Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller, and we're doing something a little bit new in today's episode.
Speaker: I'm speaking with both a dealer and her client about a piece that he recently bought from her.
Speaker: There's no question that the dealer-client relationship is right at the center of the entire world of collecting.
Speaker: Neither of them would exist without the other.
Speaker: So I'm excited to be speaking today with Jill Newhouse of Jill Newhouse Gallery.
Speaker: She's a dealer in master drawings and paintings on Manhattan's Upper East Side, as well as her client, Ray Vickers.
Speaker: Now, Ray recently bought a piece from Jill, which is both beautiful and highly unusual.
Speaker: It's a painting, but rather than canvas or board or plaster, the medium is actually a wooden lunchbox.
Speaker: Yeah, you heard me right.
Speaker: We'll get into exactly what that means.
Speaker: But the artist is Camille Corot, the great 19th century French painter whose work is seen as, among other things, a precursor to Impressionism.
Speaker: Jill is the person to talk with about Corot.
Speaker: She's currently at work developing and updating a catalog resume of Corot's drawings.
Speaker: And alongside her scholarship, Jill has bought and sold numerous works by Corot over the years, including, of course, this box, which was, as I said, recently purchased by Ray Vickers.
Speaker: Jill and Ray, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Pleasure.
Speaker: Now, I want to start by giving listeners a sense of exactly what we're talking about.
Speaker: And as always, you can see photos at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Speaker: But Jill, you know, a minute ago, I described this as a lunchbox.
Speaker: Can you elaborate on that and describe the box and the painting on it?
Speaker: I will.
Speaker: It's interesting that art objects and paintings and drawings don't always come to us with full provenance information or the history of where they've been.
Speaker: And in this case, we were lucky enough to have that.
Speaker: And there's quite a story around what is actually two boxes.
Speaker: One is a dark wood box measuring about
Speaker: eight by three and a half by four inches high, and there's a second box, which is six and a half by three and a half by three and a half inches high.
Speaker: So they're small.
Speaker: And they exist in the literature on Coro, and what we know about them is that they belong to a man named Alfred Robo, who was a French draftsman and printmaker who's really best known today as an art historian because he published...
Speaker: printed and organized the catalogue raisonne of the work of Delacroix in 1885 and of Coro, which was published in 1905.
Speaker: And these books are still considered the primary sources of authentication of research on these artists.
Speaker: So in the 1870s, Robo was living in northern France near a town called Arras, and Coro visited him there, and he painted there often.
Speaker: In fact, one of his best-known paintings of the period is an 1871 landscape that's now in the collection of the National Gallery in London of this area called Arleux du Nord.
Speaker: So in the literature, Robo tells a story that he had this dark brown, simple wooden box, which was made for food in his kitchen.
Speaker: And Coro commented that he thought the box was really ugly.
Speaker: And he suggested that if Robo would exchange it for a new one, he, Coro, would decorate it in an appropriate fashion.
Speaker: Now imagine 1871, Coro is at the height of his career.
Speaker: He's very well known.
Speaker: He's successful.
Speaker: He sells his works.
Speaker: He's heavily faked by this point.
Speaker: So he went to a local carpenter in Arleu and commissioned a new box, which is the second box that we have, the smaller box.
Speaker: He was very precise about the specifications of the size, apparently.
Speaker: And then on the inside of the lid, he painted a wonderful landscape, which is the, it's like the epitome of Koro's landscape art and style in the later years, all in this really three by five inch space.
Speaker: And the painting is fully signed.
Speaker: It shows a single tree in a windswept plain and two figures in the center lower left,
Speaker: One of them has a bright red hat on and it's fully signed at the right.
Speaker: And it's got this amazing rapid brushwork and this hazy and diffuse light that Coro became so well known for in his later years.
Speaker: It's like a little masterpiece, and it's inside a box that was used for food, kept in the kitchen, apparently, of Robo.
Speaker: So Robo, when he was recording all of Koro's work, titled it Frascheur Matinal, which means the freshness of the morning, and he
Speaker: tells us that this is one of nine recorded objects in which Coral painted on something other than a traditional support, a canvas.
Speaker: And one of them, he says, is he painted something on the back of a plate, on a cigar box, and even on his own silk hat.
Speaker: So this was really the artist having fun and the intimacy and the importance of the relationship between Koro and Robo cannot be understated.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: So it was amazing that the two boxes had stayed together, that they came down and were inherited past generation to generation in a family in France.
