The Critic Magazine December 2019 - The joys of dealing in Brussels.

The Critic Magazine November 2019 - The experience of selling at an art fair.

Life in the Arts Lane - week 133 - What to do in the car.

When I imagine what an antique dealer drives it is always a Volvo estate. I see it coughing and spluttering down the road with a large piece of furniture sticking out of the back restrained with scrag ends of string and a ragged bungee cord. The car itself is in a parlous state of disrepair, one door is a random colour, the bonnet or some other body part is yet a third. The whole exhibits poking out brown stains of rust like a fat mans belly creeping out of the seems of his voluminous shirt. 

But this image is out of date. These days the smart boys from Pimlico drive BMW estates with automatic opening and closing boots, blacked out windows and some fancy letters, that I do not understand, attached to the model number at the back - proving it's credentials for speed and swank. Further up west they drive Range Rovers and occasionally they don't drive them at all - a minion does. Lower down the pecking order the choice still veers away from the Volvo as dealers all fear falling into the cliche.

But whatever your chosen steed it seems an immutable fact that as an antique dealer you are going to have to travel by car many a mile. A 300 mile day is not exceptional. At home idle hours can be filled browsing the internet for research or shopping. But on the road you are a sitting duck, there is only the radio and eating. 

Take for example the purchase of my lacquer cabinet. Spotted in a saleroom in the darkest countryside, I cannot tell you where; or if I did I would then have to kill you - so best not. A two hundred mile day. I was hoping to buy it and therefore my beloved Saab 93 soft top is left parked outside and I venture forth in the Subaru Legacy. This car is savagely unglamorous, it is about as plain as a car could get but I love it. It is green and an automatic; I decided many years ago that changing gear was too much like hard work. It has leather seats - great when you are as clumsy as I am because you can wipe them down. But for me the USP is the large boot which allows Mosca the dog to roam around and fidget to her hearts content and me to load up the back in the traditional antique dealer manner, with a cabinet today - hopefully. In the photographs on the internet I can see that it ticks all the right boxes of proportion and originality. The actual cabinet is English; made by using cut up panels of Japanese lacquer - probably a screen. The base is japanned, that is to say decorated to simulate oriental lacquer but using pigment and varnishes. It is black. The risk and why I wanted to see it in the flesh before buying was that the quality might be poor and the restoration might be too much to take on. So I had to go.

In the car there is a DAB radio with bluetooth connectivity and two fresh bags of sweets. The radio allows me to play my iPhone and so i mix Spotify play lists with podcasts. I find hours of music slightly wearing and relentless and so I lard speech with music, or is it the other way round. “In our time” with Melvyn Bragg, or World Service Documentaries and for light relief the “Kermode and Mayo film review show” from radio 5. These are each suitably long to fill a good period of time and afford mind wandering reflection which is an integral part of a solo journey. Sometimes silence is best as the thrum of the car and zipping past landscape is just what you need. Whilst the radio is good the sweets are amazing. I have recently discovered Lidl lemon flavoured boiled sweets. They are admirably cheap but more importantly they taste of sharp lemon and the past. I have primal memories of hard square sugar-dusted sweets in tins and Lidl have somehow manage to capture exactly that. It is almost as if Chinese figs were back in the shops! (a real test for sweetie aficionados if you can recall them). Those are accompanied by M&S jelly babies, which have rather dreary colours to prove their healthy credentials. I do like the classic ones but after nearly a whole packet I start to feel weird and hyper, rather as if I have imbibed too much coffee. The same thing happens with the addictive sweets ‘Tangfastics’. Too many and you get the sugar sweats which can last for an hour or so. As you pay for your petrol the line of sweets by the till is usually extensive and horribly tempting. In supermarkets it is now frowned upon to put in the way of queuing children lines of narcotic sugary delights, but for adults in the petrol station this is seemingly acceptable. Why? Are middle aged adults not just as susceptible, can we not whine, plead with the one paying and get damaged by too much sugar? Thank goodness it is there. My particular weakness when queuing is the large Twix. And so it is today as my Jelly Babies and Lemon sweets are joined by a large Twix. The joy of a Twix is that you get two. Not just one biscuit wrapped in caramel and chocolate but two. Sometimes I tease myself by eating one and making myself wait for the second, sometimes I gobble them both up straight away. These little games or rituals that you play fill the time in the car. In the old days I used to kill car time by ringing the Mallett staff up and asking questions or setting tasks. Now I have my beloved Esther who rarely answers the phone and does not like to be belaboured with tasks. The other great driving challenge is unwrapping a sweet whilst driving. Admittedly with an automatic it is quite straightforward but not always. Having wrestled with a particularly recalcitrant and sticky boiled object of desire you get an adrenalin rush of triumph to add to the sugar and that thwarts sleepiness and tedium for a few minutes at the very minimum.

Foreign travel is much lauded in a myriad of sources but for me one of the joys afforded by abroad is access to novelty sweets. Some sour, some fruit flavoured, some hard, some soft - no matter as long as they come fresh to the field and ready to intrigue, perplex and delight. As I pull into the foreign petrol station the buzz of a potential novelty urges me in to pay and shop with great excitement. 

And so a car journey ceases to be merely the space between A and B and morphs into a smorgasbord of sugar and aural delight. If I end up buying something it can be almost as a sort of extra.  

Life in the Arts Lane - Week 132 - A perspective on the Autumn Battersea Decorative fair

Antiques enthusiasts are interested in condition, rarity and provenance and that is how it should be. But for me most of the things I sell have a story attached to them concerning how they were acquired. Take, for example, my stand this October at the Battersea Decorative Fair. 

In the middle of the stand on the long wall there is a red tôle clock. I bought that in the south of France. It was a Sunday and I was attending the Beziers antique fair. It was raining so hard that venturing forth I was soaked to my underwear in a trice. All the stands were covered in steamed-up clear plastic sheeting. The wind howled and the rain lashed and I returned to the car to regroup, change my clothes and think what to do next. The fair finishes at about 11.30 and that hour was fast approaching. Esther said to me when I suggested giving up that I should go out ’one more time’. Unhappily I agreed, timidly splashing my way forward I spotted immediately a set of four Venetian gondola lanterns exquisitely painted and in superb - as new - condition, despite being from the 1820s. I paused as they were quite expensive and passed on, regretting my caution immediately. I turned back and they had been sold to another English dealer. Maddening. I shuffled damply forward and on the brink of heading back disconsolately to the car I spotted the clock. Unloved but worthy of love lying in a basket soaking wet. I rescued it with money. And now here it is. 

The polished iron chairs came from a shop in Budapest. I had been working there helping a client furnish his house and I had a day spare. I went round the shops and found nothing, but at the end of the morning I found a shop belonging to Ernst Wastl and his glamorous wife Eleni. He took me under his arm and introduced me to hidden and obscurely located dealers and shops. I ended up buying widely but nothing from my benefactor. Finally he showed me his workshops and up on a shelf rusting away were these chairs. I loved them and I was able to show him some monetary appreciation for his efforts. We celebrated by eating fresh pan fried foie gras with apple sauce, champagne and shots of Palinka (the Hungarian fire water best flavoured with plum). Our late lunch finished at about 1 in the morning. 

The satinwood table came from the swap shop. The annual festival of dealer trading that takes place at Stow on the Wold. For the last two years I have gone with Inigo and he drinks beer for both of us, seven pints is the standard level of consumption. About a dozen of us gather for a questionable curry on the eve, the table buzzes with teasing banter and general mutterings about the trade. The next morning at 9 we (and another twenty or so dealers) corral the gathered vans and swap ’til we drop.  No money can change hands, the masters of this technique can accomplish the so-called ‘long swap’ where six or more dealers and innumerable pieces all trade at once. Max Rollitt and Tony Fell are the big dogs at the ‘long swap’; I am merely an observer at these master classes. But I do swap and this year I traded with the delightful Simon Pugh a pair of carved roundels for this fine desk. He was a fellow parent at my sons primary school and we had not met for more than a decade and a half. The perfect day was rounded off with a game of cricket where my darling son distinguished himself by getting a key wicket - caught and bowled. 

The iron console I have been chasing for 5 years. Rather annoyingly for the dealer I used to ask the price every time I saw it and each time I would fuss around for a bit and then move on. Finally the dealer came up to me and said - are you ever going to buy that table? I folded and here it is. 

The pair of Vesuvius views were bought from my favourite Dutch dealers. Wim has been buying and selling for 60 years. He and his wife live in a picturesque modern block of retirement flats in Den Bosch (Where Hieronymus came from). Each time we go he solicitously offers coffee and later a glass of wine. We look round his main room, followed by the bedroom and finally we glance into a cupboard. He is very gentle and restful and time spent in their company is most restoring - almost like a rest cure. Amazingly he always has something decorative, unusual and affordable to buy and I never leave without gathering one thing or another. These were hanging in the corridor between the main and bed rooms. The quintessentially Neapolitan scenes are therefore suffused with Dutch canal views, the coffee, wine and charming company.

The silver plate Borek Sipek candelabra was bought at the Montpellier antique fair. In the south of France there are three fairs that coincide on consecutive days four times a year. Beziers on Sunday, as above, followed by Avignon and finishing at Montpellier. You have to pay in cash and it is a constant worry not having enough or having too much. I found myself at the end of the day not having bought much and having a certain amount of cash burning a hole in my pocket. I noted this stand and asked about the object, they knew nothing about it. I asked the price and after some discussion we agreed a sum exactly coincident with the amount I had left - save 10 euros which we needed for the traditional end-of-last-fair celebratory glasses of champagne. Only back in London did I discover that it was by the Memphis inspired Czech designer - made in Holland. 

The black standard lamp and the cherry tree table lamp came from my friend Andrew. He first appeared outside Mallett many years ago offering a motley selection of curious and delightful objects. From a slow start he became, from the back of his car, or occasionally a van, one of the most regular suppliers. We became friends and his elegant, bold style of design provided many a beautiful addition. The Mallett catalogues from 2000 onwards are testament to that. Despite having left Mallett our friendship continued and I have enjoyed his company regularly on a Friday as he pops in for a strong espresso at the beginning of his rounds. The coffee is followed by a perusal of his recent acquisitions in the van and I have often succumbed. These pieces being a couple of examples. Our practice is to photograph items on the grass in front of the house. It is a charming setting and I have on occasion sold things to clients on the basis of those pseudo-bucolic snaps. 

Nearly all purchases have a story to tell, of negotiation, of friendship, of serendipity, each one new and somehow familiar. It is not usual for these tales to survive the purchase so here are a few as a taster.

Life in the Arts Lane - Week 131 - My year with Pat Albeck.

Week 131

My year with Pat Albeck.

On the 10th August I had a busy day. It began at 9am playing tennis with my 88-year- old stepfather. This game is a new regular habit and a peculiarly testing one: Peter has an uncanny ability to return the ball, and he is naturally strong on both the forehand and backhand. I am not a good tennis player but I have the advantage - being able to run. Consequently I need to return the ball to Peter - but not too far away, as killing him by inducing a heart attack would not please my mother who has cherished his presence for over 40 years.

Pat Albeck

Game over and I am off to Bampton in Oxfordshire to collect Pat (87 years old) for lunch. She is not so mobile and therefore I act as driver. We are going to meet my aunt Liz (86 years old) for lunch at Daquise, the Polish restaurant in South Kensington (70 years old). Pat and Liz used to be neighbours in Chiswick but house moves and time had eroded their friendship and they had not met for more than 20 years.

