All the Best Rubbish

by Ivor Noel Hume

  The presence or absence of wear under the foot of a glass is not an infallible test, for old specimens that received little use can have come through with virtually no abrasions. It is worth remembering, however, that when the wear is genuine the scratches go in all directions, having been acquired one at a time, but fake wear has usually been applied in one operation (either by the deft use of sandpaper or by rotating the foot on a rough surface) creating a degree of uniformity in the direction of the scratches. Just to make sure that nothing is simple, I must add that the presence of bogus wear does not necessarily mean that the glass is also spurious. A distinguished ceramics collector visiting one of the London antiques markets came upon a customerless merchant filling in time studiously abrading the base of a wine glass with emery paper.

  “What are you doing that for?” the amazed collector inquired. “That’s a perfectly good eighteenth-century glass.”

  “I know,” replied the dealer, “but Americans won’t believe it unless they can spot a bit of wear on the bottom.”

  Glasses with solid rather than folded feet were frequently chipped in the course of normal use, and chips mean cheap in the antique market; so it is not uncommon to find that feet have been carefully ground down and repolished. The result is a foot of slightly, yet noticeably smaller diameter and an edge that is sharper than it should be. Sometimes there is nothing wrong with the foot or with the rest of the glass for that matter—except that they did not start life together. A valuable glass that has been made almost worthless by the loss of its foot has sometimes been the beneficiary of a foot transplant, a fraud that should be detectable under the right ultraviolet light.

  Museum distributors of ceramic reproductions are generally very conscious of their responsibility not to mislead, and they make sure that their wares are firmly marked, yet even the best of them may not be safe from the attentions of black-hearted villains willing to buff, grind, and chisel. Even though the recorded examples are relatively few in number, they are enough to warrant collectors to examine carefully those places where marks are usually applied. Irregular concavities on a ceramic base, unusual thinness, smoothness where wear might be expected, or an unusual absence of glaze are all causes for alarm. I might add, too, that the grinding wheel of a deftly handled file can also do wonders for a genuine but damaged antique by trimming down and reshaping a broken spout or whittling away the chipped rim of a tea bowl—sometimes creating some unusual (and expensive) shapes in the process.

  Reproductions of German stonewares have received more than their fair share of name grinding. Skillfully manufactured in the Rhineland in the nineteenth century to take advantage of the Gothic revival, vases, jugs, and steinzeugs of great elaboration closely resembled their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors—all the way to the inclusion of contemporary dates and the initials of well-known master potters. These reproductions were nearly always cast rather than thrown on the wheel, and careful examination reveals traces of vertical moldmarks as well as molded and not folded terminals to handles. But in spite of these telltale details which cannot be hidden, Victorian makers’ marks have been ground off the bottoms to add three centuries to the pots’ age. There is, of course, a much greater temptation to play games with reproductions which also bear the date of the original, for by removing the modern dating evidence and leaving only the lying digits, the objects can be left to make their own sales pitch without any help from the dealer.

  The importing of antiques into America from Europe is a trade of such proportions that it is hard to believe that any water remains in the well. As the supply drops and prices rise, small traders are forced to supplement their stocks with what they hope customers will consider tasteful household accessories—reproduction delftware, glass, and brassware from Holland, gaudy faïence from France, bone china from England often bad enough to make Professor Church spin in his grave, tinware from Italy, porcelain from Japan, and cute clocks from Germany. When mingled with genuine antiques, the line between old and new can become unintentionally unclear. This was brought home to me while visiting a large American import warehouse in an East Coast seaport, a warehouse doing business solely with the antique and decorating trades. The building was stacked high with furniture of every age from sixteenth-century Spanish to late-Victorian English, much of it in need of repair but all marketable after appropriate face-lifting. Tall case clocks of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dates stood in dusty rows against the walls like old soldiers on their last parade; paintings of disapproving ancestors were stacked six deep awaiting their passage from purgatory, and piled in cupboards and standing about on chests and any available flat spaces were smaller antiques: ceramics, pewter, miscellaneous bric-a-brac—including an interesting box iron of brass with what appeared to be a Delftware handle. The metal was dull and spotted with corrosion, but it could easily be cleaned. However, when I picked the iron up I knew that the brass was too thin to have withstood real usage, and the handle, once deprived of its dust, was too bright to be old. Nevertheless, the iron was an attractive, if none too convincing “bygone,” and I wondered whether the importer had been deceived by it. The answer was not long delayed, for while he was showing me his stock of porcelain my eyes wandered to a shelf whereon, sealed in individual plastic bags, stood twenty or thirty bright new box irons, all fresh from the factory.

  I know from bitter experience that antique buying outside one’s area of specialization can be a costly business. Most authorities advise the neophyte to admit his ignorance to a reputable dealer and place himself in the expert’s hands. Although I am sure that broadly speaking this is sound counsel, the only time I tried it I was taken to the cleaners by one of London’s best-known and oldest established dealers in antique weapons. When I complained that the alleged Brown Bess musket (c. 1780) had a barrel stamped with proof marks not used before 1813 and that the lock bore an ordnance mark not used before 1841, my gentle mentor had the gall to remind me that in the antique business the watchword was caveat emptor. I say “was” and not “is” because today collectors buying in Britain are better protected, thanks to the Misrepresentation Act of 1967, which gives an unhappy customer civil recourse, and the 1968 Trades Descriptions Act that lays violating traders open to criminal prosecution.

