Our next in the series ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ returns to Preston Park Museum and the film that focuses on the antique dealers Fenton & Sons of London – you can see the final version of the film HERE.
Perhaps one of the most interesting behind the scenes information about the Fenton & Sons Year of the Dealer film is that the suit of armour featured in the Preston Park Museum YoD film is the same suit we borrowed from Preston Park Museum for the SOLD! exhibition we staged at The Bowes Museum in 2019.
You can still read the SOLD! exhibition catalogue HERE its free as a PDF. In the SOLD! exhibition, the Fenton & Sons half suit of armour was part of the display of ‘curiosities’ we arranged within the recreated ‘Old Curiosity Shop’, which was like a mini exhibition within the main SOLD! exhibition – another snippet of intel was that we originally planned to have two recreated antique shops in the SOLD! exhibition, one from the mid 19th century (the shop we recreated, which is in the photograph below) and one from the mid 20th century – unfortunately budgets intervened! You can read a little more about the recreated Old Curiosity Shop in the SOLD! exhibition catalogue, in the short essay by Simon Spier (who is now curator of Ceramics and Glass at the V&A Museum at South Kensington in London!).
It is quite hard to spot the half suit of armour as it was mixed up with a whole shop full of curiosities – but you can see it, together with its helmet, just to the right, near the window of the recreated shop (below).
Our recreated shop in the SOLD! exhibition was deliberately modelled on Charles Dickens famous ‘Old Curiosity Shop’ (1841) – . Charles Dickens described the shop in novel as – ‘one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in every corner of this town….There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour, here and there; fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters; rusty weapons of various kinds; distorted figures in china, and wood, and iron, and ivory; tapestry, and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.’ (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop, (1841), p.3).
Our colleagues at Preston Park Museum were exceptionally generous with their loans of arms and armour for the SOLD! exhibition (such objects were an essential part of the Old Curiosity Shop display), and their generosity continued with their participation in the Year of the Dealer digital film project too of course!
Do look out for the next in the series of ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’…there will be another blog post very soon!
Mark
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