All went well and an old friendship was rekindled. The food was excellent and the head waiter suitably ancient. The restaurant has meaning for all of us. Following visits to the V&A aged 5 or 6 I gobbled up exotic triangular poppyseed and coffee cakes whilst soaking up a very local form of Polishness which filled South Kensington in the 60s. The others had their own private and possibly romantic memories. Therefore it was with an intense dose of nostalgia that we tucked into our robust wintry food, ignoring the rare sunshine that was blazing away outside. The place has been radically redecorated since my cake days but it retains echoes of its post war run-down charm. They serve traditional but updated dishes and the bright airy room is delightful.

On the way home we stopped at Tesco to buy miniature bottles of prosecco. Pat loves a glass of prosecco (whilst methinks secretly preferring Champagne) but as she is now a widow drinking a whole bottle is a challenge she did not want to take. With titchy bottles in hand we headed off to visit another old Chiswick pal Pat Lousada, the beautiful ex-ballerina, author of my personal bible of pasta dishes and assiduous theatre goer (75 years old). It appeared that she too loved these little bottles and so with a reduced load we headed back to Bampton.

The extraordinary energy and vigour of the company I kept that day exhausted me. I was struck by how very much alive and full of creative force they all were. You will say they are lucky to be able to enjoy and embrace life and I will agree but what a joy and a privilege it was to be with them that day.

A few short weeks later and I have to sadly report that Pat Albeck has died, my stepfather has been struck down with some sort of debilitating stomach condition and my aunt fell over in the road and is in hospital bandaged, strapped and emblazoned with bruises. How desperately fragile it all seems.

But I am grateful that I have had this last year to enjoy and, now with tears, reminisce over. It began by being late. I hardly knew Pat in September 2016 but Esther had been her friend for some time and we had been invited to an exhibition at the Emma Bridgwater hub in Bampton of Pat’s recent work. Of late she had been working on creating cut-out still lives; simply using coloured paper and a pair of nail scissors she had created incredibly complex three dimensional, layered, simplified but botanically correct works of art. In some way these were the culmination of her extraordinary long career in design. Without preparatory drawing she sat and snipped and when she knew a piece was right she would glue it down in the perfect spot. It had the quality of Japanese scroll painting because there was almost no going back, once done and laid down the image could not be adjusted. Her decades of work - so admirably summarised during her ‘Desert Island Discs” - gave her the freedom and fluency to create finished work without revision. We arrived about an hour late and each of the 18 works were already sold.

No 20 from the exhibition Allium, Canary Bird and grapes. signed and dated

I was struck by the vivid colours and clear graphic compositions. Esther already had an example of her work and I had boringly pooh-poohed buying another but I felt both avaricious and disappointed. I could see that here was work that was fabulous, decorative, complex and burgeoning with life and energy. It deserved a wider audience.

Over a few subsequent delicious - both to eat and look at - lunches at her house in Bampton I heard more about her beloved husband Peter, who had died only a few months earlier, and other aspects of her life and past. With each visit the depth of her loss and the creative flow that was her life became clearer to me. Her aesthetic sense and excitement for the future explained her happy marriage and creativity better than any biography could. During those lunches we hatched the idea of an exhibition in London. Back home I racked my brains for where to do it?

It occurred to me that as Colefax was opening a new shop in Pimlico and because Pat’s work was very floral and bright it might suit all parties to work on an event to coincide with the Chelsea Flower Show. I emailed Emma Burns (one of the senior designers at Colefax) with the idea and amazingly it turned out she lives in Bampton too and loved Pat’s work already. So, in short, the show was on. Pat worked tirelessly for months and produced over 20 works. Regularly during that time I drove down and we would enjoy mischievous gossip, glasses of wine and a delicious something or other to eat. It is hard to capture the character of those meetings without conjuring up images of the cheerful colours of the room and the gallery of jugs that parade around a shelf just below the ceiling - these were collected by Peter and many of them appear in the works. Pat was an enthusiast for objects, but not in a value or collector’s way; she wanted things that spoke to her of shape or colour and it was of no consequence if they were rare, old, or precious. She judged people in a similar way; completely devoid of respect she either liked people for what they were or didn’t, and being granted approval by Pat was a major triumph to be treasured for as long as it lasted. It was her enthusiastic immediacy and excitement for what was to come rather than nostalgia that made both her and her work ever-fresh and exciting.

A wall at Colefax and Fowler during the exhibition

Emma framed each image beautifully and the next thing we knew Pat was seated in Pimlico like a queen receiving praise, admirers and buyers for her work. The Colefax show was a success and we thought the presage of things to come. We planned a trip to New York, hoping to cruise across as flying was out of the question.

Her much cherished son Mathew was with her when she died. He told us she left peacefully and willingly, celebrating her life-long love of flowers and more surprisingly, a love of sport. In death she managed to be as original as she was in life.

God bless the antiques amongst us and I aspire to being as young as they are.

How was January for you?

It is always the case that January carries with it a contradictory air of both optimism and depression. There is no particular reason to get too obsessed by the end of the year. It is an end but at the same time nothing actually finishes - not really. It is just like Monday, just on a bigger scale. But having made it to the end of the year it is with a big sigh of relief that we recognise and acknowledge that nothing too awful has happened to us and we can still stand up and carry on. I know that does not sound very positive but in the world as we experience right now that is pretty good. 2016 was not a splendid year. As an antique dealer deeply embedded in European art and design I was very depressed by the Brexit vote; less so by the wave of celebrity deaths - though some did make me sad; the American election seemed to be expressive of global lack of good fellowship. To end up at Christmas after all this injury - an insult was added in that I got a beastly cold. I coughed and wheezed and blew my nose so often that the bedroom became bedecked with tissues like a cheap Christmas grotto, my nose would have given Rudolph a run for his money. 

I did five fairs during the year, three in the tent at Battersea and two at Olympia. They passed with a curate's egg-like scale of success. There were no great troughs and as few heights. I am probably bound to do the same again this year. The collapse of the pound does have a positive in that UK art and antiques are now significantly cheaper than they were in June. Each time I set out my stall I was filled with anticipatory optimism leading to partial disappointment followed by modest success. During the year I presented myself directly to people via calls and emails and I sent out a number of modestly entertaining email newsletters. I roll out ideas and images on Instagram and Twitter. All of this adds up to a standard issue antique dealer. I am not a trend setter, I cannot shift the world on or off its axis, I have to follow the vicissitudes that politicians, the economy and my own life throw at me. So when Christmas comes the carousel stops for a pause and an extended feast.

But now in 2017 we have headed off on the epic journey that will end at Christmas again. January brings the first Battersea Decorative fair of the year. Half deja-vu half hopeless optimism. The pad of yellow paper that sits on my desk was set to work arranging furniture on a two dimension plane. At Hatfields, the restorer, my things were buffed and made ready to go. Orlando, Patrick and their team at Oak fine art movers gathered up and deposited. I put everything in place and yet again a rather tiresome five days followed and I ended up doing just enough business to justify coming back. Not really a sensible way to earn a living but it is the only route I feel inclined to take. There is at the fair a real buzz which comes from the fact that the crowds still come, the appetite to buy is palpably there. There is a surprisingly robust and vigorous market - despite everything.

I decided as a new leaf for a new year to sign up to the LAPADA website. It took quite a few days to load around 130 items onto the site and it was quite exciting feeling that a new venture was underway. I like LAPADA, it is down-to-earth and hard-working as an organisation and it is definitely trying to be useful. It is the organisation for the lower end of the market, but in these days of austerity it is no bad thing to be associated with the 'value' end of the market. More than anything it is stimulating to start a new thing.

On the other side of things I have discovered the joy of the chainsaw. It began a year ago with the purchase of a cheap Chinese one in the supermarket in France. It is amazing what you can buy these days in a supermarket. It was very heavy and I kept blunting the chain so this year as a tree has fallen in the field by our Somerset dwelling I decided to invest in a Stihl one. This is one of those very manly brands that professionals use and it is reassuringly expensive. As a neophyte lumber jack I thought it appropriate to acquire a macho chainsaw. The noise and danger of the chainsaw is very invigorating. I have never owned a fast car that roars and now I don't need to. The pure delight of knowing that with a slip of the hand or concentration I could sever a limb or merely do myself a mortal injury is adrenalin inducing enough.  The tree is nearly gone and I have not lost my passion for this lethally efficient tool.

With Brexit starting, Donald Trump being Donald Trump and the possibility of crypto fascists - Populists - being elected across Europe who knows where this year will lead us but as we head into February again let us all cross our fingers and our toes and hope that armageddon will not ensue and we can enjoy Christmas at the end of this journey.

The antidote to dry January - a few chosen cocktails

The antidote to dry January


The delight of that first sip - the alcohol heads off to your hypothalamus, your taste buds go into overdrive, simultaneously your body noticeably and palpably relaxes - that is why we love to have a drink and in particular cocktails.

Anyone who has spent much time in my company will have come to know that i am an enthusiast for all things alcoholic. In dealing terms that means that I am a pushover for a cocktail shaker, drinks trolley, jug or ewer and any associated parafernalia.

Here I have gathered for fun rather than pure commerce a selection of my 'boozeabilia' together with some recipes and footnotes for my favourite cocktails.

If any of the attached takes your fancy please contact me and i would happy to come round and discuss the matter over a glass of something bright and inspiring?

After all - the sun is over the yardarm somewhere in the world.

A smart drinks table, robust and glamourous, ideal for all your bar needs.

An early 20th century brass three tiered etagere, the column supports with multiple rings at the central tier with single ones above and below, the lowest tier having as a stretcher a ring framed by ogee scroll supports.

France circa 1930

Height 30 in (76 cm) Width 30 in (76 cm) Depth 18 in (46cm)

the ceremony of Wine is important. Enjoyment can be enhanced greatly simply by decanting. Obviously wine connoisseurs can wax grandiloquent about the necessity of decanting some wines but even purely aesthetically it is a joy to drink wine poured from a fine ewer or bottle.

The red decanters are mid to late 19th century.
The ewer is a very unusual shape and early 19th century English.
and the brown bottles are silver mounted with vines, the silver is dated 1901.

 

These two cocktail shakers are bells and mixing the drinks in the manner of ringing the bell is very effective.

The all silver plate one on the left is by Asprey of London and was made and patented in 1937.

The other one with an ebonised handle is from the same era and by the Van Bergh silver Co. of Rochester NY.

 

The Martini needs no introduction. It is sometimes my favourite cocktail.

For me the best definition of how to make a dry martini was given by the surrealist film maker Luis Bunuel. He said that the best was made by placing the vermouth in the window and the gin on a table thus allowing the sun to pass through the vermouth and engender a flavour without disturbing the gin. He called this the immaculate conception technique, piercing but not breaking.

I live in the Oval in London, just five minutes from my door they make Beefeater Gin which has delicate but noticeable citrus notes; this is perfect for my preferred lemon twist variant. The zest when twisted offers up a few drops of its precious oil and this gives the drink a fine surface layer of intense yet oddly almost imperceptible lemon. As vermouth i like Lillet Blanc. It was invented in a small town south of Bordeaux in 1887, it has both citrus and quinine which gives a reviving tonic like quality to drinks it joins. Through clever marketing in the 1920s it became the favourite cocktail mixer for the NY bar trade and thus its place in history was secured.

The knife came from the best kitchen shop in the world (my view) Dehillerens in Paris.

The glasses I invented as a reversible but super stable cocktail glass. I call them the Diabolo because i like all the implications of that name.
A serious glass available on request.

