By
Professor Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S.
OF THE PLENITUDE AND INTOXICATING EFFECT OF EUROPEAN ANTIQUE-SHOPS—OF THE LARGE SHOPS AND OF THE SMALL ONES SMELLING OF CHEESE-RIND—AND OF THE NUMEROUS STORIES WHICH ARE USED AS ENCOURAGEMENT FOR AMATEUR ANTIQUE-HUNTERS
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Publisher’s Note: Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S., because of his wide knowledge of European antiques, was made Furniture Polisher to King Ferdinand of Bulgaria early in 1913, retaining his high position for several years. He was decorated with the Order of the Holy Quail, first class, for exemplary bravery during the Rumanian attack on Tirnova, when for three consecutive days, under heavy shell fire, he remained under a Louis Quatorze sofa, polishing it with as much care as could have been used under normal conditions.
Publisher’s Note: Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S., because of his wide knowledge of European antiques, was made Furniture Polisher to King Ferdinand of Bulgaria early in 1913, retaining his high position for several years. He was decorated with the Order of the Holy Quail, first class, for exemplary bravery during the Rumanian attack on Tirnova, when for three consecutive days, under heavy shell fire, he remained under a Louis Quatorze sofa, polishing it with as much care as could have been used under normal conditions.
Whateverone’s bent in antiques may be, he will find it encouraged in Europe to a point undreamed of in America. Antique-shops are as plentiful in every large European city as were saloons in South Boston not long ago;and their contents, in many cases, have an equally intoxicating effect.
Uncultured persons who go into them with the intention of purchasing just one small Louis XV eggcup will frequently emerge with increased learning and laden down with a Provençal dough-trough, a pair of stirrup-irons, half a dozen French prints, an old leather purse, four pewter plates, and a large painting of a vaseful of wild flowers.
The streets of Paris are punctuated with shop-signs which readANTIQUITÉS; the streets of Rome and Florence and Milan and Venice are spotted withANTICHITAsigns; just around every corner in Vienna and Berlin is anANTIQUITÄTENshop. The word for antiques is approximately the same in all languages, as a result, of course, of an international agreement between antique-dealers who wish the tourists to enjoy their travels.
Plate VIIPROFESSOR KILGALLEN’S MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION OF EARLY AMERICAN UTENSILS, ALL HAND-WROUGHT, AND SOME OBTAINED FROM THE DESCENDANTS OF THE FAMILIES IN WHICH THE ARTICLES HAD BEEN HANDED DOWN FROM FATHER TO SON1. Instrument used in making early furniture. 2. A colonial plastron, used in disciplining the cattle. 3. Old mantel ornament. 4 and 5. Instruments used in disposing of undesirable pottery. 6. Colonial calambosa; early Spanish-American instrument for seeding turnips.
Plate VII
PROFESSOR KILGALLEN’S MAGNIFICENT COLLECTION OF EARLY AMERICAN UTENSILS, ALL HAND-WROUGHT, AND SOME OBTAINED FROM THE DESCENDANTS OF THE FAMILIES IN WHICH THE ARTICLES HAD BEEN HANDED DOWN FROM FATHER TO SON
1. Instrument used in making early furniture. 2. A colonial plastron, used in disciplining the cattle. 3. Old mantel ornament. 4 and 5. Instruments used in disposing of undesirable pottery. 6. Colonial calambosa; early Spanish-American instrument for seeding turnips.
The shops start in the expensive shopping districtswith the large, impressive, brightly lighted establishments where important-looking salesmen remove individual treasures from safes and cupboards, exhibit them proudly and learnedly, and quote prices on them that cause a pale green flush to steal over the face of the unsuspecting quester after antiques.
They end in the little side streets with small dark shops smelling of a peculiar blend of cheese-rind, fish-glue and unfinished subways, in which the pallid proprietors wait with old-world patience for customers to come and fight indefinitely to get a four-dollar article reduced to sixty-five cents.
The latter shops, of course, are of the greatest importance to the itinerant or catch-as-catch-can antique-hunters; for it is only in them that one stumbles on something rare and costly that has lain hidden in a shop-corner, regarded by the shopkeeper as a mere piece of junk—something, for example, like one of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels or a piece of genuine fifteenth-century arras tapestry or one of Henry the Eighth’s marriage certificates or a coal scuttle which was used by Madame du Barry—something that can be bought for a dollar and a quarter and sold for ten thousand.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that the antique-dealer is usually thoroughly conversant with the value of his possessions, that being his chief business in life. Still, he sometimes makes a mistake, as do such highly respected oracles as Senator William E. Borah, David Lloyd George, and Benito Mussolini; and it should be the aim of every true antique-hunter to encourage him to make all that he can.
Wherever one moves about in European antique-circles, one is apt to hear the story of the helpless amateur who stumbled into a Marseilles antique-shop and bought an amber necklace for twenty-five dollars. When he got it home, he took it to a large jewelry shop to have it valued. The jeweler, after examining each bead with great care, offered its owner a thousand dollars for it. This aroused the owner’s suspicions, so he took the beads to an expert and thereupon learned that each bead was engravedN à Jin very small letters, and that it was a string that Napoleon had given to Madame Pompadour as a little token of his esteem.
Some of those who tell the story declare that the lucky owner sold the beads for ten thousand dollars. Others say that he sold them for twenty-five thousanddollars. The most enthusiastic antiquers claim that he received fifty thousand for the string. But a little matter of fifteen or twenty-five thousand dollars should be nothing to amateurs in antiques, especially when such sums are merely matters of conversation and cost the converser nothing at all.
The foregoing story, and the thousands of others like it that constantly go the rounds in Paris and Rome and other antique centres, are all true; but certain of the ignorant view them with suspicion. They should never be viewed with suspicion because all the people who tell them almost always state that they happened to friends of personal friends of theirs; and this, as is well known, is always symptomatic of rock-bottom facts.