Transcript
Speaker: Support for Curious Objects comes from Christie's.
Speaker: On October 22nd, Christie's New York will present the live auction of Dalva Brothers, Parisian Taste in New York, a landmark sale of 18th century French furniture, porcelain, and sculpture.
Speaker: The much-anticipated sale will include fine examples of French and European furniture, sevre porcelain, Chinese works of art, clocks, sculpture, and fine art.
Speaker: Viewings are open at the Rockefeller Center galleries by appointment only.
Speaker: In the meantime, explore the sales online at Christie's.com slash curiousobjects.
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: What is it that John Lennon, Greta Garbo, and the Louvre Museum all have in common?
Speaker: I'm sorry, I promise that's not the setup for a corny joke.
Speaker: The answer is that they all shopped at Dalva Brothers.
Speaker: For decades, this New York City family business has been a pilgrimage destination for lovers of antique French furniture and decorative arts.
Speaker: And now Christie's is hosting an expansive sale of some of the firm's extraordinary objects taking place in their New York showrooms on October 22nd.
Speaker: The sale includes some 250 lots.
Speaker: And the estimates range from the thousands to the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Speaker: Lot 65 is a late 18th century secretary cabinet with remarkable Pietro Dura decoration, estimated at $600,000 to a million dollars.
Speaker: Here to tell me what all that means and what makes this cabinet and this sale so special are Jody Wilkie, Christie's specialist and co-chairman of Decorative Arts, and David Dalva, whose last name alone serves as a strong introduction.
Speaker: David, if I were to characterize 18th century English decorative arts with just a few adjectives, I might say something like, restringe, formulaic, precise.
Speaker: And I wonder, how would you characterize the French decorative arts?
Speaker: Well, I would have to say, magnificent, exciting, contemporary,
Speaker: I don't think, you know, they really held back in terms of trying to do the most they could to make a piece, you know, really, you know, a masterpiece.
Speaker: If you look at Louis XIV in Versailles, I think that really set the standard that France followed for the next hundred or so years in terms of the decorative arts.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so tell me about, you know, the Dalva Brothers inventory focuses predominantly on the 18th century.
Speaker: And yet, you know, there were great French craftspeople before and after that period.
Speaker: So what is it that makes the 18th century so special in your eyes?
Speaker: Well, I think they kind of synthesized what it was earlier and really, you know, brought it to a new success.
Speaker: And, you
Speaker: I think out of all the decorative arts in Europe, they really achieved, you know, perfection in so many different levels.
Speaker: Porcelain and furniture and textiles and architecture and gardening and everything was done to, you know, very, very high standards.
Speaker: And I think they really excelled at that.
Speaker: And when I asked you earlier for a single piece in the sale that you might want to focus on for this conversation, you didn't hesitate.
Speaker: You went straight for this secretary cabinet.
Speaker: So we'll be talking a lot about it today.
Speaker: But just for starters, can you tell me in just a few words what it is that made that such an obvious choice for you?
Speaker: Was it the value of the piece, its importance, the history around it, its sheer aesthetic appeal?
Speaker: I think there's a lot of different reasons why it's such a great piece.
Speaker: I mean, design-wise, it really brings together earlier periods as well as the neoclassical period that was going on by, you know, the use of the earlier 17th and 18th century Italian Pietradura.
Speaker: Some of the design elements, you know, just really are at the peak of what was happening in the Louis XVI period and at...
Speaker: It's really just overall just, you know, very interesting on so many different levels.
Speaker: So let's, for the benefit of our listeners, let's take a step back and talk about the appearance of the object itself.
Speaker: So Jody, Jody Willoughby, can you tell us what the piece looks like and how large it is and what the images are that are depicted on it?
Speaker: Um, easily.
Speaker: I say easily because there's so much to talk about.
Speaker: Um, if, if anybody's listening and near a computer, if they actually went onto the Christie's website and found the Dalva sale and looked at lot 65, they would find the images that I'm going to try and describe for you.
Speaker: I think one of the words that, um,
Speaker: David could have equally used for describing the French decorative arts was the word exuberant.
