York stone record set at Gaze

Gaze, Architectural and Garden Antiques, Diss Norfolk
4 April 2009

'Garden things are doing the best,' said Carl Willows of Gaze auction rooms at the recent Architectural and Antiques sale. The 1132 lot auction took place on a beautiful Spring day to Mr Willow's disgust as he openly prefers the rain and says that it brings with it more trade. Thankfully he was wrong on this occasion as it was 'a great sale'.

Mr Willows said, "It was a nice sale with a good mixture of trade and private buyers many of whom were willing to spend. We reached a new record for York Stone paving as it fetched £110 per square yard. A good quantity of 16th/17th Century oak floor boards approx 15sq yards sold well for £2200. The nicest sandstone trough I have seen in a long time reached £1500. A four poster bed which had been up for auction three times finally sold on the third attempt, and it will be nice to have that out of the way. Perhaps one of the most surprising results of the day was that a well weathered composition frog sold for £600. It was a pleasant little thing but that was well above expectations so obviously someone had their heart set on it.

On the other hand a Coalbrookdale nasturtium pattern garden bench only managed to reach a disappointing £1400. Ecclesiastical monuments did not sell very well. Fireplaces and cast iron inserts were slow, not that there was anything of fantastic merit but we expected better. Similarly the revolving summer house from Thelveton Hall, Norfolk only fetched £480, even though it was missing its track we still expected it to do better.

Modern pieces fared well a bronze study of a striding gorilla sold to a lady bidder for £1700, after the sale I thought I should have enquired if it was a present for a partner!! A circular zinc top table on pine and cast iron base sold for a respectable £520. It was a nice table and this is the type of modern piece I like having in the sale."


Above: A circular zinc top table on pine and cast iron base, 5ft diameter. Sale price: £520


Above: A good quantity of 16th/17th Century oak floor boards approx 15sq yards. Sale price: £2200


Above: A Coalbrookdale nasturtium pattern garden bench approximately 53" long. Sale price: £1400


Above: A bronze study of a striding gorilla. Sale price: £1700


Above: A well weathered composition frog. Sale price: £600

Gaze

Reclaimed brick tricycle cargo carrier

Above: This looks like around 150 bricks, or half a ton, or 500kg of reclaimed bricks, spotted in the streets of Xi'an in China. It could be electric assisted but we could not tell from the angle of the photo. Anyone know of manufacturers of heavy duty load carrying trikes and their maximum load?

Photo Bill and Carla's Chinese Adventure

Salvo Fair 2009: Buy yourself a tudor model village.

Above: One of 8 large houses, a chapel and 3 cottages from a 1930's model village available for sale at Olliff's Architectural, Bristol, priced at £3,000 each.

Bristol, UK: I arrive at Bristol Temple Meads station on an overcast mild March morning. Marcus Olliff meets me in his blue pick-up and we drive 10 minutes up the road to visit his yard in St Werburghs Road, which is open by appointment only. I had done a little research on Google street, which shows it is in a quiet residential road with a few small warehouses. What you can't see is that the yard is very close to St Werburgs city farm (nice organic cafe) and a recent eco-housing development (did they use any Olliff reclaimed materials?). We pass a string of little school kids off to visit the goats and go to see what goodies Marcus has in stock to bring along to Salvo Fair 2009 at Knebworth. When we go through the gates, I am visually bombarded and I realise how hard to it is for dealers to decide which of all the stock to bring along to fairs and exhibitions. And then once they have decided, shifting things around to get to the lucky items, and then loading them up, takes Herculean effort. One of his first comments is that 'obviously if somebody wants to buy something before the summer that I was planning to bring along, I'll have to sell it to them'.

There are lots of pallets of stone flooring outside, and stacks of timber flooring inside, that Marcus will bring samples of along. Then I spot some model village cottages. He explains that they are early 1930's and from a West Lake District coastal model village. He bought them through another dealer. There are 8 big houses, 1 chapel and 3 small cottages. They are 'Cromwellian' style, made from composition stone inside, but decorated externally with real stone roof tiles, and real pieces of oak for the timber stud frames. Each of the big houses lives on a pallet, is about 3ft high and 4ft long and very heavy. He almost sold them last summer to a lady from a Hampshire pile. Marcus decides that he may be able to bring along a few houses for the central avenue at Salvo. . . result! He is really hoping to find a home for the whole lot together.

Just behind the houses is a Coalbrookdale cast iron fountain that I recognise from the Olliff website. It has three dolphins intertwined propping up a plate with their tails. Marcus and I have a quick discussion about dolphins, which is what lots of people seem to call fishy looking things on garden ornament. But these dolphins have scales and big pouty lips, and are definitely not mammals! The fish have lovely big heads and there's lots of moss, which people always like. Hopefully this will make it up to Knebworth too.