Speaker: And they came up for auction in a sale in Europe.
Speaker: And as I had been working on Coro for a long time, I was lucky enough to have colleagues call me and we were able to buy it.
Speaker: So very, very unusual object.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I have to say it makes me wish I had a friend like Koro to paint my lunchbox.
Speaker: To paint your lunchboxes, exactly.
Speaker: No, it really is.
Speaker: It's quite a beautiful scene.
Speaker: And I want to emphasize for listeners, it's very small.
Speaker: I don't know if you'd quite call it a miniature.
Speaker: No, the actual painting size must be three by five inches or so.
Speaker: But the way...
Speaker: Ray discovered it, in fact, was we sent an email out showing just the painting.
Speaker: And the amazing thing about emails is you can make things bigger than they really are, smaller than they really are.
Speaker: And this, the painting itself,
Speaker: is amazingly complete is very powerful it when we ray came and looked at it we we looked at the box from across the room and you the painting carries amazingly so i'm looking across the room at it right now and it keeps distracting my attention six by three inches in this very small box yeah what was your ray what was your first sort of gut reaction when you saw it
Speaker: Well, as Jill said, I saw it on the website, which was, I think, announcing an extension of a show she was doing.
Speaker: And I immediately sent an email saying, can you tell me the price?
Speaker: Because I thought the image was just wonderful.
Speaker: It's that kind of late Corot, lots of energy and...
Speaker: And she said, well, you know, in her return, she said, you know, it's on a small box.
Speaker: And actually sent me a photo of it in the box.
Speaker: And I have to say, that didn't really put me off.
Speaker: I mean, I was for a number of reasons, but...
Speaker: I still thought it was a wonderful image and I couldn't imagine, you know, not having it at that point.
Speaker: It's interesting, you know, to have a landscape scene in a box with a culinary purpose.
Speaker: There's no sort of obvious connection to it.
Speaker: I think the connection is Coram is a landscapist.
Speaker: You could argue he's the greatest landscape painter of the 19th century.
Speaker: He did do figure paintings, but I think that would be really small for a figure.
Speaker: So put this in context for me, say, you know, 1871, he's sort of at the height of his fame, his reputation.
Speaker: Give me a little more context here.
Speaker: What kinds of work is Kuro producing at this period?
Speaker: You know, how does this fit into his sort of the arc of his biographies?
Speaker: Well, he started out, he was born into a working class family.
Speaker: I think his father was a wig maker and his mother was a milliner, which is a good combination, I suppose.
Speaker: And he...
Speaker: was a bad student, was sent to boarding school, and he didn't come to decide on a career as an artist until he was 26, which at that point, you know, the 1820s, that was not what one did.
Speaker: Half your life was over already.
Speaker: Yeah, that was practically middle-aged, I think.
Speaker: And he apprenticed two painters, one named Michelon, another Bertin, very young,
Speaker: traditional neoclassical artists and what he proceeded to do in his career is take those very formal
Speaker: structured landscapes that were being painted and he loosened them up and loosened the brushwork and made them more spontaneous and his trajectory leads directly into what we would identify as impressionism so which really is a kind of realism because it's trying to capture the fleetingness of the landscape and
Speaker: Even in this little painting, the sense you get is of the wind blowing across a field.
Speaker: So Vacura was very, two early trips to Italy that changed his career dramatically, but he mostly worked in and around France, drew constantly, sketched, did a lot of oil sketching on paper, which was then mounted to canvas.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: sometimes on panel but predominantly on canvas, so very much a constant draftsman, constant painter.
Speaker: So the speed of his brushwork is very evident in this late work, and the later works have this kind of diffuseness to the picture surface.
Speaker: So...
Speaker: Now you say he mostly painted on canvas.
Speaker: Mostly on canvas, yeah.
Speaker: What differences do you think this change in medium might have?
Speaker: Well, he painted a lot on paper too, which I think might have had a practical aspect in the sense that, you know, for an artist as prolific as Koro was, you were probably forever running out of canvas and paper and all different mediums.
Speaker: But...
Speaker: there's a certain reaction that the canvas has a certain give when the brush hits it that would be different in paper.
Speaker: But what we see on this box, being able to reduce a landscape to a three by five inch surface like that shows an artist at the height of his career.