 

The Negroni

The delicious Negroni was reputedly created by Count Camilllo Negroni in Florence at a bar in the via Tornabuoni. It is still there, now called the Caffe Roberto Cavalli but was then known as the caffe Casoni. The count found his drink the 'Americano ' (vermouth and Campari 50/50 )  too weak and asked the bartender to 'stiffen' it with gin. Thus the Negroni was born. The bartender in question Fosco Scarselli added his touch by changing the lemon slice from the Americano for the orange slice that is the mark of a Negroni. In a side note the gin used may not have been the type of gin known as  'london dry gin'; at that time in Italy the sweeter and more aromatic 'old Tom' style was likely to have been used. Therefore respectful of that I have used a strong flavoured and scented one, the cologne made Sunner. The perfect mix is 50% 'Americano' and 50% gin.

Campari has been around since 1860, invented by Gaspare Campari. Curiously its distinctive red colour came from crushed cochineal insects until 2006, when chemicals took over from the annual insect carnage. 

Martini Rosso was the first drink of the Martini drink company. Founded by Alessandro Martini, Luigi Rossi and Teofilo Sola. It quickly became the sole property of the Rossi family who nonetheless kept and focussed on the Martini name even though the company was nominally called Martini and Rossi. We all know the logo 'Martini'
The Rosso predates the perhaps more famous Bianco by nearly 50 years. 

The use of botanicals in the creation of gin, Campari and Martini Rosso makes the Negroni one of the most profoundly herbal cocktails. Almost a health tonic. It is also one of the few great cocktails that has no connection to NY. Though at a pinch you could reference the Americano. But that was an aspirational name given to a drink that few Americans would ever have heard of and certainly not drunk at the time.

PS I don't know why, but I abhor cherries in drinks, there should be one here.
pps It is just about acceptable in a whiskey sour.
 

The Manhattan

The Manhattan is one of the oldest cocktails, according to legend it was created in NY in 1870 for the mother of Winston Churchill. That story has been clearly proven not to be true but it is the best story and thus should stand. 

The combination of the bitter, the sweet and the richness of the canadian whisky makes for a very reviving and lingering drink, perfect for a late night crisis crank. It is one of the group of cocktails where the proportions are fiddly, but think of it as just less than half. 2/5 vermouth to 3/5 whisky, so you have to be careful to avoid it getting too sweet. I never use a measure just sight, glugs from the bottle and years of experience (hic)

The Black Russian

The Black Russian is a post war drink. After the golden age of cocktails but before the modern revival. It was invented in Brussels at the Metropole hotel in honour and for the American ambassador, the legendary partygoer and socialite, Perle Mesta, she was the inspiration for Irving Berlin's 'Call me Madam ' surely due a revival in these days of easily satirised American foreign policy? 

The Black Russian is best for me as a mix of Stolichnaya Vodka, the classic Russian grain vodka, and Kahlua , a coffee liqueur invented in Mexico in 1936; It has rum and vanilla in it which heats up and sweetens the cold cold vodka. It is slightly tricky to mix because it is also one of those 5ths drinks - 2/5ths Kahlua and 3/5 vodka. So basically a splash under half the kahlua to the vodka. If you over pour it becomes quickly far too sweet. Sometimes I add a twist of lemon to sharpen it up a bit. 

A modernist circular portable drinks table in the manner of Mathieu Mategot. Having holders below the circular top for 8 glasses and below for 5 bottles. The base is weighted for stability.

France circa 1955

Height 27 in (69 cm) Diameter 21 in (53 cm)


Mathieu Mategot (1910-2001) was of Hungarian descent starting out his professional life as a set designer. He followed this profession to France where he made his home. He volunteered for the French army during the Second World War and was taken prisoner. He was released in 1944 having learned in prison the metalworking techniques that were to become his trademark. After the war he took French citizenship.
His technique is very recognisable; employing tubular steel and perforated sheet metal. Two of his most famous pieces are the Nagasaki chair, 1954, now in the Musee des Arts Decoratifs and the Copacabana chair from a year later now in the Pompidou centre. Both employ this distinctive formula.

Below is a large scale blown glass ice bowl of a lovely grey tone and with a large ground pontil mark. Filled with ice and cooling a bottle of fantastic Crement from Sylvain Bouhelier - he thinks he makes Krug and in my view it is jolly good.

The bowl is early to mid 19th century.

The crement is available from M Bouhelier at the Chatillon sur seine market on Saturday mornings.

And Finally

roasted, oiled and salted almonds. 

You cannot enjoy a drink without a little snack and preferably a salty one

Take the whole almonds in their skins and soak them in boiling water until the skins loosen, remove them and roast the naked almonds in a hot oven for about ten minutes or until they brown gently. out of the oven salt them heavily and leave to cool; don't rush in and gobble them up straight away as they are soggy when hot and only properly crunchy when cool .

Here shown in an early 19th century heavily cut oval dish. England circa 1820

 

Life in the Arts Lane - week 130 - Prepping and Packing

The tension starts to rise a week or so before any fair. No matter how often I exhibit I never can be completely blithe about the process. Back in my Mallett days there were people buzzing around making preparations but now it is all down to me. It begins with a piece of paper and a ruler. I measure out my stand and start imagining the 'mise en scene'; this takes a while, with quite some crossing out and redrawing, but from this skeleton all else follows. The plotting triggers everything including the nervous anticipation of both problems and triumphs. There is always the dream that someone will come on to the stand and buy everything, a fantasy balanced by a nightmare where everything is unsold, damaged and derided. Neither has yet come to pass. 

The dark art of planning a stand.

My current focus is the Olympia Art and Antiques fair which opens ominously on the night of Halloween. I am not going to wear a comedic spooky outfit nor will I bedeck my stand with cobwebs and pumpkins - when most people see my modest prices they are scared enough. There are countless UK and international fairs from September through to December - the Autumn season is packed but as a rough guide the season starts with the Biennnale in Paris and ends with Winter Olympia. This fair strives to mop up the last of the year's buyers before they run off and hunker down to celebrate Christmas. It offers for the most part items of modest value and whilst there is a larding of six-figure pieces - even the occasional seven-figure - the majority will be four and five.  That does not mean the stuff is only decorative, it just means that it is modest. The quirky and the imaginative is what is on offer and that can be excellent and exquisite in execution. 

The fair comes at a difficult time in London because Brexit has triggered a large drop in the value of sterling, and whilst the devaluation creates an opportunity for buyers - providing what appears to be an inbuilt discount - it increases people's sense of nervousness and insecurity. That mood is as discouraging as the reduced price of the items is tempting. In addition many of the buyers at UK Fairs are Europeans and Americans who have moved here for work and their future status is now uncertain. This dissuades them from furnishing in an indulgent way. So within this brittle market Woodham-Smith Ltd and confreres are trying to make a show which will both be commercial and entertaining. To this end we focus on the classic methodologies. We gather fresh things, we show practical pieces with an edge of originality and glamour and we keep our prices down. Invitations will be sent out and good clients personally encouraged to attend. It is a lottery to which we all buy far too many tickets in the hope that one might come good.

Will they be ready on time?

I am getting ready. I have my plan but now I must make a really hard decision. Do I take my wine fridge or not? It is a great boon and comfort to have chilled white wine ready at all times but it is possibly a distraction to spend more time plotting my evening libation than focussing on the customers. Also the fridge itself is no enhancement to the beauty of the stand. Though I am pleased with my 70s revival glasses. It will probably go. 

I walked today through Battersea Park with my friend Arthur Millner, an expert in Indian and Islamic art. He is not an exhibitor but he is giving a lecture at the fair. He was fretting too, he is worried that he has not done enough work in preparation and consequently he is going the shut himself away for the next week to get ready. Nearly all fairs have a lecture programme and an exhibition to enhance the visitors experience. I am uncertain how much potential buyers want to attend lectures but it does make the fair more rounded and organisers want to encourage visitors not just buyers. Although I know his lecture will be excellent, Arthur's nervousness is infectious and back at home I spend a careful afternoon checking up on my preparations. 

At Hatfields, the restorers, they are completing the finishing touches to the items coming to the fair. Richard, the foreman and manager tries not to let his face fall as I bowl in on an almost daily basis asking for the impossible. They say a watched pot never boils and that seems to apply to restoration: if you hang over the shoulder of a craftsman they rebel and down tools - you have to encourage and cajole them like getting a timid cat to come out from under a cupboard. 

In addition, upholsterers and polishers should not consider going away on holiday for a fortnight before a fair - certainly they should not be allowed to. I ring my shippers for the umpteenth time encouraging them urgently to deliver my foreign purchases in time to get them ready. As the fair approaches so does the sense that everything needs to be done at once, preferably yesterday. I can comfort myself with the feeling that I am not alone, similar calls are being made by dealers throughout the land. 

Then comes the computer and the printer wrestling match. Like many dealers I print my descriptions onto sticky labels and then fix those onto string labels. The devils who design the software for label printing at Avery must chortle with delight knowing the exquisite torture they put us through. The box provided for the words never quite lines up with the label that comes out of the printer. It all ends up being a pile of errors dumped into the paper recycling and yours truly ragged and wretched accepting imperfection and scribbling hand-written corrections onto the labels in an unforgivably scruffy way. It is a battle I fight and lose before every fair. 

Nearly ready.

The penultimate battle is the one fought getting the treasures onto the stand and looking good. The carriers arrive and with a requisite amount of complaint and groaning the van is loaded up. The traffic stiffens and, cursing the delays, they arrive to do battle with the fair organisers security. Unlike prison guards who want to keep their inmates in, their struggle is to keep everyone out. If you get your goods to your stand without weeping or cursing their day is clouded. What follows is a sweaty few hours battling with wobbly walls and equally wobbly ladders. Screws fall out, nails bend, pictures hang skew whiff and the furniture tips in unseemly ways due to the uneven floor. In the end it all looks as good as it can and you head home in order to prepare emotionally for the descent of the fair's vetting team next day.

Like blood hounds following a scent the vetters sniff round the fair in pursuit of errors. They rootle about seeking imperfection and deception and debate how best to correct it. Will a change of wording do the trick or does the offending item have to be ejected from the fair?  It is a necessary pain, as mistakes can be made and it is best to do what you can to protect the unwitting public. 

And then it's done. You dust, wipe and move an object slightly to the left. The rest is up to the random delighted guest who falls so in love with an object that they have to take it home. Roll on the 31st October.  

Life in the Arts Lane -week 129 - The anticipation game

Waiting is a fact of life - that does not make it any more bearable. Two weeks ago on a bright Monday morning I rented a van and - gathering up my son Inigo en route - loaded it with some of my least loved items of stock and headed off to Stow on the Wold for the "swap shop". I have only attended this annual event once before and it has stood in my memory as a great experience. I was at Mallett then and the assembled motley crew of dealers looked on in delight and surprise as the Mallett van turned up and disgorged myself, two porters and about 150 items. three hours later, aided and abetted by swap shop maestro Tony Fell I found myself loading about a dozen new pieces onto the van and all 150 items had gone. A nightmare cricket game followed during which I was so humiliated by my incompetence that it has remained a 'laugh' for many of the trade ever since and it was over 10 years ago! Nonetheless loaded up and full of hope and expectation I threaded though the traffic up to Stow. That night 16 dealers gathered to eat curry and reminisce ahead of the morning swap. I felt nervous - like before a fair. I had to wait and see what would happen. The next morning as Inigo and I pulled the stuff out from the back of the van I predicted I would both find nothing I wanted and no one would feel desire for any of my stuff. The wait dragged on for nearly three quarters of an hour and then things kicked off. Admittedly, various folk tried to persuade me - in a nice way - that my treasures were rubbish and theirs were solid gold, but that is to be expected. As before - with a bit of argy bargy and the occasional dramatic pause, I packed up into the van a bunch of new things and left my once loved things behind. It was a good day. Sadly the cricket was no better than before and being bowled by Edward Hurst to a daisy cutter that barely made it to the wicket is a further humiliation I will have both to bear and never hear the end of. Especially as my son has now been inducted into the mocking crew.

