Antiques and potential antiques

Press, 12 July 1980, Page 17

Antiques and potential antiques

The Antique Buyer’s Handbook for Australia. By Peter Cook. Reed, Sydney, 1979. 300 pp. $39.95. (Reviewed by Mervyn Palmer) Antique buyers are generally more aware than they once were of the need to ensure that they are receiving value for the money they invest. When there is such a choice of books on antiques in the market, the same buyers do well to be discriminating in selecting handbooks to guide their enthusiasms. This applies whether they collect for pleasure or for profit. Either way, “The Antique Buyers’ Handbook for Australia” is a winner. This is true even for the enthusiast who lives and collects in New Zealand. Indeed, it is a book that would serve very well for readers and collectors in Britain

for Peter Cook makes numerous and well-considered comparisons between the antique markets in Britain and Australia, especially in an important section of the appendix that deals with values on the basis of prices made at a reasonably representative estate auction in Sussex in 1977. It only needs to be remembered that prices for quality items in almost all the fields illustrated by the auction have risen even further since.

The New Zealand reader can take up this Australian handbook as if it had been specifically written for this country. There are different degrees of emphasis and enthusiasm between one field of collecting and another when one compares Australia and New Zealand, but that is a general observation. Antique collecting has a tremendous following which, at one end, is conservative and dedicated to the pursuit of a highly selective and consistent taste, while at the other end it is questing and changeable, and subject to the pressures of a fashion almost as easily manipulated as in the world of wearing apparel. Experienced collectors will find the book useful particularly because it offers sound information on what might best be described as potential antiques in the era of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, (1890-1940). Peter Cook surveys this field without indulging in any of the myth-making that seems all too often to seize the enthusiast for the early twentieth century. It is valuable to both the experienced collector and the beginner to have descriptive references to items likely to be found in the manner of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Studies of whole periods, valuable in their own way, can leave us with insufficient hard evidence of what the collector may hope to uncover and of the kind of measuring sticks that will make separation of the more worthy from the mediocre items possible. Dealing With silver, the author underlines two areas of study that will

be fruitful for the serious collector. One of these is concerned with how marks are placed on items to meet assay requirements, that is to say the particular places prescribed for pots when compared with tankards or salvers or condiments. This could be called the geography of hall marks as distinct from their identification. The other area of study which is stressed concerns the evidence of period and authenticity provided by the armorial shields applied to many pieces of antique silver. Their styles and the techniques employed to produce them can all add to the support or the refutation of a pedigree. When one may be paying several thousand dollars for a silver salver of a stated period, the ability to detect excellence from second-best and third-rate becomes vital. Peter Cook divides his text into four main sections on glass; ceramics; silver and plated wares; and furniture. In each section he supplies salient historical data in a crisp style that produces a surprisingly clear view of the whole field. This is reinforced with a table of important dates. The material is well designed to give the beginning reader what is most needed without the confusion of excess information. At the same time, the more experienced reader will follow the sections profitably for, apart from having the memory refreshed, one discovers much that is approached from new angles. A short, but worth-while bibliography assists the reader in finding his way through the wealth of available literature on every aspect of antique collecting touched on in the text. The “Handbook” is rich in illustrations, largely drawn from Australian sources. Their quality is high and often ingenious. For example, a coloured plate shows the translucent character of English porcelain by having the shadow of a hand displayed behind the photograhed tea plate through which light is passing.