|
The wholesale dismantling of English country houses begun in the 1860's (city houses as well) was partly caused by the high cost of maintenance, usually to a roof, but not always (dry rot, for example) making the house worth less in the eyes of the owners than the land on its own. In addition, the British government created an inheritance tax and before you knew it, houses were being dismantled left, right and center. I have referred to the firm, White and Allom, still in existence today, several times before in this blog, who would buy the floors, walls, ceilings, fixtures and fittings of old houses and occasionally the furniture as well. White and Allom worked with the grand architectural firms in America of the day--Carrere and Hastings and McKim Mead and White to name two and probably many others. It was a profitable trade, quite obviously.
The dismantling of a house anywhere is a startlingly quick process. I remember the dismantling of a house on Otsego Lake, a house called Mohican Manor, built by a family from Buffalo named Spalding. The house was sold to the Clark family by descendants, and they in turn decided to sell the house, every last bit of it, in auction over two weeks. The first weekend was the contents, I presume some items were removed and kept, but for two days, anything that wasn't attached to the house, went up for sale. The second weekend, it was parts of the house itself that sold including the roofing, windows, doors, cedar closets, fireplaces, etc. As the sale progressed, the winners of these items brought in their chain saws--they didn't mess around with reciprocating saws--and sawed the items out of the house. Within a month, the house was gone.
All this is to say that the process of dismantling a house is fast. There is often a lack of care given the fragility of many of the items that are on the walls. In the UK, for example, mirror plates were often placed into the plaster of the wall with the frames around them so when the frames and glasses were taken off the wall, they needed backing for the frames to hold them together and hence a rough backing frame would be made to hold the carving. Some frames were gigantic, too big for the regular market and so would be reduced and made into two or even three mirrors. Wall carvings that surrounded frames could be turned into something else. How much original mercury glass must have been lost in the process is anyone's guess, but I would posit that it was substantial. Console tables were often attached to walls and if you can imagine, some were probably more difficult to take off the wall than others. Marble tops as well were mixed up or lost and I presume that tops often got switched between tables or even sold separately.
Every dealer comes across items that are, for some obscure reason, difficult to assess. Maybe it's because half of the backboards are gone from a mirror and the other half are plywood or missing altogether. I was given a sideboard years ago that had a wine drawer that was missing. Someone had cut off the drawer linings and made a swing door from the drawer front. I remade the drawer--it was just a little deeper than the height of a wine bottle--out of poplar because it was the only large single board, perhaps 12'-14" in width that I had. So this English sideboard, dating to around 1760 and quite a good piece of furniture, is out there now with an American made drawer with everything else pure English. It wasn't an important sideboard, but a good one with a good top and good color all around. But this kind of thing has happened to very important pieces and that is where dealers have to choose to either explain the conundrum (of a poplar drawer) or just not buy the piece as requiring too much explanation. The game of chess when selling such pieces that I referred to in the last blog can be quite a tricky one!
|
