Our series ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ returns to Lady Lever Art Gallery this week and the making of the film about the antique dealer Charles Davis – you can see the final version of the film HERE. [Hopefully the Lady Lever Art Gallery films are back online again…but if not, they should be this coming week!]
As our film indicated, the antique dealer Charles Davis sold the pair of antique Wedgwood vases highlighted in the film to the collector William Hesketh Lever (founder of Lady Lever Art Gallery) in 1905. In our YoD film we partly focused on the exhibition of ‘Old Wedgwood’ that Charles Davis organised at his shop at 147 New Bond Street, London in 1905, and which displayed the collection of Old Wedgwood that William Lever acquired from Davis en bloc (some 300 items), paying £15,200, an enormous sum at the time. You can still see much of this collection on display at Lady Lever Art Gallery of course.
We had a few more images of Davis’ exhibition but, again, we could not really find the space to include them in the film without them appearing and disappearing too rapidly. But these ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ blogs are an opportunity to show you some of the other images of Davis’ exhbition (thanks to our colleagues at Lady Lever Art Gallery!). Here (below) is a photograph of the display of Old Wedgwood plaques on the wall of Davis’ shop, beneath which is a glass case with scores of Old Wedgwood teapots, cups, vases and other objects, all purchased by Lever from Davis.
And below is another photograph of Davis exhibition, showing more Wedgwood vases and cache pots. If you want to read more about Lever’s collection of Old Wedgwood do look up Anne Eatwell’s fascinating essay ‘Lever as a Collector of Wedgwood and the fashion for collecting Wedgwood in the nineteenth century’, in Journal of the History of Collections, 4, no.2, (1992), pp.239-256.
We’ll have another ‘Behind the Scenes of the Year of the Dealer’ blog post in the next day or so, so we can catch up with the hiatus of the weekly rhythm of the Behind the Scenes series!
Mark
