French Antiques
By Helen Costantino Fioratti

Advice to Collectors

By Helen Costantino Fioratti

Collecting antiques is one of the most absorbing hobbies and one that can be continued into old age. As people advance in years and spend more hours at home, it is a great joy to be surrounded by lovely things of the past and whether one collects items of great or of minor monetary value, the thrill of a discovery or of filling a gap in one's collection is an exhilarating experience. Much has already been written on French art and it continues to be explored. An eager student will find a great deal of information to be gleaned if he has the patience to wade through some of the more technical books on the subject.

There are fashions in art as in other fields for what the public wants at a given time may leave a subsequent generation completely cold. This does not mean that the public's taste has improved. It is only a temporary change. In time, the pendulum swings the other way again and some neglected period is rediscovered and appreciated by those who are weary of what they see about them. A contributing factor to the public's tiring of a style of decoration is a reaction against the constant repetition of the use of the same colors, fabrics, and specific pieces of furniture by everyone trying to decorate a room in a given style. After seeing the decoration of the house of some fashionable person, others attempt to make their own resemble it as closely as possible.

During the first three decades of the twentieth century Gothic and Renaissance decorations were the great vogue. Important collections such as that of the Davanzati Palace in Florence, the Bardini, Volpi and the Tolentino collections were sold in New York at public auction and the collectors paid huge prices for the fifteenth and sixteenth century pieces that were offered. One was considered fortunate to possess pieces from these great collections in which the pieces were authentic and of rare quality. In 1930 the famous Figdor Collection was sold in Vienna and aroused such interest that people from all corners of the globe attended the sale. Such pieces being scarce and correspondingly expensive, as well as requiring large, high-ceilinged rooms to set off their beauty, were beyond the reach of the general public. Many could not or did not wish to live in what they considered a museum atmosphere and veered to English furniture, which they found less formal. Simultaneously with the vogue for French Gothic and Italian Renaissance, there was a great interest in Jacobean oak from England.

Since there is never enough good antique furniture in existence to fill the demand, vulgar imitations are produced to give what is naively believed to be the same effect. Some designers try to be original at all costs. When the market is flooded with these ugly interpretations of a given period a reaction against it is sure to follow. So it was when theatres and movie houses, restaurants and apartment house lobbies were decorated in what was believed to be the Renaissance style. Orange-tinted electric light bulbs added to the dreary vulgarity of these hideous and utterly inappropriate halls.

When a reaction set in against so-called heavy, dark, and austere furniture of the French and Italian fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and when even English seventeenth century oak seemed depressing, the public fancy veered to Queen Anne walnut which thereupon became the great fashion. A generation later saw the children of those who had collected Queen Anne turn toward Georgian mahogany and English Regency, which were then considered very smart even in reproductions.