The ‘Antique Dealers; Buying, Selling and Collecting’ exhibition at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery at the University of Leeds is starting to take shape – we’re just doing the final install this week, and the object loans from Temple Newsam, Leeds arrived yesterday. It’s very exciting seeing this exhibition develop – especially as I now feel like an old hand at exhibitions, having done the SOLD! exhibition at The Bowes Museum. The Leeds exhibition is on a much smaller scale – only about a dozen or so objects, but it will, I hope, be just as engaging, and I hope will also foreground the amazing antique dealer archives we have at the Brotherton Library Special Collections.
The objects from Temple Newsam are being placed back into a dialogue with the original archives from the three of the dealers that are the focus of the exhibition at Leeds – Phillips of Hitchin, Ronald A Lee and Roger Warner. Here’s the first of the Temple Newsam objects arriving at the gallery.
Antique Dealers Exhibition at Leeds University – the packing crates arrive.
The story of the exhibition is on antique dealers buying and selling antiques, and of course and perhaps inevitably, dealers as collectors of antiques – we are using Roger Warner as a key example of the dealer/collector and have been lucky to have a number of objects loans from the private collections of Roger Warner’s family, Sue, Simon and Deborah. Here are a few of those objects, just being installed into the display cases at the gallery – a 19th century mousetrap and an 18th century teacaddy from the collections at Temple Newsam, and some wonderful small objects from Rogers’ personal collection.
Roger Warner objects at the Leeds University exhibition.
We also have an early 18th century chair from Houghton Hall, Norfolk, one of a set of six chairs that Phillips of Hitchin sold to various museums in 1960 – the Temple Newsam chair retains an 18th century green velvet cover.
Phillips of Hitchin chair unpacked and ready for placing in the exhibition at Leeds University.
The install is going well, and Katie Herington (my co-curator on this exhibition) together with Fred, our amazingly helpful gallery technician, and Jill and Laura, have been busy unpacking and placing the objects in the space.
Jill and Fred unpacking objects for the Leeds University exhibition.
Katie placing the 18th century chimney board in the Leeds exhibition.
There’s still lots to do of course, and we are waiting for Eugenie from the Brotherton Library Special Collections team to come by tomorrow to begin to place the antique dealer archive material in the display cases. We have some fantastic antique dealer archives in the exhibition, including some very early stock books, dating from c.1890 from Phillips of Hitchin archives; a fascinating sales book of the 1920s of the dealer H.M. Lee, Ronald A Lee’s father; and Roger Warner’s first sales book from 1936. As well as a range of intriguing photographs of the dealers’ shops and of their stands at the world-famous Grosvenor House Antiques Fair from the 1950s and 1960s.
I hope that the ‘Antique Dealers’ exhibition at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery will prove to be a success – there’s been a lot of work by a lot of people in the Brotherton Team and the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery to make this happen.
I’ll post another blog once the exhibition install has been completed, so you can see what it looks like – it opens on MONDAY 4th March and runs until 25th May 2019 – and it’s FREE!
Mark
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