Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: And this is a special bonus episode to help you fill those social distancing hours.
Speaker: We might release a few more of these in the coming weeks.
Speaker: The coronavirus is obviously it's affecting every aspect of life and every industry, every place of business.
Speaker: And of course, I want to take a look at the effects that it's having on the antiques world.
Speaker: So where better to start than with my own firm, SJ ShrubSoul?
Speaker: So I'm here with ShrubSoul's owner, Tim Martin.
Speaker: Hi, Tim.
Speaker: Hi, Ben.
Speaker: So the shop is closed.
Speaker: The staff, including me, is working from home.
Speaker: We can't travel.
Speaker: Auctions are being postponed.
Speaker: Basically, you know, the bulk of what we do on a day to day basis is not really possible to do anymore.
Speaker: But we're still occupying the time.
Speaker: And actually, I'd like to think we're being productive in certain ways, in ways that hopefully are interesting to our customers.
Speaker: But Tim, you had a really interesting idea for a project to undertake during this period.
Speaker: And I thought listeners would be really interested to hear about it.
Speaker: So it's actually a series of emails.
Speaker: But tell me about that idea and where it came from.
Speaker: Well, I was sort of thinking about pestilence and plague and being an antique dealer, you know, how people in other times had dealt with it.
Speaker: And the central object for a...
Speaker: The central document of a plague in English silver, which is our field,
Speaker: a set of tankards made for a man called Edmund Barry Godfrey for his sort of resolute and dutiful conduct during both the Great Fire of London in 1665 and the Great Plague of London in 1666.
Speaker: And I think actually those two events may have overlapped.
Speaker: But in any case,
Speaker: They're called the plague tankards and the fire of London tankards.
Speaker: And so I went and looked at one of the plague tankards, which is on display at the Met.
Speaker: And we'd had one years ago that I'd always sort of regretted that it was before my time.
Speaker: And being sort of a, I'm generally kind of interested in literature.
Speaker: And so I thought about
Speaker: Camus, and I thought about John Donne, who talks about plague in his poetry.
Speaker: And then I thought about the most fun book probably ever to come out of a time of exile in a time of pestilence, which is the Decameron of Boccaccio, where 10 people were exiled from Florence and told each other
Speaker: Each of the 10 told 10 stories, so there are 100 stories in the book.
Speaker: And it was something that I had to read in college and enjoyed very, very much and thought, well, since we're going to be in some kind of exile, probably not in a Tuscan villa, but maybe it would help a while.
Speaker: Fortunately for all of us right now.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Maybe it would help to while away the time if...
Speaker: you know, if we could tell some stories and record, I guess also I've always sort of thought it would be nice to record some of the
Speaker: lore of this business.
Speaker: To paraphrase George Frederick Kunze's book about stones, the curious lore of precious silver.
Speaker: Because there are a lot of funny little stories that only a dealer would know.
Speaker: And it had just been the opening of the British galleries at the Met.
Speaker: And walking through them, I was struck by how many objects in there have these sort of funny backstories
Speaker: in the trade, you know, how they, whether it's how they came to be in the mat or how they came to be discovered or how, you know, some funny thing about the person that owned them or whatever.
Speaker: And I thought, you know, this might be a nice way to engage with the clients when you can't be with them in real life.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, I mean, it's a hundred year old firm.
Speaker: You can't be around for that long without accumulating some, some pretty good stories.
Speaker: So I thought it would be nice to get you to read one of these stories for listeners so they can get a taste of what we've been up to.
Speaker: And there was one in particular that actually relates to the Met Museum that involves a very...
Speaker: singular client of ours that I've heard a lot about who was just a little before my time.
Speaker: But I wanted to ask you to read the story that in our email you described as the customer is always right eventually.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Okay, sure.
Speaker: I can do that.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So, um, yeah, this is a story that involved, involved going to the Met and, uh, before this is obviously long before the new British galleries, but, um, right.
Speaker: So the story I titled it, the customer is always right eventually.
Speaker: Um, so if I had a nickel for every time I've bashed my head against a wall about a client, not buying something that they so obviously should buy, I'd probably have
Speaker: $5 and CTE, which is, you know, what is it?
Speaker: It's that brain neuron disease that football players get.
Speaker: When you're a dealer, you look on every really great purchase as a brilliant buy and a fine investment.
Speaker: Clients don't always see it that way.
Speaker: To them, investments are shares taken in wave-making companies like Apple and Oracle, Enron and Tyco.
Speaker: Sometime around the year 2000, sometime in the year 2000, I went to lunch at Partridge's, the vast and sadly defunct Bond Street antique shop.
Speaker: They had a cook and a dining room where they served bibulous lunches on a table set with white linens and silver and flowers.
Speaker: And the whole was presided over by the potty mouthed Rosemary Partridge, who thought everything was really fucking funny.
Speaker: and she would sit at the end of the table and roar with laughter about any kind of joke.
Speaker: The thing was, the partridges were really canny, and in addition to the dirty jokes and the claret that seemed to refill itself, they also placed in front of you, for the duration of the meal, an object from their inventory that they thought you might like and might be induced to buy.
Speaker: And on one occasion, the object that sat in front of me was one of a pair of livery pots known as the Rothschild Rosemary livery pots, which are massive silver gilt baluster flagons about 13 inches tall, made in London in 1602, and which had been owned by Anna Rothschild and Archibald Rosemary, who was the Earl of Rosemary.
