Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Dealer Stuart Feld: An 'Expert in Everything’ and an early American linen press
111 Plays8 years ago
Stuart Feld talks about his many areas of expertise and the linen press that has followed him throughout his career at the fine and decorative arts gallery Hirschl & Adler.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Featured Guest
00:00:00
Speaker
The form, the monumental scale, the extraordinary selection of woods, all of these come together in a piece that thus deserves the name of Masterpiece.
00:00:14
Speaker
Masterpiece Masterpiece Masterpiece
00:00:23
Speaker
Curious Objects is sponsored by Rinalda House Museum of American Art, one of the nation's most highly regarded collections of American art, on view in the unique domestic setting of the 1917 R.J.
00:00:33
Speaker
Reynolds Mansion.
00:00:35
Speaker
Browse the art and decorative arts collection at rinaldahouse.org, that's R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-A house.org, and visit in person in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
00:00:47
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Curious Objects and the Stories Behind Them, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:53
Speaker
I'm your host, Ben Miller, and for today's episode, I went to the legendary New York firm Herschel & Adler, where I spoke with their president, Stuart Feld.
Exploring the Boston Linen Press
00:01:01
Speaker
Stewart is well known in the antiques world as a connoisseur across many different specialties, and in our conversation I tried to get a sense for what it means to be an expert in, well, everything.
00:01:11
Speaker
So, while the focus is a remarkable early Boston linen press, we touch on some wide-ranging ideas that I think will be interesting for collectors from all backgrounds.
00:01:21
Speaker
I spoke with Stewart Feld in his office, so don't be alarmed if you hear some papers rustling and other antique dealer kinds of noises.
00:01:28
Speaker
The first half of our conversation focuses on the linen press itself, and in the second half we dive into the antiques business and the research process and Stuart Feld's own fascinating biography and some tips and tricks for collectors of all kinds.
00:01:43
Speaker
I'm eager to hear your feedback on this episode and on the podcast more generally.
00:01:47
Speaker
So if you have suggestions for future interviews or anything else to tell me, please send an email to podcast at themagazineantiques.com.
00:01:56
Speaker
I do read every email and I try to respond to as many as I can.
00:02:00
Speaker
So thank you so much for helping out.
00:02:03
Speaker
If you're enjoying the podcast, please leave a rating on iTunes or whatever podcast app you're using to help other podcast listeners find us.
00:02:11
Speaker
Without further ado, Stuart Feld.
00:02:13
Speaker
Let's jump into talking about this linen press.
00:02:17
Speaker
Tell me a little bit about this object.
00:02:19
Speaker
We're sitting in front of it right now, and it's, I have to say, a very imposing, almost regal sort of a piece.
00:02:27
Speaker
Can you give a physical description for our listeners?
00:02:29
Speaker
The Linen Press is something of a boomerang in that we have had this piece three different times.
00:02:36
Speaker
We've owned it three different times going back to 1984.
00:02:45
Speaker
initially sold it to Wendell Cherry, who was a very major collector in his time, unfortunately died early.
00:02:54
Speaker
We reacquired the piece.
00:02:56
Speaker
We then sold it to another legendary collector whose name was Jack Warner, collecting a corporate collection for Gulf States paper.
00:03:05
Speaker
And we have since bought it back from that collection.
00:03:10
Speaker
And here it sits.
00:03:11
Speaker
And we've not had it for very long.
00:03:13
Speaker
And we have
00:03:14
Speaker
As I recall, I think we've shown it once in that period of time.
00:03:19
Speaker
At any rate, it is a linen press.
00:03:21
Speaker
It was used to store perhaps household linens, perhaps actually clothes.
00:03:29
Speaker
Clothes were oftentimes folded and put into a linen press rather than hung up in a closet, as we do today.
00:03:39
Speaker
The piece is made entirely of mahogany, and parts of it are quite simple, but it has a very, very elaborate entablature with typical Boston carvings of anthemia and lotus leaves and scrolls.
00:03:56
Speaker
All of these elements appear and reappear on Boston neoclassical furniture.
00:04:03
Speaker
Unlike much furniture made in New York, which often has lots of Ormolu and other decoration, much Boston furniture simply relies upon a beautiful selection of woods, a very careful selection of woods for its principal aesthetic design.
00:04:26
Speaker
Motive.
