It was a rather cold and dreary Saturday afternoon. My friend and I had been rumbling up and down the back roads of Pennsylvania and lower New York making a marathon tour of every antique mall my friend knew about. For me, typically, antiquing is a solitary occupation. I need time to take it all in. I like to let me eye peruse everything, my brain to process the information. I’ve always been of the mindset that you simply “never know”. It doesn’t happen every day, but it happens. Some unsuspecting person picks up something in a shop and toddles it off to the Antiques Roadshow a few years later only to discover that the planter they’ve been using to house their prized mock orange tree is a rare 3rd-century B.C. Roman vase.
I’m not taking any chances. I like to take my time.
I’m not taking any chances. I like to take my time.
My friend, however, does not like to take his time and antiquing for him is a matter of purpose and accomplishing it with the utmost haste. The purpose of this particular drizzly day was to find an antique queen-size bed for my friend’s new house. Now if you know anything about antique beds, you know that unless you’re going after something made well before 1700 you’re on a bit of a unicorn hunt. The definitively chaste and practical Victorians had no need for anything large enough for two people so trying to find a late 19th-century queen-size bed frame is a challenge to say the least.
With all of that in mind I decided to hang up my antiquing hat for the day and simply go along for the ride – literally. When you love antiques and antique hunting as much I do, however, it’s impossible to enter a shop without looking around. We had barely been in the first place five minutes when I pointed to a chair and said, “That’s rather nice, isn’t it?” My friend barely gave it a glance before he waved it away like an unwanted mosquito. “Just 1920s…” He said breezily without breaking his stride. And that’s when I began to think.
It’s funny to think about but you still hear it just about everywhere you go. “Oh that’s just 1920s.” In reality, just about every decade after 1910 gets maligned as being “just”. I suppose this is part of the life cycle of any object. It amuses me to this day to read authors like Dickens or Jane Austen and hear them criticize the furnishings of the decades before their lifetimes. The tacky outmoded furniture of Charlotte Bronte’s day is now highly prized by collectors and much of it can be found in museums. Like so many things in life, however, all a thing needs is time and perspective and it eventually becomes valuable.
So here I sit, on the 23rd of May, 2014, gazing back across the fabric of time and realize that in two months we (the World) will be marking the anniversary of the start of World War I…one hundred years ago. Most of us don’t like to think of it but Time is marching on faster than we’d care to admit. In but a few more years that chair from the 1920s will have crossed the centenary mark and will be, by official definition, antique. Not just collectible or “old” but a bona fide antique. For years antique experts talked about the “antiques of tomorrow”. Tomorrow came faster than anyone expected and many of the collectibles and disregarded decorative items of thirty years ago have, through the steady process of time, moved closer to that hallowed definition of antique. Perhaps I’ll write another day about how the yard sale “junk” of my childhood has skyrocketed in price, but for now I’ll let you just mull the idea that the things you dismiss out of hand for being “just 1960s” are highly collectible curiosities of a younger generation; a generation who never knew what it was like to watch a television lit from within with tubes. Frightening tough, isn’t it?
I have varied tastes when it comes to the things of yore. I’m the product of my generation, I suppose. Sometimes I think I should have called myself the Kitschy Cupboard instead of the Antique Hare. I love 18th-century furniture but would think nothing of putting a piece of 1930s carnival glass on it for display. I’m not a purist and never will be. I’ll never dismiss something as “just”. All of us in this crazy business, whether dealers or collectors, benefit from the appreciation and understanding that anything is collectible so long as someone is willing to collect it. And in the end it’s not about how old or valuable something is, it’s about how much pleasure it brings the person who fosters it on its long, strange life across the decades.
With all of that in mind I decided to hang up my antiquing hat for the day and simply go along for the ride – literally. When you love antiques and antique hunting as much I do, however, it’s impossible to enter a shop without looking around. We had barely been in the first place five minutes when I pointed to a chair and said, “That’s rather nice, isn’t it?” My friend barely gave it a glance before he waved it away like an unwanted mosquito. “Just 1920s…” He said breezily without breaking his stride. And that’s when I began to think.
It’s funny to think about but you still hear it just about everywhere you go. “Oh that’s just 1920s.” In reality, just about every decade after 1910 gets maligned as being “just”. I suppose this is part of the life cycle of any object. It amuses me to this day to read authors like Dickens or Jane Austen and hear them criticize the furnishings of the decades before their lifetimes. The tacky outmoded furniture of Charlotte Bronte’s day is now highly prized by collectors and much of it can be found in museums. Like so many things in life, however, all a thing needs is time and perspective and it eventually becomes valuable.
So here I sit, on the 23rd of May, 2014, gazing back across the fabric of time and realize that in two months we (the World) will be marking the anniversary of the start of World War I…one hundred years ago. Most of us don’t like to think of it but Time is marching on faster than we’d care to admit. In but a few more years that chair from the 1920s will have crossed the centenary mark and will be, by official definition, antique. Not just collectible or “old” but a bona fide antique. For years antique experts talked about the “antiques of tomorrow”. Tomorrow came faster than anyone expected and many of the collectibles and disregarded decorative items of thirty years ago have, through the steady process of time, moved closer to that hallowed definition of antique. Perhaps I’ll write another day about how the yard sale “junk” of my childhood has skyrocketed in price, but for now I’ll let you just mull the idea that the things you dismiss out of hand for being “just 1960s” are highly collectible curiosities of a younger generation; a generation who never knew what it was like to watch a television lit from within with tubes. Frightening tough, isn’t it?
I have varied tastes when it comes to the things of yore. I’m the product of my generation, I suppose. Sometimes I think I should have called myself the Kitschy Cupboard instead of the Antique Hare. I love 18th-century furniture but would think nothing of putting a piece of 1930s carnival glass on it for display. I’m not a purist and never will be. I’ll never dismiss something as “just”. All of us in this crazy business, whether dealers or collectors, benefit from the appreciation and understanding that anything is collectible so long as someone is willing to collect it. And in the end it’s not about how old or valuable something is, it’s about how much pleasure it brings the person who fosters it on its long, strange life across the decades.
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