Speaker: And yet this piece, because it is slightly later in the 18th century, has a very...
Speaker: You can't say restrained because it has unbelievable layers of decoration.
Speaker: It's basically a rectangular cabinet that sits on top of a table with six legs instead of four.
Speaker: And there is a lower level that's like a stretcher that also serves to support the weight of a cabinet.
Speaker: Pietradura means hardstone.
Speaker: And what this cabinet looks like when you look at the front is...
Speaker: small panels that are basically paintings made out of inset colored stones so that the corner rectangle panels are flowers.
Speaker: In the center, top and bottom, there are bouquets that are tied together with ribbons and leaves.
Speaker: At the side are
Speaker: personages in Turkish garb and in the center is a harbor scene with a little huntsman with a rifle and his dog.
Speaker: And each of those panels, sort of their pictures on their own, almost like little postcards, are set within a gilt bronze frame with an added layer that is beading.
Speaker: That entire scene is set within a frame itself that's even more gilt bronze.
Speaker: The word in French is a rinceau, which is when you have a border of a repeating pattern.
Speaker: And with this, it's a pierced pattern.
Speaker: The top of the table that supports it has a fretwork going across that's applied to the drawers that support it.
Speaker: It sounds the way I'm describing it as if it's
Speaker: got so much going on that you can't even look at it, but in person it has this really elegant proportion and
Speaker: It's not overwhelming at all.
Speaker: It really grabs you and makes you, I think tactile might be another word that you could use to describe French furniture.
Speaker: You really want to touch it.
Speaker: There's all kinds of different textures going on and it's just a dream.
Speaker: And all of the colored decoration are more or less at eye level.
Speaker: It's not a huge piece of furniture.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it's a fairly geometric piece.
Speaker: And I like that word exuberant.
Speaker: It's not, I wouldn't say flamboyant in the way that I sometimes think of French decorative arts from this period.
Speaker: It's not sort of going off in every which direction and curling and swirling and all of that.
Speaker: It's fairly staid, maybe, but
Speaker: It's really, it's because it's transitioning between what's called the Rococo, which is that exuberance that you were mentioning, and the neoclassic, which was a looking back into antiquity.
Speaker: And this kind of straddles both fences.
Speaker: The colors of the stones are really rich.
Speaker: The hard stones that are used are lapis lazuli and carnelian.
Speaker: And so there's rich orange and shades of blue and shades of green.
Speaker: And when you look at a photograph of it, you would never think that it was inlaid pieces of colored stone that were making those pictures.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: They look more like a painting.
Speaker: What's really so exciting about this piece is its appearance is exactly as it was the day it was made.
Speaker: I mean, there's nothing to fade on this piece.
Speaker: The ebony is black, and everything else is ormolu and marble, which, you know, looks as good as the day it was made.
Speaker: So it's a very interesting example of a piece of furniture that really retained its original style.
Speaker: look and aesthetics from the ancient country.
Speaker: You know, so many pieces, even the porcelain-mounted ones, the marquetry has faded and the staining has faded.
Speaker: And so you get an idea of what it was like.
Speaker: But with this piece, there's really no question of what it looked like when it was made.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a sort of time capsule.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And the bouquets that I was describing that are tied with ribbons, exactly the same kind of design that you get with marquetry, where you'll have wood doing the same thing.
Speaker: But as David said, originally it was stained and richly colored.
Speaker: And now with time, it's kind of shades of brown.
Speaker: So we've talked about the Pietro Dura, which is sort of the singularly striking visual element.
Speaker: But the origin of this piece is not all with one maker.
Speaker: In fact, the Pietro Dura, as you've mentioned, is Italian, while the woodwork and the Ormolu and the gilding is French.
Speaker: And really, numerous people were involved with the production of the piece.
Speaker: So tell me about who these people were and when they were working and how this all came together.
Speaker: Well, Adam Weisweiler is the evanist.
Speaker: And he's born in Germany and came to France and was one of the premier Ebenezes of the Louis Cez period.
Speaker: Daguerre... And just define the term Ebenez for me.