00:04:27
Speaker
Motif.
00:04:28
Speaker
Here you can see in the doors matched pairs of mahogany veneers and the same thing up above and down below.
00:04:38
Speaker
And it represents, this piece represents one of the couple of most beautiful, most important, best Boston neoclassical pieces of case furniture.
00:04:50
Speaker
The doors on the top open to a series of slides, and then there are two small drawers over two long drawers in the base below.
00:05:03
Speaker
And the corners here are defined by columns.
00:05:06
Speaker
And there are columns both above and below, really colonnettes.
00:05:11
Speaker
And the piece retains its original turned mahogany knobs,
00:05:18
Speaker
And I mention those because that is very, very typical of a Boston aesthetic of this period.
00:05:25
Speaker
For years, pieces that came down to us with their original wooden knobs had the knobs taken off and shiny brass knobs were put on to tart up the piece a bit.
00:05:41
Speaker
This piece retains its original knobs, and to the extent that we've ever acquired a piece that had its knobs removed, we tend to find a set of old knobs or have a set made in order to restore it to its original appearance.
00:05:56
Speaker
Happily, that wasn't necessary in this piece.
00:06:00
Speaker
And are the knobs made from the same mahogany as the rest of the piece?
00:06:03
Speaker
They are, yes.
00:06:03
Speaker
That mahogany would have come from the Caribbean or...
00:06:07
Speaker
Well, you know, there's Cuban mahogany, there's Honduran mahogany.
00:06:12
Speaker
I must say that I'm not a great expert on determining where the woods in a specific piece have come from.
00:06:18
Speaker
But let's say that they all came from the greater Caribbean area, number one.
Design Influences and Provenance Debate
00:06:24
Speaker
And number two, it is virtually impossible to get that kind of mahogany today.
00:06:30
Speaker
First of all, to the extent...
00:06:32
Speaker
that the trees might still exist in these places.
00:06:35
Speaker
They are not allowed to be exported, and we're certainly not allowed to import them.
00:06:41
Speaker
And many pieces of Boston furniture are made of rosewood, Brazilian rosewood, and that is definitely not allowed to be imported today.
00:06:50
Speaker
So give me a circuit date here.
00:06:52
Speaker
It was made just around 1825, and therein lies a difficulty in making a firm attribution.
00:07:03
Speaker
because the two great cabinet-making firms in Boston in the neoclassical period were Isaac Vose and Son, and Isaac Vose died in 1823, and the firm stayed in business until 1825.
00:07:22
Speaker
And the other firm was Emmons and Archibald, and again, I think...
00:07:30
Speaker
Emmons died in 1825, early in 1825.
00:07:36
Speaker
Now, based upon the writing in the drawers and elsewhere, Robert Mussey, who is a very serious scholar on the work of Thomas Seymour and Isaac Vose,
00:07:52
Speaker
believes that the writing is that of Thomas Seymour.
00:07:57
Speaker
And Seymour, after closing his own shop in 1817, went a year or two later to work for the firm of Isaac Vose.
00:08:09
Speaker
What happened to him after the closure of that firm
00:08:13
Speaker
is not known so who made this piece well it could have been one of the last pieces that came out of the vosges shop before it closed in eighteen twenty five or it could have been made by archbold
00:08:33
Speaker
after the death of Emmons in 1825.
00:08:37
Speaker
But we don't know so much about what Archibald was making when he was working alone.
00:08:44
Speaker
How many comparable pieces would you say there are in the world?
00:08:48
Speaker
Linden Press is from Boston in the 1820s.
00:08:50
Speaker
Is this a singularity?
00:08:52
Speaker
Are there a handful?
00:08:53
Speaker
There are certainly other linen presses and armoires, but I think it's generally acknowledged that this is one of the two finest ones.
00:09:05
Speaker
The other one is in a New York private collection.
00:09:10
Speaker
It was made for David Sears, who lived in a very grand house designed by Alexander Paris on Beacon Street, on Beacon Hill.
00:09:20
Speaker
And that is in the other Boston taste.
00:09:23
Speaker
and is very richly ornamented with many pieces of many Ormolu mounts.
00:09:30
Speaker
Oh, right.
00:09:32
Speaker
So tell me a little bit about the aesthetic origins of this piece.