Inside the warehouse is a hotch potch of cabinets full of antique door hardware, grand chimneypieces, hob grates, simple fireplaces, some bathroom gear, lots of quirky furniture and wooden flooring. Marcus will almost definitely be bringing a few fireplaces with him to the fair, some furniture and he has a collection of five 1930's bevelled edged mirrors that will be making an appearance.






















Above: Coalbrookdale fountain of three fish £4,800






















Above: Matching pair of mid-late Victorian Lion door knockers, bronze with original strickers £750 for the pair






















Above: Georgian front door rim lock with original keep and key, 12ins long £800 (has been polished)






















Above: 1780 - 1790 Georgian chimneypiece of white statuary marble with Sienna and Portor marble ingrounds £15,000. Georgian 'hour glass' hob grate, not original to chimneypiece, £1500.






















Above: Late Victorian cast iron decorative wash stand with original mirror, tiles and towel rail and taps £2,200.






















Above: Pair of lions, made from cast fired brick, from about 1900. £1,800 for the pair.






















Above: Marcus Olliff in the warehouse: What is it they say about boys and never growing up!

- Olliff's
- Salvo Fair

How does the Baroque grab you?

Above: Ewer depicting the Triumph of Neptune. Vase, Massimiliano Soldani Benzi (1656-1740), Florence, About 1721, Bronze, Museum no. A.18-1959 The vase was a typically Baroque form of decoration. This example is one of a pair of ornamental bronze ewers on a marine theme. It borrows elements from earlier printed designs, but combines form and ornament so that the figural decoration seems to form the structure of the ewer itself.


Above: View of the interior of a shop selling export wares. Possibly the Netherlands, 1680-1700, Gouache on paper, mounted on a wooden panel, Museum no. P.35-1926. Intended as fan leaf, this shows a shop dealing in export wares. More fantasy than fact, it combines objects from all over Asia, including Japanese lacquer furniture, Chinese porcelain and red wares, small ivory devotional sculptures, Indian chintzes and Turkish or Persian paintings. Europeans were clearly fascinated by these exotic goods.


Above: Red stoneware coffee pot Meissen porcelain factory, Meissen, 1710-13, Red stoneware ('Böttger' stoneware), Inscribed '132 R' (an inventory number for the 'Brown Saxon' wares at the 'Japanese Palace'), Museum no. C.261&2-2006. Rulers all over Europe established special manufactories with the aim of discovering the secret of true porcelain. Johann Friedrich Böttger, working in Dresden for Augustus the Strong, first managed to produce this red stoneware in 1707, but it took him another two years to create porcelain. His stoneware is similar to Chinese redwares.


V&A London UK - A NEW exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum celebrates the baroque, the word itself stemming from the French for a pearl of irregular shape. Nigel Llewellyn notes in the V&A catalogue, the baroque church – with music, paint, sculpture, architecture, vestments, metalwork, sacred lighting and incense – was, the spiritual and temporal setting for what was a multimedia performance, intended to appeal through all the senses to the intellect, the heart and the very soul. Even secular baroque was endowed by the hand of God through papal, royal and noble patronage.

Joanna Norman, the curator, concentrates on trade, technique, theatre and materials, at the expense of passion, patronage and art. Considering the amount of baroque art in the V&A and throughout Britain the exhibition is, I felt, a bit sparse on the exhibit front. I was expecting to be knocked out by heaps and heaps of bling. Baroque means overwhelming bling. Decoration which does not merely passively ooze ostentation, but reaches out, grabs you by both ears and rubs your senses in it. Does this exhibiton do that? Not really. Perhaps it is too tasteful, too intellectual, too restrained - not enough of a visual feast. Baroque is the most sensual of all art styles, but I did not feel blown away by baroque sensuality when I visited.

Here is what the V&A web site notes:

The First Global Style
Baroque was the first style to have a significant worldwide impact. It spread from Italy and France to the rest of Europe. Then it travelled to Africa, Asia, and South and Central America via the colonies, missions and trading posts of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and other Europeans. The style was disseminated through the worldwide trade in fashionable goods, through prints, and also by travelling craftsmen, artists and architects.
Chinese carvers worked in Indonesia, French silversmiths in Sweden, Italian furniture makers in France. Sculpture was sent from the Philippines to Mexico as well as Spain. London-made chairs went all over Europe and across the Atlantic. The French royal workshops turned out luxury products in the official French style that were both desired and imitated by fashionable society across Europe. But Baroque also changed as it crossed the world, adapting to new needs and local tastes.