The triumph of son over father.

The next stressful wait is for things to arrive from abroad. Last week I went to Belgium with my ex Mallett colleague Nick Wells. He has fashioned a post Mallett career for himself as an internet selling maestro. His website gets a regular avalanche of hits and he sells steadily and well a delightful smorgasbord of items. Nick buys relatively little but he felt like a day or so on the road. The highlight was eating in Brussels at Vismet which is my favourite fish restaurant in the world. Nick took on the 'assiette matelot' which is a delicious but unceremonious bowl of seafood. Oysters, crab, mussels and whelks comes in a heap and you just tuck in.  It is fabulous. I, in an unexpectedly demure fashion, had a carefully crafted plate of cod preceded by a half dozen of their typically bright, fresh and very salty oysters. But we were ostensibly there to buy art and the next day I succumbed in a big way and he more modestly. Sadly the items I bought would not fit into the car and so I now have to bite my nails nervously until they arrive. I am not concerned about damage - I am terrified that I won't like them when they arrive. Sometimes the thrill and drama of driving, eating and shopping abroad casts a rosy hue over all that you survey and bad mistakes can that way tend. So now I am waiting to see whether it will be future swap shop fodder or happiness. Another week to go.

Vismet - Assiette Matelot.

Today I am waiting for the public. The Battersea decorative fair opens tomorrow and I have set out my stall and am hovering expectantly. The Big Bang comes at midday but you have to be alert as for the last two fairs the Beckhams have been allowed early access to shop discreetly. I have to report with sadness that they did not dwell or even linger around the Woodham-Smith Ltd booth. Waiting is now my friend for the next few days. I will stand by for an eager punter to light upon something they hanker after. I will be tolerant of those that want to share with me how similar something of mine is to one they once owned or bought for a fraction of what I am asking - even if on analysis there is little connection between the two. I will enjoy the banter, the dogs, the look of horror when I reveal the price, I will enjoy it all because amid the frustration and the patience there will hopefully be a few sales. I will change around my stand and perhaps a few new things will come on and perhaps I will buy something.  

It is a dog's life - always waiting.

The final and almost the only nice wait is the one before you get paid. It is true that you often wait too long and that can be exasperating, but the soft warm glow that follows a sale and the raising of an invoice is kept as glowing embers by the wait for the money. I have been expecting a payment for a couple of months and when it arrives it will feel as if the item has been sold all over again. Two tastes of honey for the price of one. Waiting is not all bad.

Maybe see you at the fair?

Life in the Arts Lane - week 128 - Push the nose once more against the grindstone -

As I sit on the edge of the bed carelessly pouring sand out of my shoe onto the carpet, I muse that not only am I making a mess but that the summer is drawing to a close. It is always this way - as August shuts down the clouds part and the sun bursts through in an almost mocking way. In my old Mallett days this week began with the tying of a tie and the donning of a sensible dark suit. I would wend my way up to the West End as if it was my first day of school. These days as I inhabit the chaotic world of the self-employed the transition is less physical. I don't get up any earlier and I don't wear work fancy dress as of yore, but there is a palpable sense of the seasonal change.

At the end of July one can sense a kind of exhaustion in the art world as if a long race has been run. The first half of the calendar year is frantic and culminates in a flurry of auctions and fairs leaving the organisers, participants and eager buyers bleary-eyed and blunt to all excitement. Then summer bursts out and for about six weeks people are away. In France it is very obvious as nearly every shop and restaurant actually closes, but here in London there is just the inevitable ‘out of office’ you receive when you send an email, the message service when you call - or even the foreign ring tone followed by a disgruntled voice as you realise you have woken the recipient at about four in the morning. Even the most pushy and energetic dealers have to rein themselves in and take a pause. For this period it is hard to buy and hard to sell but it gives us all time to recharge our batteries.

Even soft toys need some down time.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of the summer is that it gives you time to sit back and plan. The idea is that careful reflection and analysis of one’s business and its practice should lead to sensible and thought-through development and enhancement. But for many during this period of repose and reflection myriad hair-brained schemes can percolate, ruminate and generally become more interesting than they actually are. In the absence of business a certain loss of confidence and desperation can kick in and consequently the prospect of starting a scrumpy bar in Somerset or pig farming in rural Burgundy can suddenly seem like fantastic ideas. Luckily, occasionally plotting and planning has to give way to the sensible exercise of one’s time-honed skills and sometimes a small purchase or sale will clear the screen of fantasy and allow reality to once more hold sway.

But my friend Andrew - stylish, tall, blonde, killer salesman - is sitting in his picturesque chateau in France pondering how he can entice private and trade buyers over to visit. Should he give a series of dinners or even a masked ball. He considers how he might create a sort of sensation that will put his location on the touring map of european buyers - in a good way. In London the other sales dynamo, the ever-charming Tarquin from Pimlico road reflects on how to drive sales whilst simultaneously spending less time at his shop. Tucked away in his fortress in the drug-dealing epicentre of South London Nick the internet king spends his days scouring the websites for the holy grail of a cheap shop in a good area with passing trade. What am I doing? I pass my idle summer days considering how it is that I became so addicted to buying and what can I do about it.

Luckily for me the end of summer brings with it the prospect of the next outing - the Decorative Antique fair in Battersea Park which kicks off on the 27th September. It is quite a way off but there are forms to fill in and floor plans to be strategised. The fair suffered a shock this summer as its owner and major force David Juran died suddenly whilst on holiday. He was young - early 50s. The fair will go on and his family will continue to manage it through the already appointed officers but it will nonetheless be strange without his larger-than-life presence, booming voice and signature wearing of the shorts he wore in all seasons. Dogs will still roam the hall and the occasional squirrel or pigeon will wreak the usual havoc - life goes on. I will always remember the visit to Mallett of a distinguished decorator from Los Angeles, who asked me about my boss David Nickerson. He had both retired and died since her last visit as I carefully told her. A tear ran down her face and she expressed great sadness and regret as he was beloved by all. She then pulled herself together saying ‘Lets have a look around.’ She asked me if I was now in charge, and whether she could still get her usual huge discount. I confirmed both and off we went. Life goes on.

The kind of creative insanity that too much rest affords.

We need to get back to work.

Life in the Arts Lane -week 127 - Silly Season – or - how to love tidying?

Silly Season – or - how to love tidying?

Here we are in August in London. In a perfect world we hard-working dealers would now relax and go on holiday having done more than enough business in the first half of the year. But sadly the world is far from perfect. In fact we seem to be faced by a world burdened by an unending catalogue of misery. The list of woes is seemingly endless; the killing of innocent black people in the USA by their own law enforcement officers, the unstoppable rise of Donald Trump, the global tragedy of displaced people through civil wars, the terror that increases every day because of IS, the casual and everyday racism that seems to have become tolerable and acceptable in Britain since we narrowly voted to leave Europe. There is more and more to get distressed by - even jolly old sport is racked by scandals and ‘cheating’. To top it all - business is tough too. What do we do to remedy this situation? My answer is that we should all tidy up.

Is this your home or office?

Tidying puts things in order and for the majority of people it means throwing quite a lot of stuff away. The computer age instead of freeing us from paper has drowned us in it. As paper accumulates even the most avid filer-away will discover on review that a fraction of what has been kept needs to remain. The joy of many full bags of recycling being taken to the dump is hard to define. It is like have an enema - unpleasant beyond description - but you are cleaner and feel better afterwards.

Once you have purged yourself of unwanted paper you need to seamlessly move on to printed-paper. Look at all the catalogues you have accumulated over the years. For me endless auction and dealer magazines together with random sales brochures need to be evicted from my shelves. Books come after magazines and though often beautifully produced I know an awful lot of books will never even be opened or have lain fallow for more than a decade - off to the charity shop. Suddenly shelves are emerging like buds in May. A clear shelf is a thing of beauty.

From the fresh white of an empty shelf I look round my store to assess the random fragments of potentially ‘useful’ things I have accumulated. Several carloads are taken to the dump and some are given away to become cruel clutter for some poor eager fool to accumulate and have to deal with later.

A glimmer of hope.

Then - on a roll - I dive into actual furniture and decide on disposing of bits that have settled in positions around the house and store without my permission. Furniture can do that. Sometimes things creep into the house and hide because you don't know what to do with them. You look behind a door and you are shocked to see what is hiding there. Yesterday someone asked me about a friend whether he was a dealer or a ‘real’ person. I think the remorseless accretion of ‘stuff’ is a problem for both the human race and ‘dealers’. My friend in Norfolk Tony Fell is a dealer and he has an annual evacuation, which is the ‘swap shop’. Rather like the Grand Vizier offering to exchange new lamps for old we dealers would rather have a fresh new white elephant than an old one. You never know – someone might buy it. Vans all over the country are filled and driven to the cricket pitch at Stow on the Wold. There in a feverish couple of hours people swap their unloved items for others that they invest new hope into. One mans sow’s ear is another’s silk purse. For many the greatest joy is not the new opportunity but simply saying good-bye to something you have had for too long. Tony is the master of the ‘long swap’, which is when an object has to be swapped through several hands before it gets to its new home. In extremis often a dealer gets satisfaction from throwing something away in a skip that he or she bought for proper money. The principle is getting freedom from the albatross around the neck. The day closes with a celebratory lunch followed by ritual humiliation as we all play cricket. It is worth it.

So now you have separated the wheat from the chaff. You have to order what remains. The model for me is to consider how quickly you could move out. If you could easily pack and be ready to leave for another home in a week you are a black belt in tidiness. If you cannot imagine moving because sorting everything out would be an unimaginable nightmare - you are in need of intense therapy.

Applying order begins with small steps; I always begin by getting everything of the same ilk into the same space. It sounds bafflingly obvious but you would be surprised how often people don't do this    - because they are used to where things have historically always been. That task achieved I would recommend wiping everything and putting things in boxes. The process of wiping is not cleanliness - it is holding it in your hand. If you handle an object even if it just an old biro or a jar of jam you reevaluate it and you decide whether you want or need it.

Whether this process takes place at home or in the office the clarity of mind and purpose that this undertaking requires can lead to a new approach to life and business. Taking the baggage out of life and making only what you can use or need hang around - may inadvertently improve business by filtering out distractions. When we return after the summer break maybe a little more order and tidiness will make the world seem a more positive place. Maybe life won’t seem so bleak.

Life in the Arts Lane -week 126 - The passing of a discrete feminist.

This week I want to mourn and celebrate my friend and close work colleague at Mallett for nearly 20 years who has died far too young in her 60s.

In 1995 - and I have too admit I am a bit wobbly on dates - Felicity Jarrett applied for a job at Mallett at Bourdon House. She was not the usual 20 something young girl who applies for such jobs, she had worked in the city and had travelled the world as the wife of an engineer. She was the mother of three grown up children. Her sister Marilyn, whom we knew well through business, had recommended her. At interview she was obviously competent if not highly overqualified but she clearly wanted the job that was part time and ostensibly un-pressured.  Her approach was to be utterly professional and whilst she seemed quiet, almost timid and deferential, one could see that she was a powerhouse just below the surface.

From this part-time job she grew into being one of the most widely loved and successful salespeople at the company. It began with her helping me write the description tickets for the stock. Every other day we had to walk round the showrooms checking, replacing and writing tickets. She began by correcting my grammar - which has always been atrocious - and developed into asking questions about the date, style and authenticity of the pieces. She was soon correcting me and our labels greatly improved. As her expertise grew so did her confidence and my erstwhile colleague Henry Neville inadvertently gave her a big break. He took six months off from work to live in NY with his fiancée Rena and Felicity volunteered to move from behind her desk to the front line of sales. The first couple of tours with clients I went round with her, but soon she was off on her own. Within a month she was making significant sales. She was not tall and was slight of frame but her power lay in her ability to laugh and put people at ease. She exuded total confidence and whilst not being strident or pushy she had a way of persuading people that the object in question was exactly what they needed.