  The novice collector who decides that he can buy more advantageously in reputable salesrooms than in shops is probably quite right. After all, he is going only one step further on a limb than the last bidder to think the object worth having at approximately that price. Nevertheless, it is unwise to put total trust in the catalogue descriptions. Although major auction firms in America and Britain have specialists on their staffs to write the texts, a Meissen porcelain expert who happens to be the company’s current “ceramics man” might well find himself cataloguing Staffordshire earthenwares. He then does the best he can, based on the owner’s descriptions, checked against available reference books and his own good judgment. If, as sometimes happens, the books are wrong, then an uncommon object may be given less or more than its due. Thus, for example, I have seen some very ordinary seventeenth-century kitchen earthenwares offered as medieval rarities, and being knocked down at very uppity prices. Careful reading of the fine print generally shows that the auctioneers take no responsibility for such honest errors, though they will usually take back any item that can be proved to be a forgery, but only within a specified time after the sale.

  From my own, admittedly limited experience, I have found that buying at long range from a catalogue description alone can be an exhilarating but dangerous sport. In theory, one should only land a single “going, going!” deeper in the hole than bidders who have had the advantage of examining the object. In practice, however, it may not work out that way. Instead, one can wind up bidding against a rich idiot, or worse still, another blind postal bidder willing to go within one piaster of your limit. In this way it is possible to be landed with a damaged item at much too high a price. Therefore, if condition and quality are important to
the long-distance bidder, it is much wiser to invest a little more and let a competent dealer act on his behalf. This is equally true if one is bent on acquisition regardless of cost, for it is as easy to submit too low a postal bid as it is to go too high. Auction houses will generally be willing to provide an estimate of the price they expect an object to command, but experience has often shown such estimates to be far too conservative, sometimes by as much as 40 percent. Thus the absentee bidder who allows himself to be closely guided by them can expect frequent disappointments.

  Even if one collects as I do, more for pleasure and education than for investment, it is imbecilic not to protect one’s assets. In spite of the fact that fashion and attendant band-wagons make prices move in cycles, the value of antiques, prudently acquired, steadily increases and can offer a better hedge against inflation than can many another investment. It is important, therefore, that antiques of any consequence should be individually insured under a fine arts policy, and unless accidental breakage coverage is included, protection against fire, theft, and weather damage is relatively inexpensive and is well worth its premiums in peace of mind. Although a one-line description and an appraised (or documented purchase price) value is generally all that is necessary for an insurance company to issue a policy, it may become more picky when the hat is in the other hand. Thus, to avoid any danger of the company, which has so smilingly accepted one’s premiums these many years, from turning tiresome, each insured object should be catalogued and photographed—with a copy of the card being housed somewhere other than the home that may be burned or burglarized.

  Figure 121 illustrates the card format that I have adopted for my own collection and which seems to fulfill most needs. The picture (in this case a contemporary portrait of Charles II) goes on the right and the description on the left; the latter includes measurements, date, salient features, and so forth. Additional boxes are provided for the date of acquisition, the purchase price, currently insured value, and the photo negative number, along with the name of the dealer from whom the object was bought. The back of the card provides ample space for extra descriptive information, published parallels, experts’ comments, notes on any repairs that may have been made, and references to exhibitions or publications in which the object has figured. The space for the photograph provides room enough for a standard 4¼” × 3⅜” Polaroid print.

  All this museumy regimentation may at first appear to take the fun out of collecting and reduce the very objects we are trying to bring to life to the level of impaled butterflies in a glass case. In reality, however, the process of cataloguing forces us to examine an object in far greater detail than ever we would if it was simply brought home and set on a shelf to be admired but never touched. Not only do we consider its size, color, age, provenance, and the materials from which it was made, we examine and record the chips, cracks, and scratches that make this antique like no other. This last information can sometimes provide clues to the way and extent that an object was used—though that is not the primary reason for noting it on the card. Insurance companies like it that way, for it enables them to make positive identification if a thief is caught with your loot in his knapsack.

  121. A specimen catalogue card.

  Beside keeping one’s collection in order and one’s insurance agent happy, there is another excellent reason for keeping a detailed catalogue. If, like my godfather (who inadvertently dropped dead in the foyer of the London Coliseum while escorting a lady of the chorus), you leave a valuable but undocumented collection behind you, the chances are that it will be sold up by executors who do not recognize its worth or know how to dispose of it advantageously. My godfather, incidentally, collected both chorus girls and European armor, and while the girls were able to fend for themselves, the merits of the armor were less obvious. The whole lot was put up for sale at a local and very rural auction where it was knocked down for virtually nothing. Although this happened during the Depression, when antique prices were low, equally philistine executors may today see as little in one’s prized collection of barbed wire or bottle caps. Consequently it behooves us to be sure that our postfuneral voices are capable of being heard from the depths of our safe-deposit boxes.