Speaker: Ebenez is someone who basically works with veneers and are kind of different than joiners.
Speaker: And there was a whole guild system.
Speaker: And many of the greatest makers were foreigners that came to France and settled and did very well making furniture.
Speaker: And, you know, I think the French really were only interested in the end product, you know, who could make the best piece.
Speaker: And lots of these pieces went through many, many different hands to be completed, the bronze makers, the
Speaker: the joiners who put the wood, the cabinet together, and then the people that did marquetry.
Speaker: So it was a very complicated guild system, and a lot of cooperation was needed to make these pieces.
Speaker: And the Pietra Dura itself, that came from Italy, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the dealer, Daguerre, probably had a collection of these things, just like he did with porcelains and
Speaker: Various designs were presented to clients with different materials, lacquer, marble, porcelain.
Speaker: And basically, the dealers would commission a maker in Ebenus to combine all these elements and make a piece of furniture.
Speaker: Yeah, so we're talking about Daguerre, this dealer, Dominique Daguerre, and would he have originated the idea to create this piece and to commission Weisweiler and others to, you know, create the necessary components and then put them together?
Speaker: Yes, I mean, these things were a continuing dialogue between collectors and the dealers and
Speaker: what was popular, what was doing well.
Speaker: The Steth Factor, I think, you know, Jody can tell you that the plaques were, you know, very expensive to produce and, you know, were really a sign of a luxury item.
Speaker: And so the dealers would buy these and order them, in fact, and then make designs for furniture which would then be sold to the public or to the royal family.
Speaker: So, yeah, maybe, Jodi, maybe you can tell us a little more about the production of those Pietratura pieces, because it really was painstaking.
Speaker: It's hugely painstaking.
Speaker: And let me see how to spot.
Speaker: You have colored stones, and the same way a veneer for wood is a slice, right?
Speaker: So when you have French furniture, you
Speaker: in particular 18th century French furniture, where you'll have these beautiful designs set into the tops or into the drawers or into the sides, there will be a whole design and they work out how to do it.
Speaker: With the Pietradura, it's a similar thing, but they're using colored stones.
Speaker: And if you look at the photograph of these, there's a carnation that is on the bottom flower panel on this piece of furniture.
Speaker: If you think of what a carnation looks like, the petals of the flower are not normally a solid color.
Speaker: You'll get white shading into pale, pale pink shading into darker red edges.
Speaker: That is exactly what the craftsman has been able to attain using colored stones.
Speaker: And if you look very closely,
Speaker: you can see where one piece of stone has been let in next to another, but it's also a question of knowing the stones, knowing how to cut them to take advantage of the natural coloration that comes in the stone.
Speaker: And that is the real problem.
Speaker: art and craftsmanship of it.
Speaker: The difference between Pietradura and mosaic is that mosaic is pictures that are made of tiny little tiles.
Speaker: This is almost more difficult because it's large sections and you need to know the stone and how to cut it in order to
Speaker: to take advantage of the changes in color that are occurring naturally.
Speaker: So how they did that, I mean, to me it's magic, but all of these craftsmen were at the top of their game and you would have somebody like Daguerre that had sort of a stable of people that he worked with regularly and
Speaker: he knew he could introduce new ideas and that they would take those ideas and figure out how to make them work.
Speaker: And it's not that dissimilar, I guess, if you had to think today of what is the equivalent of a Daguerre.
Speaker: He was called a Marchand Mercier, meaning that merchant that was putting everything together.
Speaker: and relying on basically contemporary artists at the time to help him with his vision.
Speaker: So not dissimilar today, I guess, to use a contemporary person, somebody like the Lalanne, who would conceive of a crazy idea of making a bathtub that looks like a hippopotamus, but then you need to have
Speaker: the plumber, the metal worker, the enamelor that can figure out how to translate those visions into reality.
Speaker: And that was really what the French guild system was able to do.
Speaker: And there are still vestiges of it around.
Speaker: And it's
Speaker: It's not dissimilar also of something like the House of Hermes or of couture in general.