Felicity quietly now began to change the all male dogmas within the company. It may seem trivial now but she pioneered the wearing of trousers for women. In a business far behind the curve of modern thinking this was quite revolutionary. Quietly at first, but increasingly forcefully, every time a patronising or misogynistic comment was made she would jump on it and ferociously berate the guilty party. The men in the company became wary and would consider what they said in advance - a novelty for most. She hated any suggestion that a ‘woman’ was in any way incapable of doing anything. She shifted heavy furniture. She insisted on locking up and being on call for the alarm – which in turn alarmed the Mallett men. But she got her way.

Felicity loved NY and she came up with a plan to make regular visits to see clients and decorators. After another victory over sexism with the board she was sent off. In those days we had no portable computers or mobile phones and she used to head off with a rolling suitcase full of heavy files of photographs.  Up and down Manhattan she would lug this thing and thus she cemented her increasingly central role in the company. Weeks of telephone calls followed and couriers laden with images and descriptions sped from her desk and good business was done. She was no longer simply useful she was integral and vital to the company sales programme.

Mallett Bond St had exhibited from nearly its inauguration at the Autumn International show in NY - run by the Haughton family and only recently sold on to the TEFAF organisation. At Bourdon house we decided to take on a stand at the Winter Show, which takes place in the same location in NY, but in January. It is a very well established show historically dedicated to Americana but then with a few exhibitors from other areas of collecting. We took continental furniture. Felicity made the show a success by sheer force of will, she sent out invitations, tempting photographs and wined and dined until sales came. The clients and decorators of NY flocked to the stand to see her and get her advice.

She was appointed an associate director and then a full director. As the years passed and her seniority and stature grew she never acquired airs and graces - instead she took new young staff under her wing and nurtured and encouraged them. She suffered no fools and if she spotted anything that she thought was unfair or simply stupid she was fearless in pointing it out.

Sadly for Felicity the good years at Mallett began to fade after they sold Bourdon House. The balance between costs and earnings tipped the wrong side and losses began and though she continued to work tirelessly she was increasingly frustrated by decisions made by senior management. Add to this period of business decline - her beloved husband Colin had a terrible stroke and though she nursed him as well as anybody could, he died. Further horrors followed with her diagnosis with breast cancer, which initially she beat - but then it came back and took her life.

For me Felicity was a huge support and a life enhancing person to know. My personal memories will be of sitting, and planning opportunities to benefit the company - often enhanced by eating and drinking well. I will cherish the client parties we had at Bourdon house, the dinners in NY, lunches in Paris shopping for treasures and endless laughter in the office, often naughty, often bawdy she knew no taboos when it came to jokes.

Her legacy is one where she showed all who knew her just how a strong woman with firm convictions can flourish in an intensely sexist environment. She may have been small but she was feisty and very forceful and her feminism was never political, she believed in old-fashioned behaviour and values; but only if they accorded with her sense of fairness. Her family has suffered terribly through the loss of both their parents in a short time but they have benefitted from being the children of one of the most extraordinary women of her generation in the antiques trade.

Life in the Arts Lane -week 125 - What next after the Leave vote?

Britain voted to Leave the EU, my car was towed away at a cost of £300 and I broke the original glass over an 18th-century watercolour. It has been a bad couple of days. Having been an antique dealer for 30 years it is my immediate future and those in my business that is my most urgent concern. In the coming years and decades I can reflect at leisure on the effect of the current swing to the right in global politics; I may even reminisce with friends about these times and the turmoil we seem to be embarking on. But right now I am concentrating on next week. It is a week that begins with  the opening of the Olympia Arts and Antiques Fair on Monday 27 June, on Wednesday is the preview of the Masterpiece fair, whilst Thursday sees the finish of Art Antiques London and the viewing of the major summer auction sales at Christie's and Sotheby's. The first week of these is dedicated to the contemporary and modern sales and the second to the decorative arts. Millions - possibly billions - of slightly cheaper pounds' - worth of art are either on show for direct sale or coming under the hammer. London and its position as one of major centres for the trading in art - if not the centre of the global art market - is under threat.

My nearly finished stand - If we build it will they come?

It may be that the current drop in the value of the pound will make our goods more appealing to foreign currency buyers. As I write everything on view is instantly 10% cheaper than it was. But it is the mood, the confidence, that we need to assess. I am exhibiting at Olympia and by the time you read this the first days will probably have passed and we will be getting a bit of a feeling for the way the market will respond. In the old days at Olympia the set-up days were busy with dealers trading with each other - there were 300 of us in those days; I used to vet the fair simply to get access to buy early, before becoming an exhibitor. One year in the 90s, my colleagues - and I - at Mallett spent over £1,000,000 and we weren't nervous - we were thrilled. Over the last few years things have become very different - Mallett has closed all its shops and is trading at fairs only and from the Dreweatt auction house premises near Newbury. There is very little inter-trade dealing and we are now a reduced but still merry band of around 100 exhibitors. Prices have dropped dramatically since 2008 - remember that year? Most dealers now at Olympia sell the majority of what they have below £10,000.

The goods may be fewer and cheaper but the imagination and fantasy is still very much in evidence. That was always the point of Olympia. You can find great things but mainly you go for fun, surprise and affordable quality - everything is authenticated through vetting. Elsewhere, too, there are great things on offer.  - The major salerooms lay on their best decorative arts sales of the year. There the contemporary and modern sales, which are the bedrock of their profitability, are followed at Christie's by Classic week and at Sotheby's by Treasures. So this fortnight is incredibly important. It is a significant barometer but most vitally it is straightforward, bottom-line commerce. If we have a week of flops no one will be very surprised but it may not - it need not -work out that way.

Three mirrors - Could it be Versailles?

I can recall a time - and this shows how old I am - when I used to buy in francs in France. The exchange rate used to flutter around 10 francs to the pound. At one time the franc strengthened to 8 and suddenly everything in France was fiercely expensive. Whilst it lasted it is true that hotels and meals were pricey but I bought very well indeed. It came down to the dealers - they were keen, they had fresh stock, and they were prepared to deal out of their woes. This is the way forward for us now, I believe. Sellers in the auction rooms and dealers on the exhibition floors have to MAKE business happen. We cannot sit around and wait for the market to pick up. We are entering a sink or swim period and those that swim should thrive.

If I sell nothing over the next week or so I will have every excuse. At the same time, it may simply be that no one wants the things I have. However, if enthusiasm and a willingness to compromise and accommodate the times is required I will be there and ready. The EU vote result is for the majority in London not what we wanted; we live through international trade, and the more border-less it is the better. Last week I sped over to Belgium and came back the same day with a car full of art. I may not be able to do that shortly. I am just one of millions of British citizens and other Europeans who have benefitted from freedom of movement. All this does not matter as we are irrevocably in this situation and we have to make the best of it. Head up, chin high and off we go.

week 124 The EU Referendum

With less than a week to go before the EU referendum I wanted to use 'life in the arts lane' to reflect on whether to stay or to go. 

Before I step off the precipice and express my opinion I want to reminisce. In 1971, at the age of 9, I was horrified to find that my large handsome brown pennies had been replaced by measly tiny decimal pennies. Decimalisation had arrived and the sweets in my local shop seemingly doubled in price overnight. My 'd' turned into a 'p', and I felt sad. A half crown in pocket money seemed a substantial and useful sum, and a crown seemed untold wealth and very occasionally I would be given a fortune in the form of a 10-shilling note. I never, ever, got a whole pound. But then 10 shillings turned into 50p and a crown into 25p and my proudly held half crown was a mere 12 1/2p. It was the dawn of the move towards Europeanisation. I was 9 and it seemed a real cheat to me. My horizons were narrow then - what I wanted was sweets at 4 for a penny and to buy my favourite comics. The heavy coins in my small sticky hand were treasures, and the replacements seemed insubstantial and bogus.

A tale of two pennies, and two portraits of our Queen - 1965 and 2015

I am now 54 and we have been in Europe since 1973. My so-called grown-up work life began in 1985 when I joined Mallett but my broadened understanding of Europe had began earlier when I first noted that my parents kept a shelf of jam jars full of small denomination coins from countries all over Europe. In 1990 I started travelling to buy for Mallett and it was a full-time job orchestrating travel, invoicing and shipments for goods coming from one or more European countries at once. I once bought in Belgium a pair of Chinese porcelain figures and too late realised that I had worked out the exchange rate wrong. The exchange rate from Belgian Francs to pounds was 60:1. The Chinese figures cost 10 times more than I thought. Luckily they were very nice and Mallett managed to sell them. Gradually Europe has changed. The progress that has been made has been slow and painful and yet now I can travel and both buy and sell anywhere in Europe as if I was here in England. I know that the system is imperfect. There are places where they still want to be paid in cash or fiddle the figures on the invoice. There are places where people say one thing and do another. There are also countries within the EU where the rules for the movement of goods differ. But everywhere, even though it has been at a snail's pace, things have become easier. Of course, for me, my Euros still feel a bit unreal, but now I pay with a card or via an app on my telephone - cash itself is becoming a rarity.

Good old traditional Danish bacon, the staple of a hearty English breakfast. 

I can remember the 1980s when the UK economy was in real trouble and many went abroad to find work. The television series "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet" chronicled that time. When people complain today about economic migrants coming to the UK from Europe they are forgetting a time when travel in the other direction was to our benefit. To the art trade European business integration brings huge benefits and consequently Leave would set us all back. Times are very tough already in our business, confidence is increasingly hard to find - consequently if I should find myself inhibited once more by issues of currency, travel and the movement of goods it could result in me and others all having to find proper jobs.

Mashed potatoes at Brasserie Lipp in Paris. The potato brought from America in the 16th century and made into a national dish of most of Europe.

In the end, for me, the EU debate is not about money and the ability to do business. I know that there are a raft of strong arguments to be made for why Europe is better for us 'In' rather than 'Out'; a plethora of experts from the world over have expressed their firm opinions that Britain should remain. No one seems to pay any heed to expertise, they even suspect. In any case, in the end I believe it has to be an emotional decision. No one can see into the future, one has to just jump - the archetypal leap of faith. As I drive around the countryside and I see vast signs in fields encouraging us to LEAVE, I find it incredibly depressing. What sort of host would I be to put up a sign saying 'Leave' to welcome all my guests? Britain is an island, separate from Europe anyway, but the principle of 'Leave' is so aggressive and so adamant that it makes the antisocial, xenophobic feelings behind the sign hard to mask. We have a wonderful tunnel now under the channel and it is as easy to get to Paris or Brussels as it is to get to Leeds or Manchester. We are part of Europe now and so we should take the long view and appreciate all the international progress that has been made; rather than throw in the towel we should get deeper into the heart of Brussels and work to make the system better for everyone not just for England. We narrowly avoided breaking the union with Scotland last year, thankfully, and now we need to pray that people will have the vision and the hope for the future to see that in 50 or even 100 years a joined up commercial and social union for Europe has got to be better than being on our own. I hear many arguments from people about ceding control of our sovereignty to Brussels or - for some even worse - to Berlin. But my instinct is to urge everyone to think about how much Europe suffered during the 20th century; the peoples of greater Europe can remember both the world wars and their countries being conquered and overrun. If the primary urge of the EU were to promote international harmony and integration and simultaneously dilute partisan Nationalism, I would say hurrah to that. By working together towards commonality we must be helping to build a better world for future generations, even if on the way we encounter frustrations over sausage regulations or too many unfamiliar faces for a few years. 