Speaker: He just knows exactly where
Speaker: Each stroke of the brush goes, and it explains what you're seeing without literally translating it, which is what the neoclassical school that preceded him was more inclined to do.
Speaker: So this is a kind of impressionism.
Speaker: He's making you feel the landscape that you're looking at.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, Ray, I want to turn to your experience of the box.
Speaker: And in service of that, can you give us a little bit of context about your own collecting?
Speaker: And maybe the first question to ask is whether you even consider yourself a collector.
Speaker: Yeah, that's always a difficult question.
Speaker: It seems like a, I don't know, a kind of highfalutin term, but after a number of years of purchasing objects and having a great many of them around our apartment, I guess that term is probably accurate at this point.
Speaker: I mean, we began here in New York in the 70s really buying objects.
Speaker: Japanese art and that really started after a trip to Japan in the early 70s.
Speaker: And then in the late 70s we actually moved to Asia and then spent the next 18 years there, mostly in Hong Kong but two years in Tokyo.
Speaker: So we were exposed to both Japanese and Chinese art in a very big way.
Speaker: And that was our principal area of collecting for many years.
Speaker: At the same time, we had a good friend as a dealer whose interests were quite eclectic.
Speaker: And he would, from time to time, show us other things that he had collected.
Speaker: And then sometimes we would buy some of those, African art, pre-dynastic Egyptian stone items.
Speaker: Most of those now have been sold over the years, really to purchase other things.
Speaker: Okay, as your interests have evolved.
Speaker: Yeah, things have changed.
Speaker: And to a certain extent, environments have changed.
Speaker: Some things look very good in a certain house or apartment.
Speaker: And my wife and I have moved many times over those years.
Speaker: So then when we came...
Speaker: back to the US, we had in the meantime purchased a house in France as a second home.
Speaker: And we had that for 20 some years.
Speaker: And so that really re-stimulated our interest in Western art.
Speaker: And again, we started looking at
Speaker: items both in Japanese and not so much Chinese and in Western art again.
Speaker: So this is why we got to know Jill was through when we moved back to New York and we had an introduction to her in the gallery and we started really
Speaker: looking at things through her eyes.
Speaker: And it's been a very good... This is really just the latest of a number of acquisitions we've made from Jill.
Speaker: That have quite a range to them too.
Speaker: Some contemporary things and 19th century things.
Speaker: Yes, I think it's been interesting.
Speaker: Jill in her gallery almost always has a few contemporary artists that she's showing.
Speaker: And
Speaker: It's interesting because one of the things is that they are affordable for the most part.
Speaker: And, you know, it's a different look.
Speaker: And I should say one of the things about our approach is that we have a very flexible display system in our various apartments over the years, and we do here in New York now.
Speaker: And as a consequence, we tend to put things up for a short period of time, a month, two months, three months, and then rotate things around.
Speaker: We sort of got into that habit in Asia, because that's the style there with Japanese art.
Speaker: You know, when you have hanging scrolls and whatnot, you put them up for a while and then
Speaker: change them out, and we do that here also with Western art.
Speaker: And it's fun, actually, to try to put, say, an Asian type of painting next to, say, a Nabi painting and look at the colors and how they talk to each other.
Speaker: Not to suggest that one was influenced by the other, but rather to see how
Speaker: people at relatively the same period would have approached objects on other parts, you know, on opposite parts of the world.
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, it's a theme that you hear more and more about these days, even in the decorative arts world.
Speaker: You know, people decorating apartments with sort of eclectic objects, you know, putting, instead of trying to put like with like, putting like with very much unlike, even in some cases, total opposite.
Speaker: And the way you describe the trajectory of your collecting, you're not a focused collector of 19th century French painting.
Speaker: You've been a collector of a number of different genres, a number of different periods from millennia past.
Speaker: So I can imagine you have a bit of a more, could I call it a holistic perspective?
Speaker: idea of the kinds of art objects that you enjoy.
Speaker: Yeah, and I would say for us, and I think everybody who buys art goes about it differently, but for us it's been a question of what's been on offer.
Speaker: I mean, we haven't decided that certain areas were, or that it was our taste or whatever, and then gone out and sought those.
Speaker: We really allowed the dealers to suggest what they find to be of interest.
Speaker: Now, you said you saw the box on Jill's website.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you immediately called her about it.
