THROUGH THE AGES.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20450, 3 July 1928, Page 10

THROUGH THE AGES.

OLD ENGLAND ON VIEW. EXHIBITION OF TREASURES. THINGS OF RARE BEAUTY. Some weeks ago a number of cars were travelling over English roads, each with detectives guarding them, carrying treasures from private houses up to London, for exhibition in the Grafton GalleneaThis was an exhibition unlike any other that has ever been held. It was arranged by the British Antique Dealers’ Association. a company formed 10 years ago and conducted on the lines of ancient guilda. It is a brotherhood of craft with members all over England- and one or two in Paris and New York. There were over 1400 exhibits, some of them from dealers’ shops, and a certain number from dealers’ private houses which are treasures beyond price, not for sale. It was these lovely things which came guarded like royalty on the road. The detectives patrolling the galleries, _ 15 by day and five by night, kept a special eye on them. A spirit of intense love of beautiful things for their own sake marked the exhibition. Antique dealer is an easy label, and covers a great variety of trades. The real antique dealer is a born artist and idealist. There must be always one or two such in every great firm, to whom “pieces” are more than money, men who hr.ve travelled great distances to see and obtain a precious piece of work. These things were made when craftsmen could spend months fashioning a cup, years carving a cabine’t of choicest wood. Those days have gone for ever, and their lingering beauty marks many an English home which can treasure, as truly beyond price, handwork of the bygone days of a great people. All that can be done now is to hold them up as a merciless standard to the makers of new things. The exhibition, which was bewildering in its variety and scope, was divided into 30 sections. The earliest exhibits were probably a magnificent thirteenth century Bible and an exquisite little carved figure of St. Margaret, made by a fourteenth century ivory worker. The great mass falls in the rich seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the centuries of furniture, tapestry, pottery, gold and silver work. And glass* When a visitor stopped short before a case of Irish glass (says a London paper) he felt he bad never seen glass before. The Chelsea and Bow china groups, too, could give one a positive heartache to think that England made these, and has forgotten how. The pottery and glass alone, which included a case of tiny figures about the size of a pin, were worth walking many miles to see. . The writer adds:—The lesson of it all is this: that what is called taste in furniture, table silver, and pottery is genius of a rare flight. How did a workman centuries ago know that just one shape was right for that chair, for that clock, for that little workbox. for that handleless cup? And the benefit of the exhibition is this: that we can learn, getting our eyes trained so that in future w« shall know what is shoddy and poor, and feel when a thing is reaching out to b« good.