Not so long ago, a spate of emails came through from a dealer friend, bitterly decrying how a mass market furniture retailer had done him wrong by knocking off a piece in his inventory- a vintage industrial type hanging lamp. Deeply angry as he should have been that he, working hard as he does to try and find unique items to offer through his galleries, to then be victimized by a company whose sole intention was to mine his taste and effort- without compensating him for it.
As it happens, about the same time we received an internet inquiry from a lady in England on a set of 12 dining chairs, Louis XVI in style, but made by Maison Jansen and originally installed in a Jansen-designed villa in Mexico City. Although she complimented us on the chairs, the punter remarked that she had seen similar chairs offered through an online sales platform for less. My fingers nimbly sprang into action, and I found the same chairs, or should I more accurately say, the very roughly similar chairs, with the online descriptive text giving the vaguest of vague hints as to a relationship with the Paris decorating firm.
On the same day, a huge catalog arrived from the ere mentioned mass market retailer, showing yet another example of similar chairs, newly made, for a fraction the price of even the cheaper Louis VXI style chairs offered through the online source. I made a point of going to the retailers’ local showroom to examine their offerings, to get a sense of what might make the cheapest even cheaper, and so much more so. And it was cheaper in every sense- mediocre timber, not much detail, and fairly poor quality craftsmanship, and pretty basic upholstery. A knockoff of an earlier style, but certainly not a copy, and by the by, it was one of masses of similar pieces, all sharing the same sort of period inspiration- but sharing the same dearth of period quality.
It occurred to me, though, much as I would like to decry the hawking of inferior goods, this was price point merchandise, and it was young-ish folk who were inside looking to buy. I always tell my own clients to hold on to your money until you can purchase something of good quality, but the fact is, that money is sometimes rather slow in coming, and sitting on camp stools or folding chairs gets pretty old after a few months. Yes, these pieces I’ve heard so often described as ‘early marriage’, giving a chronology to their period of acquisition, will doubtless be the garage sale items of the not so distant future, but the fact of the matter is, what was on offer at the retailer had a period appearance, albeit a poorly executed one, and consequently gave me some degree of hope. People buy what they like, at a price they can afford, and if it is something of a period design, eventually, if the gods of an improving economy remain sufficiently propitious, the looks like but not really the same will be replaced, in the fullness of time, with the genuine article. Hope does spring eternal.
But for the moment, I have to content myself with the realization that knockoffs of period items are now and have for generations been firmly entrenched. And, at the end of the day, what did Maison Jansen do very much of the time but restate, even to the point of literal reproduction, those items of an earlier day. Doubtless 18th century ebeniste Georges Jacob would have been no happier than his modern colleagues to see his pieces knocked off- even a century on and even by a house as vaunted as Maison Jansen.