Dealer's Diary» A Naive Sell-Out: A Report on the 24th Bath Decorative
A pair of decoy ducks on the shelf of a delightfully crusty original painted pine cupboard: the image on the invitation card for this year's Bath fair was reassuring to all comers that although the fair had changed hands traditions would be maintained. In another and perhaps unintended way the image was a poignant salute to the departure of Robin Coleman who had managed the fair for 23 years.
In its time the Bath Fair gained fame amongst the trade as one of the places to go to find great country furniture, primitive and folk art and it was Robin's loving stewardship of the fair, his famous trade day and his rigorous insistence on sticking to the rules that fostered and maintained this reputation even into recent times when good pieces were no longer pouring from every nook and cranny of the south western lands.
Robin was himself a pioneer folk art dealer in this part of the country and according to an anecdote related in his shop one day over a cup of tea he was one of the first in the UK to recognise the appeal of antique wooden decoys. In those days he revealed as I remember they could be bought for very little, a few pounds if not less and the selling price was around £8. Being enterprising he placed an advert for a while in a shooting and game magazine, “Antique Decoys Wanted Will Pay Cash”, and within a short period he had become quite anxious as his stock of them ran into hundreds and far exceeded the demand at the time.
Of course within a decade or two the market price was in three figures even for normal examples and the very best were thousands. (This was just about the same time, alas, that the stock of them dried up, the age-old antique dealer’s lament).
Also in the 1970s antique primitive and naïve portraits, outside of America, were not highly regarded either and if you speak to Robin he will tell you of calls he made to ancient farms in Somerset where the farmers would produce huge blue and white platters or tons of pewter and then just before he went to his car to leave, as an afterthought, the farmer would take off his cap and scratch his pate and remember something that “properly baint be of much innerest” then go and pull down out of his loft one or two dusty but stunning paintings, some of which are now amongst the most celebrated naives ever found. I believe there is a standard reference on English Naïve Painting amongst those published in which around half of the illustrated works therein have passed through Robin Coleman’s hands at one time or another.
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This year’s fair was very professionally organised with staff on hand and security at night to keep an eye on things. During the course of the week in the afternoons one of the night security kept smiling at me, giving me a friendly nod whenever I passed him, something along the lines of “Alright John?” or “Everything Ok John, eh? Got some real interesting bits on yr stand there!” I couldn’t understand why the man was being so friendly and what his particular interest in the antiques was. I questioned him and he revealed he had been playing ‘Kim’s game’.
If you have read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim you will remember that Kim’s first training for the Secret Service was an exercise in Observation, he would be shown a trayful of objects which having been taken away or covered up with a cloth he was required to recall item by item.
This night staff, being ex-forces, had broken the boredom of his nightly perambulations by noting stand changes in the exhibition hall. He could see that our stand changed its arrangement daily, some items had gone and new ones appeared. More than that he saw that some of the items that had gone from our stand had re-appeared elsewhere in the fair on the stands of other dealers and even further that some items gone from others stands now suddenly had appeared on ours! All in all he had an insight into the trade and how it works (or should work) and felt comfortable tipping me the wink as he could see we had sold well or at the very least that I appeared to be a geezer who was prepared to do a few deals!
At any fair like this and this was part of Robin Coleman's credo you are expected to bring your "best" pieces that you have saved up. This is good and if you have the cash you hope to find a few bits on the set up yourself, some choice items that have a little extra "dollar" left in them. In previous years I had found a wonderful Spanish doll's house or house cupboard (see 925 in sold) and another time a carved lion that went right away and later was illustrated in Robert Mills's "Folk Art" .
Just as you can buy at the set up so you can chalk up a few sales too. It can be rather concerning to sell a star lot before even the show opens (and some just won't do it or even give you a price )but it does settle the nerves and if you are committed as i am to the Dickensian moral-economic model of good-flow (more of this later) then you have to do it.
Having said that the two set up days at this year's fair were disappointing, and presumably a sign of the times, not much to buy and not as many dealers as normal buying.
Nevertheless in the course of the week I somehow managed to put together a good list of buys, a period corner cupboard, a lovely Georgian side table in “sea glass” blue (this is the ‘in’ colour in Dallas right now I believe), a bank of drawers, a wonderful small primitive oil of Rochester Castle in Kent, a knock-out Bath style pine dresser in original paint, one of the best pine chests you could ever imagine finding, a West Country settle that turned out once we had worked on it to be a real gem and one of best finds a painting from the 1920s, "Toulon", by Julian Trevelyan, arguably a seminal work of English modernism providing a connecting thread from Christopher Wood, who would die in 1930, to the later art of Trevelyan, Mary Fedden and others.
As the Antique Trade Gazette reported, which was true, we all but sold out in the first hour of the first day as the trade “swept through” (ATG, 23 Mar 2013) but the press might just as easily have mentioned us in dispatches as the best buyers in attendance at the fair which I think we may well have been. It is always tempting if one is lucky enough to have a good day of selling at an antique fair to go home early bouncing along in an empty van and with a pocketful of cash (or payments pending) but somehow this never happens. More often than not our van is the last to leave and we are there sweating in the late afternoon sun and cramming a full van load having sold most of what was brought and then seemingly bought as much again. Is this good business strategy or is it rather thoughtless, bonkers, naive?? It seems to add up as we are still going!