collects as an investment (and who is unlikely to be reading this book) must put quality and condition before all else, but for the rest of us it is better to buy a less than perfect piece which interests us, at a price we can afford, than not to have it at all. If nothing else, it can serve as a stand-in until we can find or afford a better specimen. Both dealers who sell the best and collectors who can afford to buy it will tell the novice that he should shun damaged pieces on the grounds that he will never be able to get his money back when he wants to sell them. Like most generalizations, this one is both true and false. The very fact that a dealer puts a price on a damaged piece and does not simply give it away is evidence enough that there is a market for it. If the collector is fool enough to pay a high price for such an object and then tries to sell soon afterward, he will lose hands down; but if he buys at a bargain price and waits until inflation and increasing scarcity drive up the so-called bargain prices along with everything else, he will reap a modest harvest—just how modest depends on the rarity of the object and the extent of the damage. Repaired furniture (restored is the trade word for it) is the rule these days rather than the exception as past neglect and present central heating take their toll. Indeed, when I pointed out that an eighteenth-century oak dresser had had its back leg broken in half, the dealer replied with pained hauteur: “Good heavens, you must expect a bit of age on an old piece like that!”
Repaired glass is rarely worth buying except for no-return, comparative purposes. Relying, as it does, on form and the transmission or reflection of light, glass loses everything once it is cracked. There are exceptions; fractures at original construction joints (between foot, stem, and bowl) can be obscured, and sometimes when the importance of a piece lies, say, in the diamond-point engraving of its bowl, a broken foot replaced in silver or ebony can keep the glass alive and clinging to part of both its interest and its worth. Archaeological museums take a more liberal view, not only with glass, but with everything that comes to them from out of the ground. They glue, and patch, and paint as much as they legitimately can to enable us to appreciate the objects for what they once were. The same can be true for the collector who wants to teach or
needs to learn.
The student of pottery and porcelain learns by handling, comparing, and even by the test of his tongue, and therefore the possession of a number of damaged pieces is vastly more educational than putting all his money into one unchipped specimen of what is termed “museum quality.” Peering at specimens through the glass of a gallery case is better than looking at pictures in a book, but neither is any substitute for learning through familiarity—and that means through possession. Besides, having for years been a buyer of not-quite-perfect pieces, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that “chippy” specimens are today commanding the prices and respect which ten years ago were reserved for the pristine.
Unlike glass, pottery and porcelain can be skillfully and even invisibly repaired. Gone are the drilled holes and leaden rivets that have minimized ceramic tragedies for the best part of two thousand years; in their stead have come epoxy resins and reglazing ovens that obscure the fine line between mending and faking. Alas, the woods are increasingly full of pitfalls, whose bottoms bristle with poisoned stakes waiting to impale the unwary and the unknowing. It would be grossly unfair to label every skillfully concealed repair a fake. The collector whose newly acquired delftware plate is dropped by an inattentive customs official will doubtless want it repaired, and repaired so that the damage does not show. When the plate is sold again it may pass from hand to hand without anyone knowing that it is repaired, but no one is guilty of fakery. But if, on the other hand, the same repair job is done on behalf of someone who plans to sell the object as unbroken, fakery is the proper term. Regardless of who did what and for which motive, the novice (and the experienced collector, for that matter) should question the condition of every ceramic object no matter how unsullied it appears.
A mended and reglazed plate is no better than our hypothetical retopped tavern table, but they are becoming increasingly common. I have even seen a seventeenth-century delftware goblet whose pedestal foot is entirely the invention of a restorer, and were it not for a surface that is slightly less reflective than the bowl, one would never know that the vessel is only half as old as it purports to be. Nervous collectors have grown accustomed to putting their trust in ultraviolet lamps which can expose surface discrepancies in composition invisible to the naked eye, and some buyers even carry small “black light” lamps with them when shopping. Now, however, restorers have begun to use materials indistinguishable under the light from the original, and a few have advertised that their work defies ultraviolet detection. Why, one wonders, does any restoration need to be capable of hoodwinking a lamp?
In the long run, the collector’s only real protection lies in the extent of his own knowledge and experience, for it is only a small step from invisibly replacing a foot to replacing the whole thing. That old chestnut about George Washington’s ax is less funny than it was—the selfsame, original ax he used to cut down the cherry tree, save for the handle, which was replaced in the nineteenth century, and the more recent substitution of a better blade.