  All this may sound very crass, and I suppose it is. But the sad truth remains that serious collecting blossoms with middle age and bears its richest fruit toward the end of a collector’s life. Consequently the inheriting generation is more likely to sell the plums than cherish them. If the treasures were originally assembled only to feed their owner’s ego or to be decorative around the home, then their dispersal at his death is no cause for dismay; on the contrary, their return to the salesroom (and the opportunity for them to be acquired by public museums) is all to the good. If, on the other hand, the collection is the product of extensive research and refinement and, as a unit, represents a contribution to the history of art, technology, commerce, or society, then its dismemberment is to be deplored. Similarly, the parting of an antique from the information about it that the collector may have garnered represents a sorry waste of knowledge. But how is it to be prevented?

  The obvious answer is to give both the collection and the associated research notes to a museum—with or without claiming a tax deduction—while one is still around to do it. Simple as that solution may sound, it oftens turns out to be much harder to accomplish. Many museums do not like collections; they like objects! Collections demand blocks of storage space and cataloguing in a way that may be at odds with established practice. I found this to be the stumbling block when I tried to give my Thames collection to two London museums before moving to America. As the artifacts had been found in certain recorded localities and so were to some degree associated in place if not in time, I wanted them accessioned and stored as a unit. Neither museum would accept that restriction, and so, with the exception of a piece of a Roman helmet which went to the British Museum, the best of the collection came with me to America.

  This kind of problem is particularly common among archaeological collections where the relationship between otherwise disparate items lies only in the fact that they were found at a certain spot. If that happened to be the home of a Founding Father or a popular pirate, then a museum might be glad to accept the inconvenience along with the collection. If, on the other hand, the location is of no general interest, then it becomes a liability that curators may be loath to accept. They are liable to be equally unenthusiastic about accepting anything encumbered with restrictions limiting the museum’s freedom to store or exhibit as it chooses. It is a reluctance that can burgeon into a flat refusal if the collection includes mediocre specimens along with the good. Of course all these objections can be routed like vampires at the sunrise if the donor is prepared to endow a building, a wing, or equip and staff a gallery. Alas, the kinds of collections and collectors I am thinking about are not in that league.

  Even if we give our collections to museums without any strings attached, just to prevent the pieces disappearing again, there may be no guarantee that they will be safe as long as the museums endure. A museum must change its policies and points of view to keep pace with popular interest, to combat economic strictures, and to reflect the taste and scholarship of its curators. A director whose specialty is Korean bronzes may have scant regard for his museum’s collection of Roman glass, just as a connoisseur of art nouveau may use the current fashion for Edwardiana as an excuse to dispose of the medieval ivories acquired under a predecessor’s regime, using the proceeds to invest in Limoges enamels and Tiffany glass. Furthermore, the masterpiece philosophy of giving the Hsieh Ho to second-rate treasures can mean that anything is vulnerable when a better example is offered.

  The trading and selling of museum specimens is more common in the United States than in England, but even in Britain it is an idea that finds increasing favor as spatial problems mount along with costs of maintenance and acquisition. In 1972 the director of Britain’s Colchester Excavation Committee proposed the raising of funds for further digging on
the site of the Roman city by selling “priceless mosaics in Colchester Museum” to America. Later in the same newspaper interview he allegedly managed to put a price on the priceless, and suggested that one mosaic might fetch as much as $125,000, which sum could finance a major excavation in the downtown area and might lead to the finding of “maybe four or five more floors.”8 The need for the money and for the digging to be done cannot be questioned, but this proposal would not merely ask the museum to exchange one unique object for another it desired more, but to gamble away a national treasure on a chance that it might secure four others—others that no one could guarantee even existed.

  We might be tempted to seek comfort in the knowledge that most collections of yesterday’s best rubbish are not blessed with Van Gogh and Modigliani canvases or with priceless Roman mosaics, and therefore once in a museum, curators will not be tempted to use our lesser treasures to solve their financial problems. Instead, the danger lies in the staff thinking so little of the objects that it gives them away, stores them with too little regard for their safety, or throws them out (or burns them like the Ashmolean’s dodo), to make room for new, nine-day wonders. The disposal of museum objects, in whatever manner or for whatever reason, has a reassuringly scholarly name; it is called “de-accessioning.” When the objects to be deaccessioned were acquired by purchase, their rejection is really only a repudiation of a previous curator’s judgment; but when gifts or bequests are involved, or when the objects are the product of neighborhood excavations and thus are pages from local history, other more cogent issues are at hazard. It would be grossly unfair, however, if I were to leave the impression that museum staffs and trustees glibly accept responsibilities they have no intention of honoring. Although I admit to having been mildly piqued to find that an item given to a museum in 1956 could not be found there in 1972, I am sure that this was an extreme and unfortunate instance, offset a thousandfold by its galleries and storerooms filled with not-so-marvelous objects accessioned before 1872. In short, few museums are out to break the Metropolitan’s reported record of dispensing with fifteen thousand objects in twenty years.