Apropos Brian Sewell’s recent death, I’ve reread the first volume of his memoir, Outsider. It’s interesting, because in the reading, it’s clear to me that Brian was very much on the inside, but he felt an outsider because he lacked family position- indeed, was illegitimate- and was gay, or as he has it, much more opprobriously, queer.
Still, he seems to me more than sufficiently inside the trade during his early years to add gossip of the spiciest kind. I’m tempted to add a few flavorings of my own, but as we still have to swim in the same ocean, I’ll hold back- for now.
A couple of things I can say for certain, that the trade is still peopled with characters who perhaps one finds maddening on the day, but in the evening, can engender laughter, and for all that, though the players may have changed, their roles remain the same. One gaggle of players, the major auction houses as an element in the trade have changed some players and some of their role, but still remain familiar, and at times maddeningly so.
The auction houses in former times, and certainly for Brian Sewell’s tenure in the auction world, were for nearly everyone in the retail trade the wholesale resource for all manner of material, from the best to the execrable, matching, as it were, the types of dealers that populate the landscape. Though the major houses are vaunted for their longevity, and in the last few decades for their sales of artwork with stratospheric prices, they were, certainly through the ‘60’s and into the ‘70’s, performing their traditional role of merchandising at public sale all manner of personal property. In the days in which London was the overarching art market city, sales tended to be primarily art and antiques that could then find their way into the retail trade. ‘Public sale’ should have been cited in inverted commas earlier, because, traditionally, the saleroom was a hothouse environment where the same auctioneers developed shall we say cozy relationships with the trade, such that often dealers were tipped off about upcoming sleepers, intentionally miscataloged to allow the dealer to obtain a gem amidst a welter of rubbish. Money for this privilege did in fact change hands. Has this practice, the result of greater transparency due to the huge disbursal of catalog material through online sales, faded from view?
Well, no. As an example, a well-known expert for one of the major houses, when we had inquired of her about consigning a piece of good quality that we knew we had no market for, our enquiry was always followed a day or two later by the arrival of a gentleman who we never saw otherwise, invariably enquiring about the item. Otherwise, we never, ever saw him. On another occasion, we sought to recover from the same house a collection that was consigned from the bankruptcy estate of a defunct public institution. The heirs of the original donor sought to recover the collection for sentimental reasons, although it was already in the hands of the auction house. The aforementioned expert had already seen the collection and given it a value and, we understand, was going to offer it shortly in a lower end sale as a job lot. On behalf of the heirs, we offered to purchase it at mid range auction estimate plus their normal commission. Whereupon the expert communicated to us that she had had another look, and felt her original estimate was too low, and raised the price significantly. We said okay, and she raised the price again, and then yet again. Well- we did finally acquire it, and as we were collecting the items from the saleroom, were met with icy politeness by the expert who gave us to understand she was of the opinion we had scooped her. By the way, this is someone who regularly appears on ‘The Antique’s Roadshow’, but where’s the harm, as no one believes anyone or anything they see on TV, do they?