In contrast to extensive restoring, the deliberate faking of pottery and porcelain is generally confined to rare and expensive pieces, and to ornamental rather than utilitarian wares. At the same time, however, because dated anythings always fetch good prices, it is not unusual to find old pieces enhanced by the addition of new dates. Thus, for example, nineteenth-century lead-glazed wares such as inkwells, tobacco jars, and small pitchers are found with enticingly early dates incised on their bottoms, copying the kinds of inscriptions sometimes applied by potters before the wares were fired. But lettering and figures added afterward cut through the skin and surface texture of the baked clay, whereas those scratched beforehand became one with it. Now it is true that owners of domestic wares sometimes added identifying initials and dates after manufacture, but they did so where they could be seen. Letters and dates on the bottom were invariably the marks of the maker and were applied when the clay was in the leather-hard condition and much easier to incise than it would be after firing. Consequently a knowledge of how pottery was made and why it was inscribed can help to arm the collector against such crude deceptions. More difficult to spot are old pieces that have been doctored and refired or reglazed, such as the genuine, late-eighteenth-century delft ointment pots which turn up blandly sporting seventeenth-century dates or the cipher of Charles II, all in underglaze blue. The forger has usually well mastered the appropriate style for the digits and letters and has accurately captured the tone and texture of the cobalt blue; but he has made one glaring mistake. Unaware that even the simple ointment pot went through an evolutionary progression from the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth century, he has used shapes unknown in the reign of Charles the Second. Thus the collector who does know the difference is unlikely to be deceived.
Just as desirable as dated pieces of British delftware are the large dishes or chargers decorated with royal portraits or the arms of livery companies, and their value has skyrocketed in the last twenty years. Although a surprisingly large number of good examples keep appearing on the market, some clever forgeries (apparently made in France) were injected into the London shops and salesrooms in the 1920s, and they still surface from time to time, ready to torpedo the unwary. Much more insidious are the copies of once commonplace, eighteenth-century delftware bowls made as recently as 1972 in Spain and sold in New York as antiques. Decorated in polychrome, the example shown to me had a parrotlike bird in a hoop as its principal feature; the quality of the painting was extremely good in that it cleverly captured the confidence of the eighteenth-century brushwork that is usually lacking in modern reproductions. On the other hand, the white tin-glaze, though convincing enough on the wall of the bowl, was less so on the base where it had tended to pool and become suspiciously blue. Somewhere along the line, either at the factory or in the hands of a trader intent on deception, the rim had been chipped and stained, and the foot filed in a less than successful simulation of wear. Nevertheless, the overall effect was so frighteningly good that even knowledgeable dealers have been blighted by these Spaniards.
Just as one cannot learn to identify and date genuine antiques from books alone, so one cannot hope to detect forgeries without a thorough knowledge of the character and feel of the object being copied. Nevertheless, there are some key pieces of information that can best be obtained from books, and these are sizes. The saltglaze figurine illustrated in Fig. 119 belongs to a much-prized class of molded ornaments or “toys” sold by peddlers and at mid-eighteenth-century country fairs. It is visually more or less identical to an example illustrated in the 1908 catalogue of London’s Guildhall Museum—except that it is smaller by half an inch. Had it been made from the same mold as the London specimen, both figures would have been virtually identical in size; instead, the loss of the half inch indicates that the smaller example is a copy once removed from the original mold. It was actually shaped in a matrix taken from a plaster cast of the original and was made at the Williamsburg Pottery, one of the few factories still producing white salt-glazed stoneware. The reproduction was made with no intent to deceive (and no expert handling it would be fooled); the point is simply that Staffordshire figures made in England in the same way do deceive collectors who do not know the measurements of the originals. I should add, however, that overall size variations are not infallible guides, as the two statuettes of Lord Rodney (Fig. 120) demonstrate. They are painted in different colors, one has a hat and the other does not, and their bases are not in the least alike. Nevertheless, both are genuine, the figures themselves being cast from molds taken from the same master matrix—though admittedly the hatless example is a pretty miserable product. In such cases it is only by careful comparison that one can be sure that the figures are genuine, which makes it tough on the novice collector who has never before seen one example, let alone having access to two or three.
119. Diminished size and sharpness can be clues that unmask a ceramic impostor. Left, a modern copy of an English white salt-glazed stoneware figurine, its
height 4 inches. Right, the original dating from about 1745 and 4½ inches tall.
120. Differences in overall size can themselves be deceiving. These pearlware figures of Lord Rodney are both genuine and cast from the same original pattern, but they have been attached to different bases, were painted in different colors, and one, of course, has his hat on. About 1782. Height of example at right 7 inches.
In America, as interest in the Colonial and Federal periods has increased, a number of museums and historic places have sponsored the reproduction of items in their collections in the thoroughly praiseworthy belief that the past can contribute as much to twentieth-century taste in private homes as it can from the confines of public museums. Tremendous care is taken to insure that the reproductions (be they of furniture, silver, brassware, engravings, ceramics, or glass) are as exact duplications of the original antiques as modern materials and skills will allow. All are clearly marked when they leave the museums, but clarity and permanence are not necessarily synonymous. On the contrary, countless thousands of pieces of reproduction glassware ranging from eighteenth-century-type drinking glasses to commemorative American spirit bottles have been distributed with no more lasting identification than a gummed label intended to be removed as soon as the buyer got home. Proposed legislative action calling for the permanent marking of all reproductions of antique glassware that had long languished in Congressional committee was expected to pass in 1973, but the closing of the stable door would do nothing to recapture the hundreds and thousands of unmarked copies already away and running. To add further hazards to the course, there are some deliberate and extremely skillful fakes of early-eighteenth-century glasses on the market, most of them doctored to exhibit the right appearance of age and usage.
All the Best Rubbish Page 26