Speaker: At Hermes, you have the leather people, the wood people, the fabric people, and they all come together to create these singular objects.
Speaker: With the porcelain, similar to the...
Speaker: similar to the hard stones, what you created in the 18th century is what you're looking at today.
Speaker: Anything that's been fired does not change.
Speaker: It doesn't oxidize.
Speaker: It looks today the way it did at the times.
Speaker: And there, you really had that balance between is somebody an artisan, a craftsman, or an artist?
Speaker: Because these objects were going in and out of history
Speaker: uncontrollable very very hot ovens multiple times to create what are basically paintings on ceramic and it's wild how they were able to figure out what would make it work and again porcelain was used with the furniture
Speaker: There was a huge conversation, I'll say, going on between all of these craftsmen.
Speaker: And if you look at the decoration that you find on pieces of porcelain, look at the textiles that were being woven in Lyon, which was the center of the textile industry in France, look at the silver work that's done and even
Speaker: you know, compare the leg of a chair with a candlestick, you can see the cross-pollination going on and stylistically how it all holds together.
Speaker: So we're talking... No, no, I appreciate it.
Speaker: I love that detail.
Speaker: And talking about cross-pollination between different media, different materials, that's always interesting to witness.
Speaker: And it's one of the appealing features of this piece that you have stonework, you have woodwork, you have work with gilding, you have work with ebony.
Speaker: You have, of course, the work to create the
Speaker: Pietra Dura plaques in the first place which are not all contemporary to the piece some of them older to bring all that together is really as you said they were made in Italy they were made at specific workshops that did nothing but the Pietra Dura they were stocked for Daguerre he would buy numerous cabinets and take them apart
Speaker: for Pietradura.
Speaker: The porcelain, he would order whatever the factory could get him.
Speaker: So these were, you know, for the height of French furniture, for you to use lacquer, porcelain, Pietradura, that was much more expensive than using wood and marquetry to decorate a piece of furniture.
Speaker: So these were all considered luxury items.
Speaker: And, you know, the French at that time were incredibly into decoration.
Speaker: I mean, you know,
Speaker: everything was kind of, I wouldn't say competitive, but there was an amazing drive to impress with the clothing, with the property, with the interiors.
Speaker: I mean, you know, you hear stories about Goutier, the bronze maker, and, you know, how, I mean, if you're familiar with the Madame de Barry doorknob that they had at the Frick Collection for their wonderful Goutier exhibition, I mean, the amount of detail was amazing, and
Speaker: You know, that's really what the French decorative arts are about.
Speaker: It's just, you know, the more you look at it on a really great piece, the detail is just astounding.
Speaker: And there were really, there were no corners cut.
Speaker: Everything was about the final product.
Speaker: Yeah, so I want to dive into this topic a little further because we've been talking about this dealer, Daguerre, bringing together all of these components worked by various craftspeople, pulling it all together into a single piece.
Speaker: But Daguerre, I mean, he's Parisian, but he's working with craftspeople from across the continent.
Speaker: He has clients from across the continent from England and
Speaker: He ends up spending a significant amount of time in London.
Speaker: So clearly an international character as much as he's rooted in France.
Speaker: So David, is this cabinet, would you say it's characteristically French according to those terms, the idea of detail and so on that you're describing?
Speaker: Or does it start to represent something like an emerging pan-European style?
Speaker: No, I'd say it's very French.
Speaker: I mean, it's just all about what was going on at the time, bringing together the best craftsmen to make your idea come through.
Speaker: And, you know, the clientele, and there was really no expense spared to give them the best quality products that they could get.
Speaker: And the Gare was
Speaker: supplying George IV and lots of royal patronage.
Speaker: And, you know, the clients wanted to have the best and, you know, he could provide it.
Speaker: So when English clients would purchase pieces from Daguerre, they were doing so because they wanted something very specifically French.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, the French led the decorative arts world in the 18th century, I think, hands down.
Speaker: There's no
Speaker: In my mind, there's no question about that.
Speaker: No, everyone would go to France to see what was the newest, and they would then try and replicate it.