Speaker: So there was something about the, and this was before you even knew it was on a box.
Speaker: So it's something about the painting itself that attracted you.
Speaker: And then when you found out that it was a box, you mentioned to me that this connected in a way to some other objects that you've collected.
Speaker: Tell me a bit more about that.
Speaker: Yeah, the, well, first of all, as I say, as we've talked about, as Jill has mentioned, far better than I can, the image is really quite remarkable.
Speaker: And that's what really first caught my eye.
Speaker: When she said it was a box, that didn't really put me off because it fits within an area of collecting that most Asian and Chinese, Asian-Japanese collectors would be familiar with, which are called scholars' objects.
Speaker: These are objects which would have been on the desk of a 17th, 18th, 19th century scholar.
Speaker: That is someone specializing in calligraphy or ink painting.
Speaker: These would have been brush pots where he kept his brush made of precious woods.
Speaker: It might have been an armrest which they used to rest their arm while they were writing or drawing with the brush.
Speaker: Also, they would include ink stones.
Speaker: An ink stone is a slab of slate-like material, and you take an ink stick, which is a congealed soot,
Speaker: in a sort of water-soluble glue and you rub it on the stone with water and it produces black ink.
Speaker: These come in all shapes and sizes but I have one in my collection which is made from a discarded roof tile of a very famous gate to a temple in Kyoto.
Speaker: So it has some of the same aspects of the box.
Speaker: I mean it's got a written provenance, explains where it came from,
Speaker: It's a household daily object, something you'd have on your desk.
Speaker: So I look forward to a time when I can have both my inkstone and this box sitting on the desk.
Speaker: Perhaps I write an email to Jill to ask her what's going on with this new thing on the solar site.
Speaker: That's a great picture.
Speaker: We'll be right back with Jill Newhouse and Ray Vickers.
Speaker: First, just a reminder that you can see images of the painting and the box it's painted on at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast and on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
Speaker: If you enjoy Curious Objects and want to support the podcast, I'm thrilled to hear it.
Speaker: One thing that would be really helpful is if you could leave a rating and a review on the app where you're listening right now.
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Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: So I'm interested in the sort of the inception of the purchase for you.
Speaker: You know, I've talked with a lot of dealers on this program.
Speaker: I've talked with some collectors as well, but I've never had a dealer and a collector in the same room talking about an object that they've exchanged.
Speaker: And it's a sign of the art world that I think
Speaker: People who haven't experienced it firsthand may not have a very good sense for how exactly that process happens.
Speaker: I know it's different for different people, but for the two of you, you know, Ray, you called Jill when you saw the piece on her website and that started the conversation.
Speaker: How did that sort of proceed?
Speaker: How did it proceed from that point to the point of deciding to make the purchase?
Speaker: Well, of course, the inquiry I made was principally about the price.
Speaker: To put it into a context that
Speaker: of purchasing.
Speaker: And did you have a, uh, idea or a prediction based on your own experience of what you've, how much you expected it to cost or were you really sort of out of the blue?
Speaker: Um, you know, just, just, uh, wondering what, what on earth, you know, whether it might even be within your, your budget.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, well,
Speaker: Corot has produced some other small things, not in a box, but small things.
Speaker: And you'd bought a Corot drawing from me, which is an earlier one, very linear and stuff.
Speaker: And I knew it was small.
Speaker: That was said.
Speaker: I didn't know it was inside a wooden box, but I knew it was small.
Speaker: So I figured it might well be within a range I was willing to think about.
Speaker: Now, for me, maybe not for a lot of people, but for us, I mean, each of these things has not just a cost, but it has an opportunity cost.
Speaker: Because it means if I buy that, it means I'm probably not going to buy, able to buy some other things.
Speaker: So one of the things that Jill and I discussed, quite openly and frankly, was...
Speaker: other things that she might have that I might purchase in lieu of this if I didn't do that.
Speaker: And that was a very interesting conversation because it involves not just prices but kind of relative aesthetic values as well.
Speaker: I mean, do you get as much
Speaker: enjoyment out of this object as that one.
Speaker: And I think that's really how we zeroed in on it, was looking around and deciding, which puts both a monetary context around it, but also an aesthetic one as well.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so much that, what's so interesting as a dealer is that who decides to buy what?
Speaker: And it is often not a judgment of the quality, it's more a question of,
Speaker: each individual person, their aesthetics, their lifestyle, and what they'd like to have at home with them.