Week 123 - Pallant House, Lobster, Party rules.

Pallant house in Chichester is terrific. It has stone ostriches above the gate posts and is a beautiful and restrained example of early 18th century classicism. It is a gallery, a temple to what art dealers call 'Mod Brit', essentially that means British 20th century art but by dead or nearly dead artists - nothing contemporary. These are spread around the house which is also larded with some beautiful 18th century furniture. Next door and joined through is a severe multiple award winning contemporary structure by the British library architect Sir Colin Alexander St John Wilson. ( impressively both a 'Sir' and a 'St', though that bit is pronounced - 'sinjun', but thankfully and simply known as Sandy Wilson - but not to be confused with the composer of the "Boyfriend") and Long and Kentish. The new building opened in 2006, the year before his death. Within these walls are now housed - Wilson's own collection together with that of a local property developer Charles Kearley, but it was founded on the legacy of pioneering collector and the lynchpin of the Chichester arts scene - Walter Hussey - the Dean of the cathedral for 22 years from 1955 to 1977. His contribution to the music and art of the city cannot be understated, for so many creations he was both the catalyst and instrument. The gallery therefore combines architecture from 1720 to 2006 with furniture and - of course - great, but exclusively, 20th century British art in a way that is both sympathetic and challenging. Today we are visiting the show focussing on John Piper's textile designs. They are bold and strong and a real revelation to enjoy. It was also apparent how brave, determined and tolerant of criticism Hussey was to commission the work that he did for the cathedral. One curious aspect of the show was counterpointing work done using the same motifs but carried out decades apart. I was fascinated to see a painting done in the 1930s beside a textile from the 1950s. They were both clearly the same in terms of colours and motifs but managed to be both simultaneously different to each other and representative of their own decade of creation.

John Piper at Pallant House - on the left 1935, on the right 1955.

A John Piper Tapestry, bold, bright and a challenge to weave.

Heading home to Selsey bill and crab for lunch we took a detour to East Beach to greedily buy more to take back to London later, we spotted some freshly boiled lobster and swept them up without hesitation. Julie's Hut has been in situ since my puberty and it was established back then by a pretty red-haired freckle-faced girl of little more than 16. She had an entrepreneurial zeal and set out her stall in a business dominated by both men and adults. I never got to know her personally but I shyly enjoyed being sent there to buy crab and fish. It survives and seems to flourish and though she is no longer to be seen it warms my heart to see it. My stepfather Peter loves lobster and he dresses it with great care and attention. He cracks the shell and gingerly levers out each delicate morsel of succulent red edged white flesh, and creates a still life on the platter. This takes time and we are all ravenous and a little tense by the time he brings it forth but it is a great joy to both behold and consume - soft, a hint of chew and that soft salty taste of the sea that gives it its divinity. The crab is not overlooked but works with the lobster to make the tastes ever more delightful. Talk of lobster takes me back to Mayfair and I remember the Chalet in Maddox St. When I started out in the antiques business at Mallett in 1985, when the caretaker was away I had to go in and unlock the building. On parade at 8 am but then nothing to do until 9.30 when the shop opened. I used to fill the gap and my tummy by eating a hearty cardiac arrest inducing breakfast there. The ladies were jolly and welcoming and I learned to love the higgledy piggledy interior and its panelling. From then until its closure in around 2014 it was my favourite haunt in the area. Once in a while their daily special was Lobster Thermidor. A legendary dish created by one of the greatest chefs - Auguste Escoffier and named after a play written about the Thermidorian Reaction that ended the Terror of Robespierre during the French Revolution. Thermidor - the word - was the name given to the summer month by the revolutionaries. At the Chalet it was both surprisingly reasonably priced and delicious; a throwback food and it seemed transgressive to be given access to this impossible luxury. As a boy of 10 or so my father always used to say whenever we went out to eat - ' have what you like but not the Lobster Thermidor! ' The dish acquired mythic status. Once in a while the Chalet was silent at lunchtime whilst the patrons delighted themselves with the daily special. Eating Peter's carefully prepared lobster I felt nostalgic for the restaurant and the memories from those times.

Lobster Thermidor - in this case made by my mother.

Midweek we discussed whether to drive to Oxford for the opening of Pat Albeck's show of cutout collage still lives. My rule is that the journey to and from an event should not be greater than the time spent at the event. In other words driving for 4 hours for an hour long drinks party breaks the rule. On the other side of the argument is whether the host would appreciate the effort so much that it 'trumps' the rule. We drove to Oxford. The show was all but sold out by the time we arrived - only one left - and that was only 30 minutes after it opened. There had been a feeding frenzy and they were all consumed. Pat was delighted and excited by her success but she was keen to do more and she promised she would make two big ones for me to show at Olympia. Having admired the work and chatted to some of her rapt audience the pictures were all gathered up and carefully tucked away; on came chairs, tables and huge bowls of salad and chilli and the drinks party morphed into a dinner. finally heading home towards midnight we reflected that the rule had actually hardly been broken at all, and the trump card had definitely proved both effective and correct.

Some of the sold items from Pat's show. I could have bought them all.

Week 122 from Naples to Catania

There is an old joke about traffic lights in Italy, it states that in Milan they are an "instruction", in Rome a "suggestion" and in Naples a "decoration". I have been buying in Naples for some years and I have fallen in love with this magical ancient city of hills, varied districts, staircases, winding roads, indeed every mode of public transport - which includes cable cars and funicular railways - and an encyclopaedia of crumbling buildings from the birth of cities to the present day. You know when you love Naples when you can cross the road - with confidence. The trick is to step off the curb and without deviation, hesitation or repetition you steadily cross. It is an act of faith and you will reach the other side alive. Amazingly, the cars don't want to run you down, they will stop but they are always in a hurry and they won't stop just for fun or for any sort of road sign, but they will to spare a life. The belief that the Neapolitan driver in some small way loves you is a spur to love them back, and I do.

A view that needs no introduction

We are staying in the Chiaia district around the Castel Dell'Ovo; this is where most of the antique shops are but there are others dotted around throughout the city. The shops are all semi private - in other words you go in and ask a few questions and they then offer to show you their warehouse - a small rub on the oil lamp and many an Aladdin's cave is opened up. Naples loves history and this is one of the last cities to be still home to a vibrant, copious and energetic antique trade. Here the much vaunted global intoxication with all things 'vintage' is kept in abeyance.

But though I cannot resist poking my nose into various familiar shops I am here with Esther to immerse myself in churches and sea food. Naples spreads itself out densely over its seven hills overlooking no corner. The inhospitable, sometimes vertiginous, terrain is ignored, furthermore the heat of the summer is accommodated as the buildings are high, close together and very often with balconies on every floor. This delivers a cooling breeze down the narrow streets and shade as you walk along the near ubiquitous cobbles. The museums and churches of Naples need no description though I would encourage all to experience the streets and restaurants which offer for me the fullest immersion into Naples. Sitting sipping an intensely black robusta bean espresso with its dark brown crema and pitch black liquid whilst gloriously consuming a cannolo stuffed with sweet ricotta and tipped with a sprinkle of rough cut pistachio fragments is both contact with divinity and deep into Naples life.

A typical view looking down towards the bay.

Morphing from pedestrian to driver reminds me of the puppet television programme Joe 90 from the late 60s. He was a normal boy until he put on these specially programmed glasses. Once I don my sunglasses seated behind the steering wheel I am transformed into a ducking and diving Neapolitan, sitting behind the bumper of the car in front and overtaking on every blind corner. Despite the desperate screams and frantic phantom breaking from the passenger side we make it out of the city and to Paestum without physical incident, it took a few further hours for Esther to speak to me again. The legendary site of three Greek temples revealed a wonderful extra I had not noted before, a wonderful vast swimming pool with an elaborate underwater labyrinth for swimming round and through.  It must have been fabulous fun, on a hot day visitors must look enviously downinto the imaginary water. The museum cafe surprisingly offered up a beautiful lunch, a shady terrace and fine espresso to brace us for the journey to Reggio.

The pool with the labyrinth in the distance

If you have never seen the Riace bronzes make time to do so.  Their home in Reggio certainly celebrates them, the museum is bedecked with pictures and every sign points towards them. They have a special room which is protected by an airlock. You stand for 3 minutes and are swept with some sort of special air and then the door slides back and you are in front of them. Two naked bronze men of lush physicality, they stand contraposto, one with an air of impossible swagger the other with a touch of humility. They are life size and are magnificent. It is impossible to describe adequately their super-reality but standing before them you cannot help but be both humbled and impressed. They had an old man with them originally but he has mainly rotted away and all that remains is a magnificent head and a fair amount of lame cgi via a screen at the back of the room.

The Riace bronzes

On into Sicily and we visit Messina for cakes at the 1920s cafe Doddi and the fountains of Orion and Neptune, masterpieces from the mid 16th century by, the pupil and studio assistant of Michelangelo, Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli. These two works were pioneering and are superbly expressive and dramatic. Though Montorsoli was from near Florence originally he seems to offer with these two works a perfect baptism into the drama and intensity of Sicily.

Torta di fragola, cannolo

In order to get around Sicily without a human guide or a map we relied on the Sat Nav of Tomtom. This was a mistake. Esther's theory was that it was a conspiracy by either the car hire companies to force you to damage your car so that they can claim on your insurance or by the mafia to lead you into dark and secluded spots to be mugged. Either way Tomtom, which I have found elsewhere to be impeccable, led us down an endless litany of dead ends, up the wrong way of numerous one way streets, down narrow roads - that only a skinny cyclist could pass through, and finally it tried to make us drive up a staircase. Tomtom had to be ignored. Happily Google maps stepped in and saved the day. The only problem is that it often fails to keep up or indicates left when you need to turn right. But at least it, stumblingly, did work. We came and went from town to town with hardly any u-turns or mishaps. In the end we had to be happy as I can remember the old days of maps when no couple were loving enough to survive the pressure of map reading without tears and acrimony.

Based in Modica, we roamed around embracing the multiple strands of the ancient, the baroque and Commissario Montalbano. The Ancient Greek, the roman, the Norman, the Angevin, the Spanish and the baroque treasures are numerous and well catalogued but hand in hand wherever you go you come across buildings that proudly proclaim the fact that they are and were locations for the detective series noted above. The cult of Montalbano is so strong that there are dedicated tours and various towns have either renamed themselves to fit the books or added their fictional sobriquets to the town names. We visited a beach beside a town called Sampieri and in the distance we saw a ruined brick factory, oddly it is a ruined Sardine factory in Montalbano, perhaps the writers thought bricks were not sufficiently Sicilian? Walking round the baroque streets of Scicli we saw filming around the town hall, they were actually shooting for the next Montalbano series, it is the police station in the show.

Modica has its own Montalbano locations, it features in the title sequence, but it also justly famous for its two great baroque churches, San Giorgio and San Pietro; the latter has in its shadow a chocolate purveyor which is the oldest in Sicily. The Dolceria Bonajuto was founded in 1880 and a picture of its founder looking like an old mafioso graces their bags. This chocolate is lauded throughout the town and the whole of Sicily. It is famously still rolled on a stone block and retains its 19th century character. It is special because it is slightly gritty. The sugar is not fully merged, the oddity is that I assume this must at first have been simply a mistake, and somehow through ingenious marketing and general bravura, the mistake has become a much copied emblem of the city. Modica has another claim to fame that some might hide rather than trumpet. In the 15th century it had the highest Jewish population in Sicily. Where we were staying was in the remains of the historic Jewish quarter. Back then an enthusiastic Catholic priest whipped up a foment of hatred for the Jews and inspired the nations first pogrom, almost all Jewish residents of the town were killed irrespective of age or gender. Modicans mention this fact with a certain awkwardness. But there it is. When told we did not know whether they wanted us to be proud of their historic first or ashamed. I guess that perhaps in 500 years the people of Auschwitz might also be uncomfortably proud of their place in history.