Art & Performance
Baroque art did not stand shyly by, hoping to be noticed. Paintings, sculpture and decorative arts swirled with vigorous action and strong feelings. Figures have a sense of realistic immediacy, as if they had been stopped in mid- action. Facial expression, pose, gesture and drapery all played a part in the drama. Human figures played a leading role in all the various art forms, from painting and architecture through to sledges and tableware. Allegorical, sacred and mythological figures took over the whole work, turning it into a drama in which the actors strove to convey particular messages and to engage the emotions of the viewer. These figures were put into the service of both faith and dynastic ambition - in emotionally wrought religious paintings, and in heroic portraits of rulers, their heads held high above a mass of billowing drapery.

Architecture & Performance
Baroque buildings were dynamic and dramatic. They used the language of ancient Greek and Roman architecture but broke its strict rules. Facades were full of movement, columns were twisted, and ground plans were composed of curves and ovals. Inside, painted ceilings seem to open to the sky, and hidden windows illumined domes and altars.
All these devices were meant to convey particular meanings and emotions. The great curved colonnades outside St Peter's in Rome made actual the church's embrace; the repeated elements on the endless facades of Baroque palaces signalled absolute power. Baroque architecture was pioneered in papal Rome by Pietro da Cortona, Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini. The new style was vigorous and imaginative but never out of control. Borromini's oval ground plans were based on a dynamic geometry of triangles and circles. The same geometry lay behind the city plans of Baroque Rome.

Marvellous Materials
A fascination with physical materials played a central role in the Baroque style.
Virtuoso art objects made of rare and precious substances had long been valued. They were often kept in special rooms or cabinets, alongside natural history specimens, scientific instruments, books, documents and works of art. But in the Baroque period - with the birth of modern science and the opening up of the world beyond Europe - there was an increasingly serious interest in the nature and meaning of these exotic materials. Rarities such as East Asian porcelain and lacquer became fashionable in interior decoration and were imitated in Europe. Some of the rarest materials were believed to have the very useful capacity to detect poison. Among them were the newly invented ruby glass (which contained real gold) and rhinoceros horn, which also had the sexual connotations it still carries in some cultures today.

From 4 April to 19 July 2009

V&A Baroque exhibition

Salvo Fair 2009: Star of the show!

Beyond France are based in Gloucestershire and run by a mother and daughter team, Maud and Olivia Lomberg. They will be exhibiting at Salvo Fair in June for the second time and bringing more of their vintage Hungarian linen.

They will also be bringing along decorative barn stars made by the Amish communities of Pennsylvania. The metal and wooden stars are created using recycled old tin and wooden roofing. The stars vary in size from 23cm to 110cm and cost from £23 upwards.

According to The Artistic Gardener, the barn star originated approximately 300 years ago with religious refugees (which included Amish and Mennonites who are commonly referred to as Pennsylvania Dutch). They started by painting geometric symbols such as the hex sign and have evolved into multi-dimensional stars. Originally they were painted directly onto barns, but since the 1970's, craftspeople have begun using roofing materials to make them. After 1990 thin sheets of steel started being used. Unfinished ones tend to rust and have become popular as decoration. The barn star was referred to as a symbol of good luck to farmers and each colour has a significance.

The Amish communities in America abide strictly by the word of the bible and try to live as their 16th century ancestors did in Europe. They do not use cars and modern technology and embrace old fashioned crafts such as blacksmithing, quilt making, carpentry and joinery.

- Beyond France
- Artsitic Gardener website: More info on barn stars

Gothic plant stand

reuse of the week

Fe26 is a company set up by Nick Page, using his background in sculpture. Nick said, "I work from my studio in Manchester. My speciality is bringing together salvaged objects and materials to give them a new life. Sometimes functional, sometimes purely decorative.
I also work to commission. If you have something you don't want to part with, but which is no longer useful, contact me to see what can be done with it."


Above: A plant stand made from salvaged cast iron stair parts and recycled wood.


Above: A Gothic reuse plant stand


Above: A small scale example of Nick Page's handcrafted Gothic plant stand


fe26

Try before you buy

At a recent Lapada conference interior designer Lady Henrietta Spencer-Churchill gave an interesting piece of advice, "One very important service dealers could offer is to allow a client to try a piece in situ as it is amazing how many people cannot visualise what it would look like in their home. It can also be very useful for a dealer to work as a team with an interior designer, perhaps by visiting the decorator's project to get an idea of the tastes and style of the client. Some clients are moving house and might need to change their style to fit in with a different period of house so dealers could perhaps help by advising a client to swap a piece that fitted into the period of their old house for one better suited to the new one."

Elspeth Thompson in her project to transform an old railway carriage into an eco home shows that this advice is relevant, because much of the furniture was of abnormal proportions due to the strange shape and size of the carriages. Elspeth said, "We found a great table, 103 inches long we were allowed to try it out for a few days to see if its unusual dimensions would suit our living space."