00:09:36
Speaker
What are the major stylistic influences
00:09:39
Speaker
Well, the piece, whereas the Sears piece that I just mentioned, the form of the piece is very much in the manner of English Regency pieces
00:09:54
Speaker
The mounts are not only in the French taste, but the mounts on that piece are all imported French Ampire mounts.
00:10:06
Speaker
Here, this represents another aspect of Boston taste, and it relies to a certain extent, very creatively,
00:10:17
Speaker
on a few design books published in London, one being John Taylor's The Upholsterer's and Cabinetmaker's Pocket Assistant of 1825, and I think that Plate II shows a general composition that's closely related to it.
00:10:36
Speaker
And then, if one refers to George Smith's Cabinetmaker's and Upholsterer's Guide of 1826,
00:10:45
Speaker
There are certainly plates there that relate to certain details in this cabinet.
00:10:54
Speaker
It's interesting that those two publications are of 1825 and 1826.
00:11:02
Speaker
which is just at this critical moment in Boston when one of the two great cabinet shops simply closes in 1825, the Vaux shop, and the Emmons and Archibald shop is disrupted by Emmons' death early in 1825, and as I said, the mystery remaining of just exactly what Archibald was making on his own.
00:11:24
Speaker
Would your instinct be that those plates might have actually been seen by the maker of this cabinet?
00:11:29
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:11:30
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:11:30
Speaker
It's well known that a number of different design books were available to not only Boston cabinet makers, but cabinet makers all over the sophisticated cabinet shops all over the East Coast.
00:11:45
Speaker
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and so on.
00:11:49
Speaker
So what separates this piece from other pieces made in Boston at the time?
00:11:54
Speaker
What are the unique characteristics?
00:11:56
Speaker
The combination of the form, the monumental scale, the extraordinary selection of woods, all of these add up to what we call quality, and they all come together in a piece that thus deserves the name of Masterpiece.
00:12:16
Speaker
It's not known specifically for whom the piece was made, but what do we know about the provenance?
00:12:22
Speaker
We don't know anything about the provenance, but what interests me about provenance in a general way is that the furniture that we deal in, and that I am specifically interested in, was made roughly between 1810 and 1840.
00:12:40
Speaker
and is thus several generations younger than Chippendale and Queen Anne furniture.
00:12:47
Speaker
And although I have bought a great many major pieces of neoclassical furniture over the years,
00:12:55
Speaker
Very few of them have come down with a meaningful, accurate, verifiable provenance.
00:13:04
Speaker
And when I go to this auction or that and see the Jeremiah so-and-so family Queen Anne lowboy or the whatever, I am in disbelief that these provenances are necessarily accurate.
Neoclassical Furniture in American Collecting
00:13:23
Speaker
it doesn't make sense that pieces that are 50, 75 years younger rarely come down with the provenance and these 18th century pieces frequently do.
00:13:34
Speaker
I suspect that a lot of them are creatively arrived at.
00:13:40
Speaker
There may be some wishful thinking involved.
00:13:42
Speaker
I don't think there's any question about that.
00:13:44
Speaker
Interesting.
00:13:45
Speaker
Now, whoever it was made for, why would the customer have chosen to buy an American piece of furniture instead of an imported English piece?
00:13:53
Speaker
Well, that's a good question.
00:13:55
Speaker
And we're learning more and more about the quantity of furniture being imported into the United States during this period.
00:14:06
Speaker
And to a certain extent...
00:14:09
Speaker
pieces being made here were being made in exact or nearly exact replication of some of the imported pieces.
00:14:20
Speaker
On the other hand, there is starting in the 17th century,
00:14:27
Speaker
There was great furniture being made variously in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and beyond to a certain extent.
00:14:36
Speaker
And there was a serious patronage for the craftsmen producing the furniture, the silver, and so forth.
00:14:46
Speaker
Many of the great houses of the period we know were furnished with domestically produced furniture.
00:14:55
Speaker
That doesn't mean that in the same households there might not have been the occasional or perhaps more than occasional piece of English or French furniture.
00:15:05
Speaker
And would American furniture have been less expensive?
00:15:09
Speaker
Would it have been more expensive?
00:15:12
Speaker
What would the difference be?
00:15:13
Speaker
I don't know the answer to that, but let's say that pieces of
00:15:20
Speaker
would not have been inexpensive pieces of furniture in their day because they represent the very best of what was made.
