Our next in the series ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ is focused on the Samuel Richards film at Lady Lever Art Gallery – you can see the final version of the film HERE
Samuel Richards (1859-1927) is quite well known for a provincial antique dealer and there is a lot of information on him and his antique shops that we could have included in the film – but of course, we needed to keep the films shorter than 3 or 4 minutes; we were thinking that many people might watch the films on their phones so were guided by social media programmes such as TikTok and Instagram on maximum lengths of the films.
We had a lot of images of the hand-drawn, lithographed catalogues that Richards produced from the 1880s to c.1914 – there a small number of libraries that hold a few examples of Richards catalogues (V&A National Art Library in London for example) and the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds holds some copies in the John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History The Library at University of Leeds also has one bound copy very generously gifted to the Brotherton Library by the antique dealer Simon Myers (a great supporter of the antique dealer research project!) – you can read about Simon’s donation in one of the earlier post on the research blog HERE. We have also done a few blog posts on Richards and his catalogues over the years – see HERE. HERE.
Most copies of the Richards catalogues are bound together in hardback volumes but the John Evan Bedford Collection at The Brotherton Library has a few single examples which retain their original covers, exactly as they would have been sent out in the 1890s (see below).
Such examples are rare with the original covers but the John Evan Bedford collection also has an exceptionally rare large scale single sheet (similar in size to A2 paper size, about 17 inches by 24 inches), ‘Catalogue of Objects of Art and Curiosities’ issued by Richards in the same period – I’m not aware of any other examples in this format (see below).
We also had quite a few images of Richards’ shops, many of which we used in the Year of the Dealer film at Lady Lever Art Gallery. One of the images of Richards’ antique shop that we might have used, had we had more space/time in the film, is this image (see below) of The Old Friary, Nottingham c.1900. It’s from Nottingham Local Studies Library and potentially shows the only known image of Samuel Richards (see front, centre), but we decided not to use it as we could not be sure the man in the image was in fact Samuel Richards.
In subsequent research we have also recently discovered that as well as his 2 shops in Nottingham (The Old Priory and in Houndgate, Nottingham), Richards also had a shop in the ‘Old Baptist Chapel’ on Friar Lane, Nottingham (see below), in what seems like a very early repurposing of a redundant chapel as an antique shop (much more common in the 1970s onwards).
Look out for more ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ next week.
Mark
antiquedealersblog 
Leave a comment