Speaker: So you'll get stylistically things made in Germany, in Sweden, in Italy that are inspired by the French, but there tends to be a...
Speaker: I guess you'd call it a lag in their adaptation of it because first and foremost, it came to people's attention in France and then slowly would filter across Europe.
Speaker: And everybody, everybody who's anybody wanted to be the first.
Speaker: So they'd go to France.
Speaker: And Louis XIV and how Versailles was meant to
Speaker: show exactly what mankind could do if they put their minds to it.
Speaker: I mean, it's astounding.
Speaker: And it's just everything since then was keeping up that level of creativity and that quality.
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Speaker: Support for curious objects comes from Christie's.
Speaker: On October 22nd, Christie's New York will present the live auction of Dalva Brothers Parisian Taste in New York, a landmark sale of 18th century French furniture, porcelain, and sculpture.
Speaker: Approximately 250 lots have been selected from the firm's extensive inventory of 18th century decorative arts, collected over 80 years and across three generations.
Speaker: Dalva Brothers has sold to many of the world's great museums, such as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Versailles, and the Louvre.
Speaker: The much-anticipated sale at Christie's will include fine examples of French and European furniture, porcelain, Chinese works of art, clocks, sculpture, and fine art.
Speaker: Viewing is open by appointment only at the Rockefeller Center Galleries.
Speaker: In the meantime, please dive into curiosities and browse the sale online at christies.com slash curiousobjects.
Speaker: Now, Jody, even when it comes to some of the most fine and valuable pieces, it's not always possible to track the provenance.
Speaker: But with this cabinet, we know, or at least we have strong reason to think that we know, where it resided quite early in its history.
Speaker: Could you walk us through that?
Speaker: What does the provenance look like and what's the evidence for it?
Speaker: Well, the provenance starts with Daguerre, and we know that because he did have a huge clientele in England, and he actually opened a shop in London.
Speaker: And...
Speaker: I believe that it was on his death.
Speaker: At any rate, it was definitely 25 March 1791.
Speaker: This cabinet was sold by Christie's as Lot 42.
Speaker: And in the Christie's catalog of 2020, there is a photograph of that 1791 catalog.
Speaker: What's amusing is that it doesn't look all that different than what our catalogs look like today.
Speaker: And so through that, you can start tracking it.
Speaker: So if it was sold in 1791, for sure, it had to have existed before then.
Speaker: Presumably, it was in Daguerre's stock at that time.
Speaker: Whether he had sold it to somebody before and had brought it back, whether that was where it was starting out, I don't think that anybody knows.
Speaker: But there is an inventory process.
Speaker: for another dealer who was active then and buying a dealer called Roche.
Speaker: And then that was described in his estate inventory that was 1820.
Speaker: Slowly, you can track these pieces.
Speaker: I don't know that we have any confirmed provenance of where it's been from 1820 on.
Speaker: but I believe that it was with the Dalvas for quite a while before David would know better than I where it was acquired.
Speaker: But this business of trying to track provenance is really key, particularly in today's market, because being able to link these objects to the history and the time period in which they were created
Speaker: really does help bring them alive.
Speaker: And it's one thing to read in history books about the various wars in Europe in the middle of the 18th century and how people would have arguments that would erupt and these wars would go on for years and years and years.
Speaker: Until you start thinking about
Speaker: how people lived, where people lived, the furniture that they were sitting on.
Speaker: It allows you to have a real visual picture of how this worked.
Speaker: And the idea of these luxury arts being something that would very much support the reputation of whole countries
Speaker: They were used for diplomatic gifts.
Speaker: They were almost a source of trade and of value, both
Speaker: sort of the psychological value of the French and actual monetary value of the objects that was traded back and forth.
Speaker: And as I say, it's not just the furniture, it's all of these other luxury items that all link together.
Speaker: It makes it come alive.
Speaker: The fact that so much French furniture is not necessarily on a huge scale, but on a small scale, because it was used in homes and it was meant to move around the room, I find fascinating.
Speaker: You know, I'd just like to say that provenance is wonderful, and it really makes a fabulous story.