00:15:28
Speaker
And like, I mean, Albert Sack years ago wrote a book called The Good, Better, Best of American Furniture.
00:15:38
Speaker
It's largely furniture made before
00:15:42
Speaker
about 1810.
00:15:43
Speaker
He very rarely gets into the real high American neoclassical period.
00:15:50
Speaker
But if such a book were written, and it's been suggested that I do so, but I don't have that in mind,
00:15:57
Speaker
And on the good, better, best of American neoclassical furniture, a piece like the linen press that we've been talking about would certainly rank as a masterpiece.
00:16:09
Speaker
One of the reasons I don't want to do it is that...
00:16:13
Speaker
How do you tell some private lady that her card table is going to be a good... Nearly good....when it came down from Grandmama, who thought it was the very best thing that had ever been made.
00:16:27
Speaker
So there's no point in our getting involved in anything like that.
00:16:30
Speaker
But we are interested in the pieces that, in an expansion of the sack aesthetic, would have been described by him as masterpiece.
00:16:53
Speaker
Let's take a quick break.
00:16:55
Speaker
As I say in radio, stay tuned.
00:16:57
Speaker
Next up, I'll ask Stuart Feld about his own personal story and for his advice about collecting.
00:17:03
Speaker
Curious Objects is sponsored by Rinalda House Museum of American Art, celebrating its 50th anniversary with a new publication, Rinalda, Her Muses, Her Stories, that takes readers behind the scenes of one of the nation's most prestigious collections,
00:17:17
Speaker
On the Albert Bierstadt piece, Sierra Nevada, museum founding president Barbara Babcock-Milhouse remembers traveling to see Bierstadt's views for herself.
00:17:26
Speaker
Quote, It was as though I was sitting in a theater with an intense drama enacted in front of me.
00:17:31
Speaker
I knew at once that Bierstadt expressed in his paintings exactly what I felt.
00:17:36
Speaker
So escape to Winston-Salem, North Carolina to experience the unique views of Rinalda House Museum of American Art, American masterpieces surrounded by century-old decorative arts in an American country home.
00:17:47
Speaker
Rinalda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
00:17:52
Speaker
RinaldaHouse.org.
00:18:04
Speaker
Welcome back.
00:18:04
Speaker
Thanks again for listening.
00:18:06
Speaker
Don't forget to leave us a rating and subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes.
00:18:11
Speaker
And again, if you have any comments or suggestions, send an email to podcast at themagazineantiques.com.
Stuart Feld's Expertise and Career
00:18:18
Speaker
All right, let's get back to Stuart Feld.
00:18:28
Speaker
Now you are, and we are sitting right now at Herschel & Adler,
00:18:32
Speaker
the legendary gallery in Midtown Manhattan.
00:18:35
Speaker
And I have to say, as I walked in, this is my first time in your gallery, it's astonishing the range of objects that you deal in.
00:18:43
Speaker
I mean, there are paintings, there's furniture, there's sculptural works, there's, you name it, you've published books on all of these different subjects, on early American furniture, on early American painting, also on American Impressionism, on
00:18:58
Speaker
an incredible variety of subjects.
00:19:00
Speaker
I have to ask, it seems hard enough to me to be an expert in one thing.
00:19:04
Speaker
How do you become an expert in half a dozen, a dozen different, completely different subject areas?
00:19:10
Speaker
Well, you know, that is something that when I was much younger, puzzled me as well.
00:19:17
Speaker
And although in graduate school, I had already, I think, become something of an expert in the field of American paintings,
00:19:27
Speaker
When I was leaving graduate school for one year to take a fellowship at the Met, I was placed in the Department of European Decorative Arts.
00:19:39
Speaker
And I was very puzzled about that, but my advisor at Harvard, where I was doing my graduate work, said that once you have become an expert in one field,
00:19:51
Speaker
it is much easier to transfer that level of expertise to other fields as well.
00:20:00
Speaker
Well, as a kid of 26 or so, I didn't understand that, but I genuinely believe today that that is the case.
00:20:13
Speaker
and can be the case.
00:20:16
Speaker
For example, I did start looking at American neoclassical furniture while I was in graduate school, and I started out knowing nothing, but I looked and looked and looked,
00:20:29
Speaker
There wasn't much to see in museums, but I did see things at the dealers, I did see things occasionally in books, and I did learn something about them.
