antiquedealersblog

After many years of invigorating research and work, the digital film trails for the Year of the Dealer project are finally launched today, Thursday 11th June!

As many of our readers will know, The Year of the Dealer is a project that began 4 or 5 years ago, and it’s taken an enormous effort, working with a brilliant team at the University of Leeds and colleagues at our 5 Year of the Dealer collaborating partner museums – The Bowes Museum, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Preston Park Museum, Temple Newsam, and the V&A South Kensington – to finally launch the digital film trails.

You can watch all the films here – on the Year of the Dealer main project website, but also on all five partner museum websites too – we hope you enjoy watching the films – but you can also go and see the antiques highlighted in the films at each of our five partner museums.

Focusing on ten familiar objects at each of the five museums, the films highlight how some of our most prized treasures ended up in collections and reveal their hidden histories as ‘antiques’. Guided by two friendly avatars, Mark and Mo (see below) – with introductions by respective museum directors, curators and collections officers – 50 antiques and over 40 antique dealer histories are explored.

The films reveal the fascinating stories of the dealers who sold the antiques to the museums – including Edgar Gorer, a leading specialist in antique Chinese porcelain, who sadly perished in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915; and antique dealer Frank Partridge, who miraculously survived the same disaster.

Several films highlight the important role that women have played in the history of antique dealing. One features an antique lace collar on display at The Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, originally from the collection of Jane Clarke, one of the most prominent antique dealers of the 19^th century (see below).

The Year of the Dealer project draws together several years of research, including museum and dealers’ archives, auction catalogue records and oral history interviews, to bring these previously little-known stories to life.

Other antiques in the digital film trails include the important library table, made by Thomas Chippendale in the 1770s for Harewood House in Yorkshire, sold to Temple Newsam, Leeds in 1964 by H. Blairman & Sons for a world record price of 41,000 guineas (see below);

A rare pair of 17th century Chinese ‘Prunus’ pattern jars, sold by the special dealer in Chinese Works of Art Edgar Gorer to the collector William Hesketh Lever in 1911 for the spectacular sum of £6,500 (equivalent to as much as £3.8 million at the time) and now at Lady Lever Art Gallery (see below).

The Bowes Museum’s famous 18th century silver swan automaton, acquired by John and Josephine Bowes from the dealers Briquet and Samper of Paris in 1872 for about £200 (see below).

The Great Bed of Ware, sold by the antique dealer Frank Partridge to the V&A Museum in 1931 for £4,060 (see below).

There are also some much more humble objects sold by antique dealers to museums, such as this toy Noah’s Ark c.1900, sold to Preston Park Museum, Stockton, in 1969 by Caedmon Antiques of Whitby for a few pounds (see below).

We hope you enjoy the Year of the Dealer films, and that it will encourage you to think further about the role that antique dealers have played in the development of collections.

Mark