Speaker: The thing to always look at is the quality of the finished product and how much detail and how much work that they put into it.
Speaker: You could look at a bronze that's chased by Goutier and a bronze that is chased by someone else could be the same model.
Speaker: but it's that detail of finish which really sets the bar.
Speaker: There's so much that we don't know about provenance, but there's so much that is there to look at and to decide whether, wow, this is really an exceptional piece or it's kind of run-in-the-mill piece.
Speaker: Well, and presumably if a piece rises to a certain level of quality, that's a good indication that whatever its provenance was, was probably fairly important.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: All of these things, when they were created, these major objects, they were not made for the man in the street to start with.
Speaker: Number one, the man in the street could never have afforded them to start with, nor would they have had the place to put them.
Speaker: I laugh.
Speaker: With Sevre porcelain, for example, the Sevre factory was very much...
Speaker: supported by the king, supported by his mistress slash best friend, Madame de Pompadour.
Speaker: And at the end of every year, around Christmas time or the very beginning of the new year, the factory would have what I, you know, flippantly call the Tupperware party.
Speaker: And what it was was the factory...
Speaker: bringing out all of its major achievements throughout that year, and they would have a sale.
Speaker: And the aristocracy that was trying very hard to stay in good with the king, whose support of the king
Speaker: meant the difference between being given a little attic room to live in at Versailles or very nice chambers because of the amount of support.
Speaker: They would go shopping specifically because this was the king's factory and they wanted to be seen to be buying.
Speaker: And the Seve factory is fantastic for us now in the 21st century because they do have
Speaker: archival records that are searchable.
Speaker: And it's slightly frustrating because everybody thinks, oh, well, Sev has the sale records.
Speaker: We can just go and look up our piece because they also had a system of marking their pieces where you could tell the year in which it was made.
Speaker: And ideally, the painter who worked on it and the gilder who worked on it
Speaker: The reality is the archives are available, but there are certain chunks of years that are basically Swiss cheese, huge holes in them.
Speaker: Or the descriptions, you have to figure these ledgers were not being written out so that
Speaker: 300 years later, we could look through and go, oh, look, my cup and saucer was made by Mr. So-and-so.
Speaker: It was a working ledger for a manufacturer, and the descriptions are pretty bare bones.
Speaker: So you can very often find what you think is probably your object, and very often in comparing prices and decoration, you can fine-tune it,
Speaker: But rarely do you come up with something where you're absolutely 110% sure that this piece written down in the manufacturing records is without any question this piece that you're holding in your hand.
Speaker: But more and more work is done on them, and slowly by process of elimination, we're getting...
Speaker: better and better at finding things in those records.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: I was in just that exact same situation today looking at a piece of what I believe to be William Beckford commissioned silver, and there are matching descriptions.
Speaker: But even if the description matches, sometimes that's not quite enough to get you there 100%.
Speaker: Right, but if you know that this one definitely was Beckford because it went from him to the daughter to the sail and the other one didn't, then maybe you can, it's basically putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
Speaker: And it's one of the things that makes it so much fun.
Speaker: I mean, to me, it's fun.
Speaker: Somebody else might find it to use beyond belief, but I find it really fun.
Speaker: Well, we're all in good company here.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So let's I want to talk a little bit about the the nuts and bolts of of the auction process.
Speaker: You know, I mentioned at the top of the show that the estimate for this cabinet is six hundred thousand to two million dollars.
Speaker: And I'm curious from you, Jodi, I'm curious how you arrive at that range.
Speaker: And from you, David, I'm curious how that compares to what a reasonable sticker price would be in a retail setting.
Speaker: And I imagine you've had these conversations between yourselves as well.
Speaker: Many times.
Speaker: I must say, working on the Dava sale has been a real treat.
Speaker: The idea of a sale is something that was mooted in
Speaker: nearly two years ago now.
Speaker: And slowly, slowly, the ideas germinated and it came together.