00:20:38
Speaker
I then went on and wondered what the American silver was that was the parallel to the great furniture by Duncan Fyfe and Lanwier and others.
00:20:52
Speaker
And I was warned by the silver dealers of the moment with a quote that I've never forgotten.
00:20:58
Speaker
Don't ever buy a piece of silver, American silver, made after 1800.
00:21:03
Speaker
It's all junk.
00:21:07
Speaker
Well, I have long since learned that that is not the case.
00:21:11
Speaker
And there was a question really of learning by looking, handling, and so on.
00:21:17
Speaker
And of course, I have found that
00:21:19
Speaker
the most extraordinary silver was made in Philadelphia in particular, but also
00:21:26
Speaker
There was wonderful silver made in Boston and New York as well, and occasionally elsewhere.
00:21:33
Speaker
So I do think that one can learn, either with a mentor or on one's own, about lots of other things as well.
00:21:42
Speaker
It's been very beneficial to the business for us, cumulatively, to have that kind of expertise here.
00:21:49
Speaker
We never handle anything by policy where we don't feel we have definitive expertise
00:21:55
Speaker
so that we can transfer something to a new owner, whether it be an institution or a private person, without ultimate scholarship.
00:22:04
Speaker
I'm curious about this point because there's another aspect to having expertise in a wide range of fields, which is there are also auctions in different fields and there are dealers in different fields and there are collectors in different fields.
00:22:17
Speaker
And to be buying and selling objects across all these different disciplines, you have to have your finger on the pulse of so many different facets of the antique world.
00:22:26
Speaker
How do you keep up with all of that?
00:22:27
Speaker
Well, it's a very time-consuming thing, but I love what I do.
00:22:34
Speaker
I absolutely look forward to going to work every day.
00:22:38
Speaker
As of October 1, I will have been at the Gallery as a partner and for a long time now, sole owner.
00:22:44
Speaker
For 50 years.
00:22:46
Speaker
Wow.
00:22:48
Speaker
And I have a way of kind of keeping in touch with the marketplace in the various areas that we're interested in.
00:22:56
Speaker
And we have a staff of 20.
00:22:59
Speaker
And if an object needs to be looked at, either one of us will go do it or we have people we trust in various locations, cities across the country, who
00:23:10
Speaker
Even if something comes up in London or Paris, we have people who can look at things for us.
00:23:17
Speaker
If we think it's advisable for us to go ourselves, one of us will do it.
00:23:22
Speaker
Now, you started your career in the academic and museum world.
00:23:27
Speaker
You picked up a couple of degrees.
00:23:29
Speaker
How did you go from there to the world of private dealing?
00:23:33
Speaker
Well, I mentioned earlier that I had taken a fellowship at the Met, and I started in the department of what was then called the Department of Post-Renaissance Western European Decorative Arts.
00:23:47
Speaker
After being in that department for four months, I was transferred to the American Wing, and during my tenure there in the late winter and spring of 1968,
00:24:04
Speaker
I was offered a job to stay on as a curator in the American Wing, which I declined because I had in mind going back to Cambridge to complete my graduate work.
00:24:16
Speaker
Then, later in that semester, so to speak, I was offered a job to write the first ever catalog of the American Paintings Collection at the Met.
00:24:28
Speaker
And the first volume of that was published in 1965.
00:24:32
Speaker
In 1967, Tom Hoving became director of the Met, and I did not want to work for him.
00:24:41
Speaker
And I left with the idea that I had been asked to write the Pelican History of American Art.
00:24:47
Speaker
And I was going to spend the next year and a half doing that.
00:24:50
Speaker
probably working in a carrel in the Met Library.
00:24:53
Speaker
And then I started being offered jobs by various galleries, which I hadn't really thought about.
00:25:00
Speaker
I was offered a very interesting job at Wildenstein.
00:25:03
Speaker
I was offered a partnership at Kennedy Galleries.
00:25:06
Speaker
But the partnership offer at Herschel & Adler seemed the most interesting to me.
00:25:11
Speaker
And I accepted that and began work here on October 1.
00:25:17
Speaker
1967.
00:25:17
Speaker
So we're just, what, two months shy now of that anniversary?
00:25:22
Speaker
Of 50 years.
00:25:22
Speaker
Incredible.