Speaker: And the wonderful thing about Ray and Priscilla is they've always, in all the years we've known each other, they're incredibly open-minded aesthetically.
Speaker: And that's something that appeals to me greatly, the idea of mixing Japanese art with Western art, drawings with paintings.
Speaker: And even the idea that they rotate what they're looking at is so interesting.
Speaker: They have an independence...
Speaker: and a surety of what they like and what they want to own that's pretty rare, really.
Speaker: So, I mean, we've built up a long relationship over the years and discussed things and trust each other, but it really comes, which is the basis of any relationship in the art world between dealer, client.
Speaker: But they always had a kind of broad...
Speaker: open-mindedness which
Speaker: fits with my point of view because I have a lot of different kinds of things in the gallery that I've shown at different moments from contemporary to earlier things.
Speaker: And this kind of object, as you called, it goes well with your scholars' objects because just for the sake of the people listening, the box is closed.
Speaker: You need to open the box and then in the inside lid is where you see the little painting.
Speaker: So
Speaker: it's almost like a little secret world that you can open or not.
Speaker: You could display it with the lid open so the painting is visible, or you could display it closed.
Speaker: And it's not going to appeal to everyone.
Speaker: I fell in love with it.
Speaker: I think Ray did too.
Speaker: Each object has its home, and that's the trick about having a gallery is you hope that people...
Speaker: fall in love with the things you show the way you have.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to come back in just a minute to the sort of eccentricity of it.
Speaker: But while we're on this subject, is there, I mean, a dealer obviously wants to make a sale.
Speaker: That's how you stay in business.
Speaker: A dealer also, we hope in the best of all possible worlds, is really trying to develop, as you say, a long-term relationship, a relationship based on trust with their clients.
Speaker: And
Speaker: How do you adjudicate those interests?
Speaker: When Ray calls you up and says he's interested in this piece, and you know it's a piece that might have a sort of appeal to a particular kind of person or a person with a particular kind of interest—
Speaker: how do you decide whether this is the thing that you want to sort of promote or whether to encourage your clients to think about other options?
Speaker: How do you sort of... Clients have interests, but dealers also have... I mean, they're professional persuaders.
Speaker: So how do you sort of...
Speaker: navigate that.
Speaker: I never thought of myself as a professional persuader, but anyway, well, in most cases, in art of the period that I show, and even the contemporary art, the little bit that I show, I find things that I think are good, and then I hope that the people that I know will agree with me by purchasing something.
Speaker: If you're asking...
Speaker: When Ray was interested in this box, I was thrilled because we have a long relationship.
Speaker: I understand his taste a bit.
Speaker: I would rather it went there than went to someone I was less involved with, although it's always nice to make new clients as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't know, does that answer where you were going with that?
Speaker: Yeah, no, I'm just trying to sort of explore this notion, this sort of, and I encountered this as a dealer myself with some regularity, which is, you know, we, the firm where I work is about 100 years old and prides itself on its relationships, long-term relationships with clients.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we like to think in many cases we know our clients' interests and that sometimes guides our purchasing decisions as well.
Speaker: If we know that there are one or two people on our mailing list who have a keen interest in this kind of object, we're much more likely to want to buy it or bid it higher at an auction, that sort of thing.
Speaker: But not everybody can buy everything all the time.
Speaker: Well, no, timing is a lot of it, too.
Speaker: I mean, Ray wasn't always in New York all the time, and this would have been a tough one to buy sight unseen, I have to say.
Speaker: And then also, everyone is not in a buying mood all the time.
Speaker: And we have different objects here.
Speaker: But I have to say, after 40 years in business, one of the biggest mysteries is who is...
Speaker: why a certain person buys a certain object.
Speaker: I mean, some of it is slightly predictable, but when we put up a show or a catalog, there's always a surprising connection to someone that we maybe wouldn't have thought of.
Speaker: Obviously, there are certain things I know if I get them, I would call Ray, but this I didn't really...
Speaker: think that you would be interested in this.
Speaker: I mean, I'm sure you would be interested because it's interesting, but to buy it, I wouldn't have known that, really.
Speaker: I have a Corot drawing, and I've looked at a number of Corot things with Jill, never having purchased them, but we have
Speaker: There are a couple of artists that she knows that I now have a, didn't really start with the idea, but now have three or four of them.