A taste of the voluptuous curves of San Giorgio in Modica

Of course we did not have enough time to see Sicily with any thoroughness, we rushed around barely stopping between sights and delights. We caught a flavour of it and we did see the great post-earthquake of 1693 towns. We saw superb articulated facades and fantasy plaster work, we saw the Norman duomo in Ortygia that shows the columns of the Greek temple it was built around bursting out of its monotheistic hold. We saw mosaics of such imagination and condition that images will stay with us forever. We saw a lot of sunshine and ate better than anywhere in the world. In summary we are already planning our next trip.

The Duomo in Ortygia - a synopsis of Sicilian history.

Places: A snapshot of recommendations.

 Naples - B&B Luna de Caprese, top floor of a crumbling palazzo; N'tretella, small restaurant, classic, old school; Da Ciro a Mergellina, again an absolute classic, bright lights, stone floor, simple but perfect food, black Aglianco wine and a short walk from the Ciro cafe, late night buzz and fresh graffa ( a local type of doughnut ); Da Ferdinando, another old school classic. The museum restaurant at Paestum, good simple food, very fresh fish. The town of Amantea and another palazzo B&B - hard to find but carefully looked after, the Barone was Italian ambassador to Irag and Saddam Hussein as well as soviet Russian - the family photographs are thus most extraordinary. The Bel Soggiorno in Taormina, beautiful views, lovely breakfast, rooms with terraces, ask for room 24. Ristorante Nero D'Avola, superb service, excellent wine list and seriously gastronomic food. B&B Talia in Modica, beautiful old buildings, part of the 15th century Jewish quarter, brilliantly redesigned by husband and wife architect team and with the best service and breakfast. In Modica the Osteria di Sapori Perduti, sadly too much touristic hustle and bustle but a genuine local and flavoursome cuisine. locanda Del Colonnello, a quiet family run place and perfect for an uncomplicated but good meal. the Duomo in Ragusa, two star Michelin, a bit grand, stuffy and full of anyone but Italians, despite that - a truly imaginative, delicious and very Sicilian meal by the celebrity chef Ciccio Sultano. In Noto the Crocefisso, run by young, enthusiastic and quite cool staff, delicious and creative twists on classic Sicilian food.

Week 121 - Pensions, Jesus, Foundation and Collage

It is an almost certain truth that at the age of twenty your work pension seems the most boring thing in the world. As I approach my mid 50s I increasingly find it a subject of fascination and importance. It is a sad fact that for me I have actually found it interesting for some time. During my Mallett years I was often working around Christmas - everyone else lived in the country whilst I lurked in London. During three days when it was pointless being open I did the online pension trustee course. It was both boring and difficult, like VAT! But the holiday for others ended and freshly qualified I joined the pension trustees and have been there ever since - even after leaving Mallett. Following the recent turbulence it has been a great concern that the pension was not being suitably attended to and so we had a trustee meeting. We formed an impressive team - two ex-employees and one on notice. My dog Mosca attended as an impartial witness. Two hours passed and it seemed as if time had stood still, we slipped seemlessly back into our roles as company men, despite the absurdity of the situation.  We cannot escape our trusteeship and the burden of maintaining the pension remains a worry that we can do little to ameliorate.

By way of contrast that evening Esther and I headed to the beautiful wreck of a church known as the Asylum which is more prosaically the Caroline Gardens Chapel. It is in South London and is the centrepiece of a group of early 19th century neo-classical buildings, almshouses; in fact rest homes for retired pub landlords. Sadly it was bombed during the Second World War and though losing its roof and much of the interior - it has survived, but never been restored beyond stabilisation. Our hosts Iain and Richard Abell are the brothers who founded Based Upon. Their work is hard to describe as it is generally a mixture of furniture and wall panels, all mainly of metal and employing modern technology to create unusual finishes, patterns and surfaces. In tandem they integrate in the work biographical details of the commissioning client, both specific and abstract. In something of a departure they have been commissioned to create a completely new technology version of the Last Supper. This they have done through choosing a cast of characters and using 3D photography to record them and then fashion the figures in bronze. All very high tech stuff. We attended the unveiling of the work in the chapel accompanied by biblical style snacks and red wine drunk from terracotta beakers, serenaded by a chap who played and sang unearthly resonant tunes on instruments straight out of the Star Wars bar. It was a very effective and memorable event and the techniques they have learnt and employed will colour and inform their future projects. 

The Last Supper.

To accompany my attendance of the recent Battersea decorative fair I sent out two emails of highlights from the stand. Now because I am a bit of a chump I got my friend Samuel to prepare them and all I had to do was send them out. Cleverly, I got the order wrong and sent the one intended for the eve of the show out first - a week early. Various friends and clients berated me and one poor person turned up at the show venue and was turned away to the amusement of the team there - but unsurprisingly not by her. Anyway, the errant email inspired a purchase and we went to deliver the items and have a drink with the new owner. Luckily they looked good in situ and we passed a delightful evening reminiscing about the past. She is in her 80s and whilst she can look back; her main interest is looking forward and planning her next travel adventure - and helping us plan ours.

My son Inigo has a show celebrating the end of his foundation course at Camberwell. On Saturday we went to see his piece. We began by priming ourselves with breakfast at our local cafe. The Parma Cafe on Kennington road is a beautiful survival from the late 60s with red plastic bucket seats, murals of Greek gods and period condiment dispensers. They even have an old school frothy coffee maker which modern baristas would probably sneer at. It is true that it does make terrible coffee. But that is not the point, a 'Jumbo English' not only comes with plenty of everything but it is arranged on the plate like a careful still life, not one mushroom is dumped down, it is all ..... - perfect; just like you might get in fancy 3 star Michelin places. Slightly too full we cycled off and soon arrived to admire the video piece that has been his last few months work. Needless to say I was shocked. It has a soundtrack replete with smut and groaning and the visuals are a scary close up of his face. I have to admit that he has achieved something in that the work was both technically masterful and left his poor old dad reeling. What more could you ask for from art school?

the author trying to understand modern art!

Back home we headed off to Oxford to meet the artist Pat Rice, known professionally as Pat Albeck. You can listen to her recent desert island discs on the Iplayer. She is an old friend of Esther's and she has been working through the sadness of the death of her beloved Peter - husband of 50 years - by creating - for an exhibition - some fantastic work. These pieces are inspired and brightly colourful still lives all achieved in exquisite and virtuoso collage. She sits at her desk and looks at flowers with utmost intensity and somehow with coloured paper and a pair of nail scissors renders them. The end result is a remarkable fusion of craft and art together with echoes of Italian Pietra Dura and 17th century Spanish still lives. We drank champagne and ate lasagna and she was inspiringly positive and chatty despite the ever present silent shadow of her grief. I am sure her work will sell out but if any are left I hope to show them on my stand at the forthcoming Olympia Art and Antiques show in June. 

A taste of what is to come.

Week 120 Two Christies and a Graham-Stewart

Running the risk of giving too much away and thereby ruining my nocturnal parking life in the West End I am about to reveal a secret. If you arrive near Christie's at exactly 6.30 pm you can always find a parking space - a free one too, as the parking ceases to be charged at that time. The hard working art dealers have left and the evening revelers are yet to appear. This is a window of opportunity which, occasionally, I climb through. On Monday I crow-barred Esther out of the house in time to reach Christie's in time to view the forthcoming auction and settle down to hear Manfredi Della Gherardesca give forth on the subject of Italian interior decorating in the 20th century. Manfredi has been a mover and shaker in our world of Decorative Arts for as long as yours truly - that is to says decades. You could say of him that old cliche that he has forgotten more than I have ever known. The talk he gave roamed over the 20th century offering up wisdom accompanied by excellent photographs. Over the years Manfredi has acquired a magnificent beard. As a young Turk working in the Citibank art advisory department he was was lean, clean shaven and very Italian. Today he remains as svelte as ever and his Italian-ness is undimmed by years in England, but his square jaw is now buried beneath a dense coppice of beard. On our way in to the talk I spotted James Graham-Stewart, he was with a client burrowing under tables looking at carpets. I tried a bit of banter teasing him for his approach to the lecture, he raised his eyebrows - inferring that the lecture was seriously impeding his shopping. After the lecture I saw him again, descending the stairs, and he was both delighted and surprised by how excellent Manfredi's talk was. His new showroom has finally opened and I made a date to visit it later in the week.

Manfredi about to begin. His lecture subject not hard to work out.

On Tuesday quite oddly and coincidentally we were back at the same place. This time we were there for the exquisite botanical watercolours by Meena Harding, the mother of my friend and client Sanjit. She is self taught but manages to capture both the spirit of Indian miniatures and the grand tradition of European scientific and amateur botanical watercolours. Many years ago at Mallett we had a selling exhibition of watercolours commissioned in the late 18th century by Lady Impey in India. She commissioned local artists trained in the Moghul style to paint and draw the local flora and fauna, but in their version of the English manner. The work produced is a perfect fusion of the cultures and a true echo of the Raj. Meena's work is similarly suffused with the same parallel influences, enhanced by a clear love of plants and gardens. We avariciously toured the room greedily deciding which to buy. But we were thwarted; she had brought many years work to the show and all the proceeds were destined for her preferred charity - Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity - and her friends and supporters leapt on the works and everything was sold within minutes. Delicious Tattinger champagne and carefully crafted canapés lubricated the process but the air was full of the appreciation of her work and it's achievements.

Meena Harding capturing the essence of blossom.

On Wednesday we shifted gear as we tried out a new place, still in the West End but this time in Shepherds Market. Kitty Fisher is a new-ish small restaurant which merges a modern British culinary sensibility with Spanish features. For those who don't know who Kitty Fisher was - she was an 18th century courtesan whose instinct for fame made her renowned throughout Europe - even Casanova wrote of her. In addition Shepherds market is, allegedly, London's locus for 'high end' courtesans today. Consequently there is an elegant appropriateness - though I am not sure how the Spanish thing fits in? In any case the restaurant is modern but is styled with an eye on the 18th century. Our feast began with bread with onion butter. The simplicity of the description belies the wonder of this plate. Perfect bread - which for me consists of a hard crust, a meaty but soft and succulent crumb, all of which has a note of salt and yeast.  Hand in hand is an extraordinary snow white beaten fluff of butter dusted with a black residue of intense burnt onion. Each and every mouthful coupled with the the aroma of bread, butter and onion was good in a profound and life-enhancing way. After that we ate lamb chops. These were presented hot from their wood grill and coated in an oily green salty splash of heaven. We gobbled these up and ordered some more, though the kitchen had closed the chef fired up the grill again and out they came, delightful, slightly less perfect, but nonetheless highly satisfactory. This becomes a truly memorable night when you add the perfect company of Marcus and Monica Tremonto. As a team they travel the globe literally illuminating lives. Marcus is an inspired artist who does astonishing things with electricity and lights. He fashions oddly organic copper creations with LEDs and circuits. But we love them not for his artistic and professional skill and artistry, but for the fact that he can whistle up a laugh and a challenging conversation on any subject and with Monica there to focus, enhance and leaven each verbal peregrination an evening with them stays in the mind to be enjoyed and discussed for many a day after.