00:25:23
Speaker
And what was that transition like, going from a world infused with research, with academics, with academic thinking, to a world of real life and dealing?
00:25:34
Speaker
I couldn't divorce myself from my heritage.
00:25:38
Speaker
And I had completely reorganized the archival systems in the American Painting
00:25:44
Speaker
department at the Met.
00:25:46
Speaker
And when I arrived at H&A, I found that the place was not very well organized in terms of library, archives, and so on.
00:25:59
Speaker
And I completely changed that, reorganized it, adopted a format that I had created at the Met
00:26:08
Speaker
for our research and for our systems.
00:26:11
Speaker
And so in a funny way, I have continued to do things exactly the way I was doing them there, except here we actively buy all the time and museums buy occasionally, and we actively sell all of the time.
00:26:26
Speaker
And so in a funny way, it's a different kind of work, but in another way, it's the same.
00:26:32
Speaker
So you still clearly are still applying serious scholarship to the pieces that you're buying and selling.
00:26:39
Speaker
Virtually every work of art that we offer for sale has been thoroughly researched and it's documented to the largest extent that it can be documented.
00:26:52
Speaker
And all of that information goes along
00:26:56
Speaker
with each piece as it is sold and is actually recorded on the bill of sale.
00:27:03
Speaker
Is there any particular kind of object that you enthusiastically collect for yourself?
00:27:08
Speaker
The answer to that has to be yes.
00:27:12
Speaker
I started buying American neoclassical furniture in my second year of graduate school.
00:27:18
Speaker
and I've never stopped.
00:27:20
Speaker
And I was encouraged to add American neoclassical decorative arts to the kind of material that Herschel and Adler offered for sale after my wife and I had filled a rather large apartment and I guess I was too much of a junkie to stop.
00:27:42
Speaker
And so I gradually got into this business as well.
00:27:48
Speaker
And our daughter, Elizabeth, has been here for, I don't know, 17 years or so and is very much interested in the decorative arts and spends a considerable amount of her time working in this area as well.
00:28:02
Speaker
What was Herschel and Adler handling before you joined?
00:28:04
Speaker
The firm was handling American and European paintings,
00:28:12
Speaker
and some works on paper and the occasional piece of sculpture.
00:28:16
Speaker
No decorative arts at all.
00:28:19
Speaker
And the focus of the firm was much more on European art than on American art.
00:28:26
Speaker
And one of the reasons that they wanted me to join the firm
00:28:30
Speaker
was to enhance its representation of American art.
00:28:38
Speaker
And I guess I've done that because we now deal in all aspects of American art from the beginning up until today.
00:28:48
Speaker
I want to ask a couple of
Auction Houses vs. Dealers
00:28:49
Speaker
questions about the business landscape.
00:28:51
Speaker
And everybody in the antiques world has a different idea of what's going right, what's going wrong, what's changing for the better, what's changing for the worse.
00:28:59
Speaker
Can I ask about specifically a trend that seems to be happening with certain auction houses that are beginning to resemble retail outfits more and more in certain ways?
00:29:13
Speaker
conducting private sales, advertising directly to end consumers and relying less on dealers.
00:29:21
Speaker
How do you see that trend?
00:29:23
Speaker
Do you see that trend happening?
00:29:24
Speaker
And what do you think the effects of that are for dealers and for collectors?
00:29:28
Speaker
I do see that happening.
00:29:30
Speaker
And it's not something that happened at all years ago or even 10 years ago less than now.
00:29:39
Speaker
It doesn't adversely affect what we do in that we bring a very, very serious level of scholarship to the table, and that is highly respected both by institutions and private collectors.
00:29:58
Speaker
I can't tell you how often members of the staff of both of the major auction houses here in New York come to us for our opinion of
00:30:09
Speaker
something and that can be in a variety of areas and sometimes we see something that's wrong and speak up i've learned that sometimes they don't particularly want to know and i don't speak just about the
00:30:27
Speaker
New York houses, but in a general way.
00:30:29
Speaker
I remember once calling a friend of mine who owns an auction house out of town, telling him that the picture on the cover of his current catalog, current as of that date,
00:30:42
Speaker
had been here and is a fake.
00:30:46
Speaker
Oh boy.
00:30:47
Speaker
And his response was, I wish you hadn't told me.
00:30:51
Speaker
And that's an exact quote.