Speaker: One might even say a little collection of
Speaker: And I think if she were to find a nice drawing of one of these, I would probably get a call.
Speaker: But on the other hand, I might not be in the mood for the artist at that point.
Speaker: You never know.
Speaker: And you've talked already about buying things and then later deciding to sell them and move on to something else.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think that that's, you know, unrealistically I thought when I really started this back in the 70s that I would never own more than ten things.
Speaker: And I would always sell, dispose somehow, and keep the quality.
Speaker: Well, that left the barn a long time ago.
Speaker: But the lovely thing about the way you collect is you see something and you do think...
Speaker: You take it independently, but then you think, well, how does this fit with what else I've got?
Speaker: And you're making all these mini-exhibitions of the objects you have at home.
Speaker: And so it keeps a very open mind on your part, which is great.
Speaker: Well, I always found, I mean, when we started out...
Speaker: It really was always trying to buy the best object I could that I could afford.
Speaker: Not necessarily in the genre that I already had, but just if something... Again, as I say, I didn't go looking.
Speaker: Dealers, I've been very lucky.
Speaker: Jill, another friend that she knows...
Speaker: Very good dealers who have brought things or sent whatever information about things and have permitted one to pick and choose, you know, and not get annoyed.
Speaker: if you say, well, thanks very much, but no thanks this time.
Speaker: A minute ago, Jill, you mentioned this sort of, I don't know if you used the word eccentricity, I think maybe I did, but this sort of unusual feature of the painting being on the inside of the box, which you said was maybe not a feature that everyone would enjoy or find to be an advantage.
Speaker: How does the market, do you think, treat a piece like that, which
Speaker: For some people might be a turnoff, but for others, you know, there's there's really a kind of a charm and a personal intimacy to it that might be appealing, maybe even more appealing, but only to a smaller group of people.
Speaker: What kind of influence do you think that has on on the value of the piece?
Speaker: An object like this is really very hard to value in any kind of rational way, I would say.
Speaker: I would also say the market for Coro paintings is erratic because of the problems of how heavily faked he was and because of how prolific he was.
Speaker: So any artist like Renoir, any artist that produced that project
Speaker: many works, there's going to be a big swing in the quality.
Speaker: So I think that this box, and tell me if you agree, Ray, it's the kind of, I bought it up to a level where I felt just on instinct would be too much if I paid more and really...
Speaker: for a little commission, was happy to pass it along to Ray.
Speaker: It's a very indefinable thing.
Speaker: I don't know if scholars' rocks have a steadier... No.
Speaker: I mean, I think, again, these are so individual.
Speaker: For me, one of the real attractions, though, is the feeling that you're practically as close to the artist's hand as you can get.
Speaker: That's what I loved about it, actually, that you can just envision him painting it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And somehow you can have a... You know, this didn't just... It wasn't on the easel in the studio for a week while he did this and that.
Speaker: I mean, this is something he sat down and there is a really special quality of that for me.
Speaker: And... But as to...
Speaker: Of course, Jill knows the market in a way that I don't, but I found that it was... I mean, if this were a sizable painting, I think it would be one of the really special Corot landscapes.
Speaker: If it had been done on an easel and it were four by six feet.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, it would be one of the big bobby-dazzlers.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: I mean, I think on the other hand, because of its size, there are a few limitations you might impose on it.
Speaker: You know, it's interesting because if I had in the gallery a two-by-three-foot coral oil painting from the late period, I don't think that would be your particular taste.
Speaker: Even though you loved it, I don't know that that would fall into your collecting category.
Speaker: And really, my gallery started...
Speaker: specializing in drawings and that has drawings have the same kind of intimacy that that appeals to both Ray and I about the object you know a drawing after all is as close as the artist can get to the paper with nothing in between so I think that that probably that's a lot a lot of the appeal of it
Speaker: So there are definitely people who want large-scale, highly finished works for whom this would just seem too small an item.
Speaker: Too small and too rustic.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, that's the, that's the, um, that's a taste.
Speaker: It's a personal taste is also, and personal taste affects the market in that, uh, when things come up for sale publicly, I guess it depends how many people share a certain kind of taste over another kind of taste.
Speaker: But, um, yeah, but you know, I mean, I'm,
Speaker: I'll carry my sandwiches to work in this, you know.
Speaker: In the box, in the lunchbox.