On Thursday afternoon I made my pilgrimage to James up in Scrubs Lane. It is not close to the Oval and at first I thought it would be a bit of a mission to get there. In the end it was actually quite easy. James Graham-Stewart has been dealing for a long time and unlike many others he has not drifted into interior decoration. He has remained and focuses on buying and selling antiques. He sticks to and dedicates himself to 'old school' antique dealing. Around the trade and abroad it is depressing how many people feel a sense of doom and gloom about the business and its future. But James is the antidote. He is located in a warehouse and he has done a deceptively basic decoration, ie there is probably more to it than it looks. In half a dozen rooms he presents a myriad and a panoply of things. He is scholarly and careful but not pompous or supercilious - he just loves the stuff, and if you want to buy it from him that would be very nice - but not essential. As a person he comes across as borderline miserable but his approach and achievement in making himself one of the foremost current dealers in British decorative arts is a joyful thing. His approach is exactly right for our time and everyone aspiring to come into the business should study his model, as it works.

As a footnote we ended the week in Somerset away from the London art world. We ate in a small village called Bishopswood ( just off the A303) at a pub called the 'The Candlelight Inn' We often do and I cannot recommend it more heartily. They won a prize as best gastro pub in Somerset last year. Amongst other delights we ate some slices of smoked venison with pears hiding below robust shaves of pecorino that I think was the most delicious thing I have eaten in a long time. This was local meat; smoked, cooked and served from the same house. This is what cooking should be.

The venison was the star.

Week 119 - the Battersea decorative Fair - Spring has sprung.

Packing up on Monday morning as the exhibition walls were taken down around me to the raucous accompaniment of pop music, power tools and the occasional heart-felt curse, I reflected on what I would miss from the past week.

A cat on a lead

The Battersea Decorative Fair runs thrice yearly out of the fancy "Evolution" tent tucked away by the plant sales area and the gym in Battersea park. This year I have decided to exhibit at all three fairs and their Spring iteration has just wrapped up. David, who owns the fair loves the tannoy and I will miss his daily messages - warnings about a birthday, a cat coming in on a lead, or the police practicing a terror alert behind the tent - amongst many others. I will also miss my neighbours. Mark, a floppy-haired party animal, once married and now determined to remain free to fish both metaphorically and actually, who sells 20th-century design with a focus  on lighting, and his landlord Roger who has a stand adjacent selling vintage clock faces with modern movements. The fourth corner of our little enclave is taken up by Dave, Rob and Edgar, fashionably dressed - leather jackets, tweed frock coats and sporting stubble, who purvey Danish mid-century seating and furniture. None of us is aggressively young but Roger wins the antiquity prize being in his 70s whilst the rest of us flirt with 50, either waving it goodbye behind us or saluting its near arrival. Roger is firmly of the V-neck jumper brigade and is either off to play golf or is just back. Mark does tennis swings with an invisible racket when bored and the Danish guys plan their nightly revels. We are a happy crew. We get coffees or teas for each other and band together to shift furniture when required. When a sale is made everyone looks shifty for a bit and then congratulates. There is no jealousy or competition - especially not with me as I don't sell vintage clock faces nor anything on the others' stands. My insane marriage of this and that is a constant cause of bewilderment to one and all including myself. By way of an illustration of my lack of focus I have three mirrors on my stand. One is 17th-century Dutch and in ebony, one is gilt bronze and Italian mid-18th century and the third is 20th-century and from the Secessionist movement in Vienna. Oh well -as George Bailey, current chairman of the amusingly acronymed 'TEFAAG' is wont to say say, 'We are where we are'.

The Woodham-smith booth

I am trying to be abstinent. My normal fair day would consist of coffee, coffee and more coffee until about 6pm when a chilled (from my on stand wine fridge) glass of wine - and possibly another - would muzz my senses until closing time. This time, though I have the kit, I am sticking to fizzy water and green tea. My erstwhile chum Oscar Humphries once reported to me that his 'medical team' had concluded I was a bad influence. They would be so happy with me now. I am drinking the occasional glass but today I am a pussy cat by comparison with my past. So, the days pass as  watching objects and furniture making their way along the corridors from stands to the stores and vice versa. The fair have laid on a team they call the Harvey Boys who will shift anything on or off your stand at any time of the day whilst the fair is running. Consequently the aisles resound to the grunts and groans of the boys as they lug big lots on and off. It gives the fair a great sense of activity and is equally a superb service for the exhibitors. The only downside is that you cannot help feeling a slight sense of jealousy as some dealers appear to clear their stands several times over during the week. But even without coffee, wine or regular bulky sales the week passes very pleasurably. 

Just behind my stand like a caged tiger is my old friend Charlie, who prowls around clutching his iPad ready to sell or take orders at the drop of a hat. He makes plans and proposals all round and his iPad is hot with activity. He never stops unless he is having a cup of tea and this he could do all day. He sells too. This is his first outing at Battersea and he works it as hard as anyone could, ably backed by his daughters and wife. He will be back for more and we all enjoy his frenetic contribution.

A general view of the fair with Mrs Charlie hard at work

The fair is fun and laid back, with scruffy no nonsense stand-building and dogs everywhere. There is also a growing feeling that this is where the trade thrives these days. The public come in their droves and they nearly all come with the urge and intention to buy something. Even my pathologically mean friend Lucinda went out with a bag, though I cannot be sure there was anything in it beyond her gloves. Admittedly the prices are usually between a few pounds and a few thousand, hardly anything is over 5. But this price point brings out people who want to own and furnish with old or antique things. Nearly every object at the fair is a special or different in some way and as such the opportunities are many and various. Many of the dealers buy from each other as well, consequently the atmosphere is one of the most commercial I have encountered. Just because the prices are mainly low I do not want to run down or deride the quality on view - there are some exceptional things, even masterpieces. As someone said - there are things that are a lot of money but nothing that is expensive. Roll on the next one in September.

Week 118 - TEFAF 2016 + Hieronymous Bosch

Week 118

Everything is the same and yet everything is also different. As the car moves steadily out into the main road beginning a week long 600 mile European round trip I am very much aware that I have done this before. I have arrived in Maastricht a number of ways over the years. I have not cycled, walked or ridden a horse but I have employed most other methods. The car has been the recent favourite as it is my wont and delight to fill the car with optimistic purchases en route. This year I am a pure shopper and onlooker, not wearing any hats of employment no connection to Mallett or Masterpiece. I am looking forward to seeing the Mallett stand as there will be some pieces that I found and discovered but the design and layout will be entirely Thomas free. I think this is more than my 20th journey and whilst I anticipate familiar delights it will also hopefully offer the thrillingly new.

One of the first delights is the buzz of arriving in France. The tunnel - like a birth canal - pushes one out into the fringes of Calais and you feel a little spine tingle of happiness being abroad. Driving on the right cements it and you know you are off on an adventure. The car is full of petrol and we head to the decorative junk warehouses around Lille - pausing to visit Paul De Grande at his chateau to admire his latest arrivals. Driving down a back street in the small town of Marcq-en-Baroeul, 5 miles outside Lille, we park - having missed the spot several times and circled around cursing the SatNav - the delightful, young but wracked with a beastly cold Sylvain Barrois appears. He has shifted his business from dealing in rusty pseudo ancient chandeliers though industrial style warehouse lighting into shiny metal 70s Italian furniture and lighting. Nimble though these metamorphoses have been his warehouse still bears the debris of his previous incarnations. We buy and load our acquisitions into the welcoming Subaru.

Now we head for Brussels via Joost in Haaltert. He has many temptations within his few rooms and some we admire and some we purchase. His taste is eclectic in period but consistent in that he never has run-of-the-mill or standard, there is always a quirky or magical element to each of his items. We make a purchase and the car drives on ever so slightly heavier as it is a pair of marble tazzas that we find irresistible.

one of the treasures from Joost

Brussels offers us Vismet - my whenever-possible dining option. Just by St Catherine it is deceptively plain and simple. pale wooden chairs and tables and an open kitchen in the corner. Daily specials are hand-written and photocopied, accompanied by a standard menu printed in blocks of primary colours. I always eat the same thing here - oysters. They come without fancy ceremony, simply in a bowl. They are delicious - salty, brightly fresh and just the faintest hint of a bite. Then by mistake we get cod. I had ordered my usual deep fried cod fritters but what came was a fancy dish with a sauce and accompanying vegetables. I looked at this vision and I have to admit - like looking a gift horse in the mouth - I was disappointed. But gallantly I ate it and I begrudgingly have to admit that it was the most delicious cod I have ever had, brilliant white flesh and chunky ,neither chewy nor gelatinous, just succulent and perfect.

Sleep was followed by the final leg to Maastricht via Wim van Dam in the over-complicatedly named 's - Hertogenbosch ( by everyone shortened to - den Bosch ) He and his lovely wife Cornelia live in retirement flats overlooking the Meuse and spend their days looking for and buying antiques. He sits at his William IV writing table and peers through catalogues and decides where next he will visit and shop. He has never failed to have something for me to buy ever since I first met him. But the charm and tenderness of the couple and their manner of living makes the visit worthwhile - even without a commercial corollary.

Maastricht brings dinner with Larry Strenger at his hotel in Slanaken - half an hour outside of town. Here he stays for Tefaf every year; the attendees to his annual preview eve dinner make for an amazing sub-history of Mallett. Larry speaks slowly, each word lasts a minute at least, with a gravelly deep voice, he is also quite large; primarily a deal maker, from his tiny office in NY he has put some substantial deals together - mainly property - mainly shopping malls. He loves to shop and be involved with antiques dealers and their trade. I had thought that this year it was going to be a reduced group of just us and the Chinese export art dealers -the Gregory's, who are his good friends and fellow hotel residents. But in came the residual Mallett staff and their chairman George Bailey. I anticipated a certain awkwardness but George was charm itself. Over dinner which was moderately tasty but fundamentally interminable - ending at 1 am! Justin revealed that he too was leaving Mallett. Thus leaving not a skeleton team but only a part skeleton. The future of Mallett, indeed the whole group, appears very much in question.

The preview opening of the fair was very much business as usual with hoards crowding round the stands and voraciously consuming all the so-called free eats. The fair has undergone a radical redesign with more openings and aisles and it has been made easier to navigate and more exhibitors are happy as they feel more prominent. For Esther and yours truly the worst thing to admit is that the highlight for us was stopping our peregrinations and sitting for a while at the oyster bar and having a dozen Zeland oysters which were masterpieces in their own right. It is hard to describe an oyster as good ones all have so much in common but these were everything an oyster could aspire to being. Imagine a delicious oyster and these were they.

A masterpiece of hardstone carving chez Kugel.

The days pass and many treats ensued, including a surprising eccentric tour of the Thiessen winery in town - eccentric because they don't seem to make wine there anymore, the tasting was not even of local wines, the tour was in Dutch with offered but no actual translation from a nice young man who did not speak much English at all.

Finally we had to head home but not without trying to get to see the Hieronymous Bosch 500 year anniversary show in his home town back in's - Hertogenbosch. Tickets were all sold out but we boldly nonetheless ventured the journey. Our pluck was rewarded by the offer of tickets at 6pm - it was then midday. We ruminated and decided to go for it. What followed was a fascinating day spent around the town trying to walk though as much as we could of the surviving elements of the 15th century town. His first home was adjacent to a house that had collapsed only a week earlier - survival is precarious. The exhibition was heaving with people when we entered and it was quite a mission to actually get close to the works, but as the day ended and the kick-out time of 8 pm approached we were able to get much appreciated unimpeded access. The imagination of Bosch is beyond question but I repeatedly kept feeling that I was being sucked into a 500 year old version of "where's Wally?". My problem. We drove home to London exhausted but with the feeling that we had been granted a special insight into another time and space. The codicil to this is that we are soon off to Madrid where we can see those works at the Prado that were deemed too fragile to make the journey.

A strange genius indeed!