00:30:52
Speaker
Wow.
00:30:53
Speaker
Because I guess that put him under a certain obligation to say something which did not happen and the picture was sold anyway.
00:31:02
Speaker
Really?
00:31:03
Speaker
So we are sometimes quite reluctant to express our opinion and I think at an auction it's certainly a let the buyer beware.
00:31:12
Speaker
situation.
00:31:13
Speaker
Now, as we sit here, we are sitting opposite one of those extraordinary dolphin sofas, which were probably made here in New York around 1820.
00:31:27
Speaker
And this one is very much like one, for example, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
00:31:32
Speaker
I've done something of a catalogue résonne of these sofas, and I think I've catalogued 13 and a half of them
00:31:41
Speaker
the half being a full-size sofa that was at a later date cut down on one end to make it a recommie.
00:31:49
Speaker
Now, another one turned up at a recent sale in New York, and it took our daughter Liz and me to tell the auction house that the sofa had been substantially cut down.
00:32:03
Speaker
So, you see, we're not concerned about the competition of an auction house or auction houses, because we do bring to the table a serious level of expertise, and that is really, really important to the serious collector.
Collecting Habits and Market Trends
00:32:18
Speaker
It's perhaps less important to the person who is simply, as they say, decorating with antiques.
00:32:24
Speaker
But it's important that before buying something that one should know how original a piece is, what the integrity is, and so forth.
00:32:35
Speaker
Are your clients also generalists?
00:32:37
Speaker
Do they collect across disciplines or do you have more specialist clients or both?
00:32:43
Speaker
Well, because we show all of these things together, even people who hadn't thought about buying, let's say furniture collectors who hadn't thought about buying silver or painting are often tempted to do so here, or people who are purely paintings collectors
00:33:03
Speaker
have come in and seen a piece of furniture or so that they couldn't possibly resist and have acquired that.
00:33:12
Speaker
I mean, for example, Jack Warner, who alas died quite recently, was a very serious collector of American paintings.
00:33:21
Speaker
And I remember his seeing a pair of English patinated in gilt brass candlesticks
00:33:29
Speaker
with eagles at a winter antique show and he bought those and they were the first of literally dozens and dozens and dozens of pieces of american neoclassical furniture silver ceramics glass lighting that we sold to him in ensuing years so much like with your interests for a client one specialty can lead to another and lead to another
00:33:54
Speaker
Yes.
00:33:54
Speaker
What kind of effect is the Internet having on the business and on your experience of dealing in these areas?
00:34:01
Speaker
Well, we have our own website and we are constantly updating it and making it better.
00:34:10
Speaker
I must say I think it serves us much more as an advertisement than it does as a specific selling tool.
00:34:21
Speaker
Having said that, we do sell something occasionally that way, and we also sell something occasionally via a site like First Dibs.
00:34:31
Speaker
But I think they are much more valuable to us as a window onto what we do and encourage people to make a visit to
00:34:44
Speaker
call us and find out what we have in a certain field and so on.
00:34:47
Speaker
At the other end of the spectrum, many auction houses that used to produce
00:34:56
Speaker
don't do so so much anymore but their sales are documented quite effectively online and I do spend a certain amount of my time looking at specific sites I don't have the time just to surf the internet looking at
00:35:18
Speaker
random things, but if I have reason to think that a specific auction might be interesting, I will try to review the catalog online.
00:35:28
Speaker
What do you think about the generational shift that a lot of people are perceiving in terms of declining interest in brown furniture, in silver, in old decorative forms?
00:35:41
Speaker
We have, dealing in American neoclassical furniture, we have not seen the decline in interest in brown furniture.
00:35:52
Speaker
At the Winter Antique Show 2017, we had, first of all, we had an extraordinary show, and secondly, we sold almost every piece of furniture except a couple of card tables and a few chairs.
00:36:08
Speaker
But we sold almost everything else.
00:36:10
Speaker
We also sold some very major paintings.
00:36:13
Speaker
There seems to be a very serious interest in American neoclassical furniture, and we're finding it easier to sell than to buy at the level at which we're interested in dealing, which is the top couple of percent of
Advice for Young Collectors
00:36:29
Speaker
that market.
00:36:29
Speaker
Sure.
00:36:30
Speaker
Interesting.
00:36:30
Speaker
Let me ask.
