Our next in the series ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ returns to the V&A South Kensington and the film that focuses on the important role that women antique dealers have played in the antique trade, and in the development of public museums – you can see the final version of the film HERE. And apologies for the slight delay in our weekly Posts – we are having a few problems with the migration of the YoD films from the University ‘Mediasite’ to the new ‘Panopto’ site, so currently the films are not working. We are on the case with our IT Team at the University and will have the films back working again in the next few days [update 20th September 2026……the YoD films are working again (apart from just 5 films that still need recoding)..thanks to Ralph Mackinder and Fiona Blair at the University of Leeds!…we will have the remaining 5 fixed by early this week).
Anyway, our film on Women Antique Dealers at the V&A South Kensington is one of three films on this subject in the Year of the Dealer films; as well as the V&A film we also have films on the same subject at The Bowes Museum and at Preston Park Museum (we will highlight some of the behind the scenes stories of those films later in our ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ series).
We thought it was vital to highlight the role of women antique dealers as a special part of the project and, as the three profiled films in the YoD Project demonstrate, there have been some highly influential women antique dealers. Several important women antique dealers are featured in the YoD films at the V&A, Bowes Museum and Preston Park Museum, including (as you will see when you watch the films) dealers such as Jane Clarke (c.1794-1859), who was perhaps the most famous women antique dealer of the 19th century. If you want to read more about Jane Clarke do take a look at Jean Hemmingway’s essay ‘Millinery and Old Lace: Miss Jane Clarke of Regent Street’, Textile History, volume 43, no.2, November 2012, pp.200-222.
There were dozens of other women antique dealers we could have highlighted in the YoD films but could not find museum objects that were currently on display for the films to highlight interesting stories for the visiting public. That said, there must be hundreds of objects in museums that have associations with women dealers so perhaps there will be a future project that reveals these important stories. Interestingly our antique dealer map project (see on the main antique dealer project website HERE) highlights more than 250 women antique dealers trading in Britain from c.1900 to c.1960, and there will be hundreds more I’m sure in the period after 1960 to 2000 once we get round to being able to add more data into the map (we are working on that!).
One dealer we would have loved to include more information on was Jane Toller, but we could not find a museum object currently on display at one of our 5 partner museums that was sold to the museum by Jane. Jane opened an antique shop in St. Christopher’s Place in London in 1937, before meeting her future husband, the antique dealer Charles Toller in the same year and setting up a highly successful antique dealing business specialising in ‘Treen’ (small wooden objects). They eventually moved their business to The Old Rectory in Marlow, Buckinghamshire in the 1940s (see below), and then Eton High Street in the 1950s (see below). As well as being a successful antique dealer, Jane and Charles also published widely on collecting antiques – Jane also composed an autobiography of her life as an antique dealer, ‘Living with Antiques‘ in 1968.
We have to catch up with the missing weekly Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer, so will be posting 2 more blog posts in the coming week to get us back up to speed with our weekly posts. But in the meantime, do look out for a couple more blog posts in the coming week.
Mark
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