Adventures in American Bookshops, Antique Stores and Auction Rooms. Guido Bruno
Table of Contents
When a man has made money in America he at once becomes a victim to the craze for an artistic home. The tradespeople with whom he comes in contact in order to achieve his artistic desires speak of art and rugs and paintings. He reads in the newspapers about Mr. So-and-So who spent thousands of dollars for antique furniture or for pictures in auctions, and he begins his walks on these dangerous and costly grounds where one may buy for goodly sums the ephemeral fame of a collector and a lover of objects of art. The reputation of an art expert seems to go with the objects as well as the wrapping paper and string.
It is the dream of every antique dealer once in his life to enter one of those coveted garrets where treasures of six generations are stored in boxes, in cases and trunks. To enter this garret at the invitation of some real estate owner or lawyer who represents an estate anxious to sell the house and to clear out the ‘rubbish’; to buy the contents of such a garret for a few dollars and to find a painting by Rubens or Tintoretto or Martha Washington’s wedding slippers or a suite of magnificent Colonial furniture … sure enough these are red-letter days in the career of almost every antique dealer. Only recently, for instance, in an old garret on Ninth Street, an old Persian rug was discovered which no second-hand dealer would have paid fifty cents for, an expert rug man realized its value, gave eighteen hundred dollars for it in competition with other dealers and sold it to a famous rug collector for twenty-six thousand dollars.
Some time ago a buyer of Marshall Field in Chicago saw a painting in one of the minor art shops of the city. He liked it and purchased it for fifteen hundred dollars. It was marked six thousand dollars and put on sale in Marshall Field’s art gallery. It is a standing rule of this art gallery to resell once a year all their purchases. This particular painting seemed unsalable. It was reduced and reduced for a number of years, but it could not be sold. Finally a picture speculator bought it for six hundred dollars, took it back to New York, sold it in an auction sale for ten thousand dollars. The picture was sold and resold eight times during the following six months and ultimately found a final resting place in the mansion of a very well-known man on Fifth Avenue. He paid for it one hundred and eighty thousand dollars.
Not the man who keeps shops and stores has the great adventure in seeking after the old and antique. But people who are “picking up things,” attending action sales here and there, visiting junk shops and second-hand shops all over the city, constantly expecting to find something and never tired or disappointed. I know highly educated men unusually gifted, possessing expert knowledge that in many cases surpasses the “infallibility” of our museum authorities, who prefer the free life of buying and selling to high-priced positions in art shops and in art galleries. I know one man who is “picking up” a living by looking through the book-stalls of dealers and buying odd volumes for small amounts of money and selling the same books to rare-book dealers for as many dollars as he pays cents.
1917
Auctions As Amusement Places
REAL enjoyment of life is caused by life’s contrasts. And what greater contrast than to witness Mrs. Astor, for instance, bidding against a second-hand furniture dealer from Second Avenue for a curious crazy-quilt, soiled, torn and catalogued as genuine, direct from some old farmhouse?
Amusement? Galore. And more than that. Studies in human nature, scale exercises of human passions. Everybody has his chance in New York auction rooms. The gambler, the collector, the book hunter, the shrewd dealer, the speculator, the bargain fiend; these auction rooms are a paradise for those who know their own wants, needs and desires. A Dorado for the careful and cautious who have taken advantage of the exhibition on the previous day who have examined the articles for which they wish to bid, who know the condition of the offered wares.
But these auction rooms are a dangerous playground for the emotional, the weak, who really doesn’t need the objects on sale, whose eyes and voice seem to miss constantly proper telephonic connections with his central, his seat of thinking. Disastrous prove these auction rooms for those who bid without seeing properly what they are bidding for, who bid higher and higher because perhaps they do not want the other fellow to have the thing, or prompted by pure gambling instinct.
Fascinated by their surroundings, they are easily moved to action; by a look of the auctioneer, by a nod or a word, that places them all at once (though only for a second) in the limelight of public attention. They pay their bills and do not know what to do with their purchases. What a comedy!
Exactly as you know where to go to when you wish to see a musical comedy or an opera, so do I know in what particular auction room I can get a view of human vanity, a peep at greed, an exhibition of plain, delightful collectors’ mania.
“Follow the red flag,” I would have almost said, but the auctioneers have done away with their old emblem during their recent convention in Rochester. Red flags nowadays are supposed to symbolize revolution, socialism, brotherhood of men, an equal chance for all, and their display is prohibited by city and State legislation. Therefore, blue is now the auctioneer’s color, and you must follow the blue flag.
The auctioneers themselves are wonderful entertainers, psychologists of the first rank: Virtuosos, who play wonderful tunes on the emotions of their audience; golden tunes, tunes that turn into gold in the auction-room proprietor’s pockets.
“Something for nothing” is ever attractive. There wasn’t an American born yet who would not stop, look and listen at the word “bargain.”
But then there is a mystery back of it all. You don’t know where the things come from. They are jumbled together in the picturesqueness of everyday life; a painting by an old master may be followed by an iron bedstead that only yesterday harbored the maid of some bankrupt actress. Napoleon is supposed to have dined from one of the offered china plates, and a much-worn fur coat is offered ten minutes later.
I love auction rooms without catalogues, without plush chairs, where specialists have not been allowed to separate the goats from the sheep.
“Finds” are rare in our times when every grocer’s wife who inherited a library from her great uncle, the preacher, knows more about auction-room prices than the average collector of books; when every push-cart peddlar examines his ill-smelling day’s collection for antiques.
Books and works of art have become objects of speculation. Daily papers are the sources of information on the prices of values in auction rooms as well as on bonds sold on the stock exchange. And still bargains are found almost daily. Little fortunes are made by buying things in an auction room on University Place and selling them in another one on upper Fifth Avenue.
Here is a little amusement calendar for lonely afternoons:
Do you want to see splendid gowns, magnificent jewels, society manners, etchings of priceless value, paintings, sold for thousands of dollars by the square inch? Witness Mr. Kirby’s performance at the American Art Galleries. He is a dignified gentleman: never talks above a whisper: very discreet in advice, but irresistibly urgent in his discreetness. A magnetic fluid seems to emanate from him, and he has the power to direct it properly—believe me!
But what an education to see the great works of great artists put up for public sale: Whistler, Zorn, Degas, Corot, the greatest—and how wonderful to think that they will find an honored place in so many American homes. And the books! Rows of wonderful bindings and old yellowish tomes with broken backs. Rich and poor have an equal chance; and money does not always acquire the most precious, the most coveted prize. Money usually searches for outward beauty; real value is left unobserved in a shabby garment. This is the consolation of the bookworm, but dealers spoil his chances now-a-days. They have learned that it pays to put beautiful clothes on valuable books.
Would you like to see an actor of the old type? Drop in on Mr. Hartmann, in the Fifth Avenue Auction Rooms on Fourth Avenue. Listen to his good-natured talk:
“Madam,