Speaker: And we created a little team here at Christie's that was working on this particular project and spent many hours at the gallery, both going through the gallery, looking at each object and sitting with David, with his uncle, with his cousin, and
Speaker: and fine tuning what we thought would work best as a sale to put on the market in New York to start this process.
Speaker: And I must say that when the catalog first came out, and for us it was very frustrating because as you know, the sale was originally supposed to take place in the spring and needed to be postponed for obvious reasons.
Speaker: But the minute the catalog kind of hit the streets, as it were, we had clients calling us saying, oh my God, oh my God, I've wanted this forever.
Speaker: And this catalog is beautiful.
Speaker: It's all there.
Speaker: And to us, that meant that we had done what we needed to do, which was to draw attention to these objects and
Speaker: They were, we had long discussions on price and came up with estimates that we felt were realistic for today's market, did justice for the objects, and gave a sense of what, as David was saying, what is the difference between the top of everyone's game, the true, true masterpiece, and the pieces that were
Speaker: still good, but not that top, top, top.
Speaker: And it's a very difficult thing.
Speaker: What you're then talking about is connoisseurship, which is not something that is created overnight.
Speaker: But if the catalog, when someone looks through it, does give a sense of why these pieces are together and where the differences are, because there are several pair of Wormula candlesticks.
Speaker: They don't all have the same estimate on them.
Speaker: What's the difference?
Speaker: We're hoping that we will, with this catalog, also be kind of educating a new generation that hasn't had the possibility of seeing the volume of French decorative arts that used to come on the market 30, 40 years ago on a regular basis.
Speaker: And the way to learn to love this is to see it and to handle it.
Speaker: So we've had, I say we started two years ago.
Speaker: We've had a really great time with it.
Speaker: And our hope is that within the next two weeks, when the sale is over, everyone will also have had a good time and will be geared up for more.
Speaker: And David, do you have anything to add to that on, you know, in particular thinking about the valuation of the cabinet?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, um,
Speaker: You know, putting a price on something is always going to be tough.
Speaker: You know, and you have to find a happy medium.
Speaker: I don't think Christie's or Delva knows exactly what the market's going to feel the secretary's value is.
Speaker: But, I mean, you know, putting a number on some of these things was probably the hardest part of it.
Speaker: I mean, you know.
Speaker: But like I said, you know, you have to let your eye out.
Speaker: talk, you know, and, you know, over 75 years in business, you know, we're not satisfied with run of the no stuff.
Speaker: We really respond to unusual things because sometimes hard to sell things.
Speaker: But, you know, that's what you used to go to a dealer for was their aesthetic, you know, was their eye.
Speaker: And that's why people went to Daguerre, you know, because, you know, he had a fabulous eye and fabulous sense of design.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: It continues to this day.
Speaker: So, you know, pricing, you know, that's really the auction houses specialty.
Speaker: They know the market.
Speaker: But I would just say, look, you know, it's really, it's all about looking at the piece and falling in love with it.
Speaker: All these pieces have been, you know, happily found homes for almost 300 years.
Speaker: And, you know, we're really just, you know, we're,
Speaker: you know, temporary curators.
Speaker: You know, we've been lucky enough to handle the stuff to come in every day and be surrounded by these beautiful things, you know.
Speaker: My grandmother used to say, oh, you know, I love coming to work.
Speaker: It's like an injection of B12, she always used to say, because, you know, we cheered her up just being surrounded by beautiful things.
Speaker: You know, that's what they were trying to do then, and that's what 18th century furniture does now, you know.
Speaker: Even now, all of us here have been working from home since March.
Speaker: And when Christie's finally opened up and I was first able to go out to our warehouse because I had to continue work on the Dalva collection, walking in and being able to see a real object and not a picture on a computer screen was so fabulous.
Speaker: It made...
Speaker: it made what should have been the chore of taking extra images in anticipation of requests be far from it.
Speaker: And it was like, you know, reacquainting yourself with old friends that you hadn't seen in forever.
Speaker: It was really wonderful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, maybe one of the benefits of this being at home so much is really taking a good look at your surroundings and saying, you know, wow, we're here once, you know, um,
Speaker: Is everything that I have around me, you know, do I love it, you know, or, you know, can I change some things around and, you know, get some beautiful pieces into my home that now that I've been sitting around for six months, you know, I could change a few things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we'll see.