Speaker: And I throw down my gauge for anybody to challenge me here.
Speaker: They are the finest pair of livery pots in the world.
Speaker: And by the end of the meal, so fine was the food and so inexhaustible, the decanter, reader, or listener in this case, I bought them.
Speaker: And if you hear the echo of Charlotte Bronte there, it is because a couple of years after I bought them, I felt that I hadn't so much bought them as married them.
Speaker: Everyone I offered them to balked or they offered too little or they wanted to trade something for them that I didn't want, including, and I'm not making this up, a vintage Ferrari, which a man in Canada seriously proposed that I should allow him something like $800,000 and he would pay me the rest and I would have this fabulous Ferrari.
Speaker: So can't believe you passed that up.
Speaker: Yeah, this is a tough one.
Speaker: I decided to do out loud and in life what I'd been doing in my mind for a long time and not just on these, but many other objects, which was to grab a client by the lapel and say, what the hell is the matter with you?
Speaker: And the client I chose to do this to was was Rita Gans.
Speaker: But at four foot eleven, Rita was a little small for roughing up.
Speaker: So instead, I told her to meet me.
Speaker: on a Monday morning outside the Met for what I warned her was going to be an awkwardly convoluted sales pitch.
Speaker: And I walked her into the British galleries and I showed her the Paston livery pots, which are very, very beautiful, very nice, really special.
Speaker: They've got these great big scallop shells and dolphins on them and they're fantastic.
Speaker: And they're illustrated in this wonderful old painting called The Paston Treasure.
Speaker: And we looked at them and I said to Rita, I want you to hold those in your mind and I want you to come back to the shop.
Speaker: And you know where this is going.
Speaker: Back at the shop, I showed her again.
Speaker: I'd showed her to them before, showed them to her before, and she passed on them.
Speaker: I showed them to her again.
Speaker: And, you know, they're bigger.
Speaker: They're heavier, which you can't appreciate in a museum, but they are much heavier.
Speaker: They had this fabulous gilding and they're really just the greatest, probably the greatest piece of Elizabethan silver that's come through my hands.
Speaker: And she bought them, as she should have.
Speaker: And then as with many of her other treasures, they ended up in a great gift that she made to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Speaker: So that's the story.
Speaker: It's a fantastic story.
Speaker: Thanks for sharing, Tim.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I kind of ad-libbed a bit in the middle.
Speaker: Sorry?
Speaker: I kind of ad-libbed a bit in the middle where I felt that writing wanted a more conversational approach.
Speaker: Well, you're allowed a little creative license with your own work.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: The response to this series has been really fantastic.
Speaker: I've been really happy to see how many listeners have, or I should say, how many readers have tuned.
Speaker: Boy, I'm really in podcast mode right now.
Speaker: Your listeners have tuned in.
Speaker: You're mixing your media.
Speaker: Yeah, I've been really, really impressed with the number of readers and clients who have written in and expressed their enthusiasm and their appreciation for the storytelling.
Speaker: And it reminds me of, well...
Speaker: You know, we're being called back to a lot of traditional ways of occupying ourselves and entertaining ourselves when we get tired of sitting in front of Netflix and telling stories is perhaps the oldest and most hallowed of all.
Speaker: So it's...
Speaker: Yeah, it's a pleasure to hear these stories and to be able to share some.
Speaker: And I think it's a great way for our firm to stay active doing what matters to us and what matters to our customers.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's, I don't know.
Speaker: I've really found the idea to be...
Speaker: much more rewarding than I thought it was going to be.
Speaker: Um, and frankly, much less commercial than I thought it was going to be.
Speaker: I had sort of envisioned it as, you know, like, you know, go to the website and you can see X. And I don't think anybody's in the mood for that right now.
Speaker: And I mean, obviously I'm going to, you know, tout the goods when I can, but, um,
Speaker: I feel like it's more about maybe just saying that if you look at the life of a firm like ours and the kind of historical
Speaker: reach or their historical breadth, you realize that, you know, all these great collections, they're all put together over a long, long time.
Speaker: You know, people buy silver for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and slowly put together a beautiful group of objects that they love, that they could afford at the time, whatever.
Speaker: So it's not really about pushing merchandise now, so much as about saying to people, you know,
Speaker: we're going to be around and these goods are going to be around and wonderful things do come up and, you know, watch this space kind of thing.
Speaker: And if they could survive the Great Fire of London and the plague, then they'll probably survive COVID-19.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And silver, as we know, has antiseptic properties.
Speaker: And I really want to get that in.
Speaker: Silver has antiseptic properties.
Speaker: It's very important.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Thanks so much for sharing that with us.
Speaker: Thanks.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: It's fun.
Speaker: And listeners, you can see pictures of these objects on the web at tropsal.com or on social media, of course.
Speaker: I'm at Objective Interest on Instagram.
Speaker: If you haven't subscribed yet, please do.
Speaker: It's the best way to be notified about new episodes coming out.
Speaker: And in the coming weeks, as I said, we may well be putting out some additional episodes.
Speaker: to react to and reflect on the coronavirus situation.
Speaker: So thanks for tuning in.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Today's episode is edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: No Michael here today, but Michael Diaz-Griffith, my co-host, will be back with us soon.
Speaker: And I'm your host, Ben Miller.
Speaker: I'll catch you next time.