Speaker: I mean, that's what it was intended for, after all.
Speaker: These days, moving from the bedroom to the living room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, actually, in that sense, an intimate object to me makes much more sense in these moments where we're home...
Speaker: looking at what we own, what we're surrounded with, it's kind of a perfect moment for now.
Speaker: Actually, more similar to the 1870s when they didn't move around as much as we all came to move around.
Speaker: Well, also, you know...
Speaker: It's interested me that these, in a sense, what I'll call scholars' objects, have been popular in France with the big politicians.
Speaker: I mean, I don't know if you see a photograph of Jacques Chirac's desk.
Speaker: There will be a small African sculpture on it.
Speaker: Mitterrand was much the same way.
Speaker: They always had these small little...
Speaker: objects of aesthetic interest.
Speaker: I think here in the US politicians it's usually they might have something interesting but it more is associated with US history or something more prosaic.
Speaker: And I think that's how I see this.
Speaker: I mean, this will look just wonderful to me on a desk otherwise associated with workspace.
Speaker: So it fits into many, many categories.
Speaker: Now, maybe not for everybody, but certainly that's how it strikes me.
Speaker: Well, fortunately, it doesn't have to for everybody.
Speaker: You're the one who bought it after all.
Speaker: Well, I want to wrap things up here, but can I just, sort of in closing, I mean, it's quite a pleasure for me to see the two of you talking like this and hear a bit about how you're both relating to the object and
Speaker: in your own ways, contributing to its ongoing story.
Speaker: But I, you know, I sort of, we tend to think, I think some of us tend to think of the dealer-client relationship as a one-way street.
Speaker: But,
Speaker: Clearly, as you're showing right now, it really isn't.
Speaker: You are both offering things to each other in terms of your knowledge, your experience, your learning.
Speaker: So I just want to, as a sort of an open-ended question for both of you, ask, what do you learn from each other?
Speaker: What have you learned from each other?
Speaker: Well, we both said the last time when you came to look at this, that we just enjoy talking to each other about the artworks that Ray's eye on, on what he sees in the gallery often helps me see things that I may not have seen.
Speaker: And I certainly seeing when I've been to their apartment, the, the context that artwork is put in is, is fascinating.
Speaker: And it's,
Speaker: the ability to share things that we both find visually and intellectually stimulating.
Speaker: So it brings a lot.
Speaker: And actually, especially in these difficult times, it's so nice to have people in the gallery, like even doing this and Ray coming and seeing it and sharing those moments, which for me are the driving moments of having a gallery.
Speaker: It's having people in and talking about the art, whether they buy something or not, is really what
Speaker: makes me come to work every day.
Speaker: I think too, you know, again, as I say, everybody's different, but I'm often first taken by the object.
Speaker: And then, then I want to learn about it.
Speaker: And the nice thing about Jill is that if you say, I really like that, but I don't quite understand it, she's perfectly happy to take all the time in the world to get out the books, show you where the antecedents of it are, where another version of it might have appeared in a museum, to put it into a broader context.
Speaker: So that's a very important thing.
Speaker: I mean, that's a very important relationship to have.
Speaker: Now, I can go read books myself to be able to be put onto the right path.
Speaker: For example, Robo.
Speaker: I had known about Robo, who was the... Koros' friend.
Speaker: Koros' friend and...
Speaker: cataloger.
Speaker: And now I know I'll have to be on the lookout for
Speaker: Hard to find out a lot about Robo.
Speaker: And what he did was he published these two catalogues, the Delacroix and Coro.
Speaker: So that's two amazing artists of the 19th century.
Speaker: The Coro volumes are four volumes.
Speaker: And in many cases, they did have some photography of the works, but in many cases, Robo drew pictures.
Speaker: images of the paintings, measured them and cataloged them.
Speaker: I mean, it was really an act of love.
Speaker: So he, without him, our scholarship on those two artists would be in very rough shape.
Speaker: But that's the sort of thing that I think that we share.
Speaker: And I mean, I can't imagine actually working with a dealer with whom you didn't have that kind of relationship.
Speaker: Well, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker: Ray Vickers, Jill Newhouse, thank you so much.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben.
Speaker: Thank you, Ben.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
Speaker: I'll just sneak in one more reminder to leave a rating or write us a flattering review.
Speaker: Very much appreciated.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm Ben Miller.