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: Well, and Jodi, you mentioned, you know, the sale was postponed because of the pandemic.
Speaker: You know, we've now seen auction houses, including Christie's, adapting to new circumstances and conducting more online sales, online viewings, that sort of thing.
Speaker: There will be an in-person viewing.
Speaker: There's definitely an in-person viewing.
Speaker: And
Speaker: What we are doing, we're being, we've been open now to the public for several weeks.
Speaker: We actually, last night, just had a major sale of 20th century paintings, plus Stan the T-Rex.
Speaker: But what we have done is been extremely, extremely careful about the number of
Speaker: people that we allow into the galleries.
Speaker: And we've set up the viewings for the exhibitions by appointment and the sales themselves are held live the way we've always done it, but the public is not allowed to attend the auction.
Speaker: So bidding can be as always by sending in an absentee bid, by being on the telephone with a specialist or by bidding yourself online.
Speaker: but the public can come to the view, they can't come to the sale.
Speaker: And what we've done is totally rejigged the room so that we can accommodate
Speaker: many more telephone bidders than normal.
Speaker: And each of those bidders has their own six foot table separated from the next six foot table.
Speaker: And so far so good.
Speaker: And I've been making appointments for people to come in to views for the next two weeks because we've got a whole run of sales that are culminating with Dalva and the great 18th century.
Speaker: Yeah, well, it's been interesting to see, you know, sales have actually done maybe better than I would have expected or feared in recent months, in the last six months or so.
Speaker: There have been some quite strong results coming from various auction houses.
Speaker: And so I wonder, you know, the timing, one might have thought that the timing for the sale would be terrible.
Speaker: And yet maybe it's maybe it isn't.
Speaker: I wonder how you're thinking about that and how COVID is sort of changing your overall strategy.
Speaker: We I mean, our overall strategy remains the same in terms of putting things
Speaker: our clients' objects out at what we feel is the best time.
Speaker: But what we're realizing is the whole concept of the auction calendar that used to be a very organized affair, God forbid anything change, has been totally thrown up in the air and does not have nearly the power that it used to.
Speaker: We were having major sales at the end of July and in August.
Speaker: And now these sales that are coming up in October, we're realizing that it is the right time for them because there hasn't been anything of this type for so long that the market, I think, is really hungry for it.
Speaker: But what we've been very careful to try and do
Speaker: make sure that that market does not get indigestion by having too much of any one kind of thing coming at the same time.
Speaker: So even though I say we have other sales that are coming up this week, there's nothing that really has the strength in the 18th century
Speaker: and the breadth of kind of objects that Dalva has.
Speaker: There are old master painting sales coming up.
Speaker: We are selling property from the collection of Jane Reitzman, but nothing that is on this scale with this breadth of
Speaker: object and with the depth of quality.
Speaker: So the fact that it is coming up at the end is kind of the the demiement of the whole season.
Speaker: We're really looking forward to it.
Speaker: I appreciate the French vocabulary.
Speaker: David, dealers, of course, are intimately familiar with the auction process.
Speaker: And yet, this sale is quite a departure from the retail environment that Dalva Brothers has operated in for a long time.
Speaker: So I just wanted to close today just asking you a very general question of how you feel.
Speaker: I feel good.
Speaker: I mean, I'm really excited to see these pieces continue on with their pleasing people.
Speaker: And I think Christie's has been really wonderful to work with.
Speaker: And I know Will Trafford, you know, has always been a huge fan of ours.
Speaker: And so I think everything looks good.
Speaker: I really am looking forward to the next chapter of these wonderful pieces existing.
Speaker: Well, David Dalva and Jody Wilkie, thank you so much, and best of luck with the sale.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Next episode, we will be traveling to the UK for a conversation with the Fine Arts Society about works by Agnes Miller Parker and Jessica Dismore, so stay tuned for that.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delotti.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit, and I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: Thank you.