00:36:31
Speaker
a couple of questions that I ask all of my guests, which are, first of all, what's a piece of advice that you would give to a young collector just starting out in this field, maybe someone who's listening now and intrigued by the idea of this linen press?
00:36:46
Speaker
What would you tell someone who's just thinking about dipping their feet into this world?
00:36:50
Speaker
In all aspects of the material that we deal in, the pieces that are the best of their kind have held their value or have
00:37:01
Speaker
become more valuable, whereas the more generic objects, whether they be decorative arts or fine arts, have really kind of lingered and there's a lot less interest in them right now.
00:37:19
Speaker
As a, wearing my hat, not as a dealer, but as a private collector, and I was a private collector long before I became a dealer, I've always tried to seek out objects that I thought were really extraordinary that were a little bit below the radar, and
00:37:38
Speaker
because I could not economically compete with the person buying the great Philadelphia Chippendale high boy or the Goddard Townsend shell-carved knee-hole desk or whatever dressing table.
00:37:56
Speaker
And I settled years ago on American neoclassical furniture
00:38:01
Speaker
which was not at that point of great popular interest.
00:38:05
Speaker
And that turned out to have been a very nice decision.
00:38:11
Speaker
One of the areas in the picture world that we have personally collected is the American so-called pre-Raphaelites.
00:38:18
Speaker
And we have collected extensively in that area, and as a matter of fact, are significant lenders to...
00:38:27
Speaker
a show of that material that will be at the National Gallery in Washington,
00:38:31
Speaker
in the summer of 2018.
00:38:35
Speaker
My advice in brief would be that you want to buy the absolute best that you can at a given moment.
00:38:44
Speaker
So our listeners ought to seek out areas that are under the radar, areas of collecting that are maybe out of vogue, but where they can afford to buy really excellent examples.
00:38:55
Speaker
Unfortunately, having given this sage advice, I have to then say,
00:39:01
Speaker
that there are fewer areas now that are under the radar than there were when I was getting started.
00:39:07
Speaker
But there are still the occasional beautiful thing that can be bought that is really great quality that is not necessarily wildly expensive.
00:39:17
Speaker
But the best advice I would give is that if you yourself don't know what you should be buying, then seek advice from somebody who does have a sense of where the market has been, where it's going, and what the right things to be buying are at a given moment.
00:39:36
Speaker
Maybe someone at Herschel & Adler.
00:39:37
Speaker
That's possible.
00:39:38
Speaker
But there are other people as well.
00:39:40
Speaker
What's a mistake that you see even experienced collectors making that you would caution against?
00:39:46
Speaker
It can best be described, I think, as beating the system.
00:39:51
Speaker
Many collectors who really don't have any experience and don't know what they're doing have gone out and tried to build a collection on their own.
00:40:01
Speaker
where money is the chief decision-making factor in an acquisition.
00:40:09
Speaker
With the given that there are no bargains in an area that has been heavily collected over a long period of time, the thing you want to do is to buy the best thing you possibly can.
00:40:21
Speaker
And again, I repeat, because it's really important,
00:40:25
Speaker
If you don't know how to make the selection yourself, you need to put yourself in the hands of somebody who can give you that advice.
00:40:34
Speaker
That advice does cost money, and some people giving that advice shouldn't be giving any advice because they themselves don't know.
00:40:42
Speaker
I won't ask you to name names.
00:40:45
Speaker
Stuart Felt, thanks so much for being with us.
00:40:47
Speaker
Thank you very much for asking me.
00:40:49
Speaker
It's been a pleasure.
Closing Remarks and Listener Engagement
00:41:02
Speaker
Curious Objects is sponsored by Rinalda House Museum of American Art, one of the nation's most highly regarded collections of American art, on view in the unique domestic setting of the 1917 R.J.
00:41:12
Speaker
Reynolds Mansion.
00:41:14
Speaker
Browse the art and decorative arts collection at rinaldahouse.org, that's R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-A house.org, and visit in person in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
00:41:25
Speaker
And thanks so much to all of you for listening.
00:41:27
Speaker
I really hope you enjoyed it.
00:41:29
Speaker
Curious Objects is a podcast from the magazine Antiques.
00:41:32
Speaker
Today's episode was edited by Sammy Delati, and our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:41:36
Speaker
Until next time, I'm your host, Ben Miller.