antiquedealersblog

One of the latest acquisitions to the growing archive of antique dealer ephemera is a rare sales brochure, dating from c.1900, from Hampton & Sons Limited, Pall Mall East, London, of ‘Antique Embroideries, Furniture, Silver, Porcelain and other Art Objects’. It’s a very elaborate brochure, with a colour printed and embossed cover and full of black and white, and some colour photographs, of the stock of antiques that Hampton had for sale.

Hampton & Sons were established in 1830 by William Hampton, trading in Cranbourne Street, London, selling general household items and furniture and expanded to a large general furnishing and department store in East Pall Mall, London, in 1869. Many department stores in London in the period c.1900, such as Debenham & Freebody, the 19th century department store business that eventually became Debenhams, and the furnishing store Maple & Co. Ltd., of Tottenham Court Road, developed ‘Antique Departments’ within their stores – here, for example, is a sales brochure produced by Maple & Co in c.1915, also in the Antique Dealer Research Project archives.

(For more on antiques and department stores see also our blog post on November 2nd 2014 by Chris Coles). Like these other department stores, Hampton & Sons antiques department sold a wide range of antiques. They described themselves as ‘Decorators, Furnishers’ and ‘Dealers in Antiques’ in the frontispiece to their sales brochure – with ‘Antique Furniture’, ‘Old Tapestries’, ‘Embroideries and Laces’, ‘Old Arms and Armour’, ‘Old Silver’, Sheffield Plate and Porcelain, ‘Old Copper Ware’ and ‘Curios’ all listed in the contents of the brochure.

In the Introduction to the brochure Hampton & Sons write that ‘The steady and continuous growth of the Department…rendered it absolutely necessary to make extensive additions to the Show-rooms’ that they had ‘recently constructed for the display of Antiques’ (Hampton & Sons, brochure, p.1). The sales brochure illustrates the very wide range of antiques that the business sold in the period around 1900. Here is a page showing ‘Old Arms and Armour’, including ‘A Demi-Suit of Bright Steel Armour…of the XVIIth century, from the celebrated Melges collection’, (Brochure, p.4) – numbered as item ‘O1.’ in the photograph.

Among the photographs of antique furniture is this page, showing 18th century English and French antique furniture and clocks, is a fascinating cabinet on stand (right side of photograph, numbered ‘O71.’), described as ‘an old cabinet, of rosewood, richly inlaid with conventional representations, in ivory, of trees and flowering plants….’; and an equally interesting ‘Old English Miniature Bureau Bookcase’ (show top left, numbered ‘O67’)…an ‘Important example’ as the caption states. This, of course, as we now know, is a late 18th century example from Vizagapatam, India.

Another of the pages devoted to antique furniture includes another cabinet on stand, this time described as ‘A Very Fine Old Ebony Cabinet….Formerly the property of Oliver Cromwell. From Olivers Stanway, once the residence of the Eldred family’; (numbered O78.’) – the cabinet is also illustrated in Arthur Hayden Chats on Old Furniture (1905), p.99, where it is reproduced by ‘permission of Messrs. Hampton & Sons’ and obviously from the brochure here.

There is also an extensive selection of antique textiles and lace in the sales brochure; antique textiles and lace were highly fashionable at the time, but antique lace in particular had also been a key part of the antique markets since the early 19th century, perhaps most famously with Jane Clarke, who operated the ‘Antique Lace Warehouse’ at 154 Regent Street, London in the 1830s and 1840s. In the Hampton & Sons brochure there is a fabulous ‘Banner of Old Italian Lacis’, ‘dated 1606’, ‘a very fine and interesting specimen’ as it was described; (numbered ‘O130’).

There is also a page devoted to the ubiquitous ‘Curios’, which included an ‘Elizabethan Brown Glazed Ware Jug’ (numbered ‘O211’) top right in the photograph below, together with ‘Ivory Tankards’, ‘Silver and Metal Gilt Monstrances’, and ‘a Pair of Chinese Carved Cylindrical Spill Vases’ (numbered ‘O212’) top centre – these are carved Bamboo brush pots which appear to have been later mounted in silver, probably in Europe.

And finally, no antique department store would have been complete at the time without some collections of antique Chinese ceramics, and here are a couple of pages from the brochure illustrating Hampton & Sons collections of ‘Old Chinese Porcelain’. This page (below) showing 18th century polychrome porcelain, including an interesting vase ‘on Imperial Yellow Ground’ (centre, numbered ‘O272’):

And this page (below), showing ‘Old Nankin Porcelain’, from the extensive collections of blue & white Chinese porcelain at Hampton & Sons.

The Hampton & Sons sales brochure is a rare and fascinating survival of antique dealing in the period c.1900, and will be making its way to the antique dealer archives at the Brotherton Library Special Collections at the University of Leeds in due course.

Mark