November 8, 2012 - Auction Central News

RSL’s Dec. 1 auction features Allen Liffman black Americana collection

Ives clockwork Stump Speaker, all original, est. $5,000-$7,000. RSL Auction image.

TIMONIUM, Md. – Anyone who has bought or sold black Americana or finer-quality black-theme toys is likely to know Allen Liffman, a trailblazing dealer in African-American antiques. Over the past 30 years, Liffman has also been an active and enthusiastic collector of rare black Americana, and on Saturday, Dec. 1, RSL Auction Company will have the honor of auctioning his lifetime collection. The 630-lot sale, with Internet live bidding through LiveAuctioneers.com, will also be highlighted by the mechanical bank collections of two esteemed former members of the MBCA – the late Waldo Hutchins III and the late William H. Labelle Sr.

“We had sold a few of Allen Liffman’s black toys in our July 1st auction,” said RSL partner Ray Haradin. “They did so well that Allen decided to consign his entire collection to our December sale. We’re really happy to be handling it. It’s a great collection.”

Clockwork toys from the Liffman consignment include an exceptional Ives Stump Speaker, which Haradin described as “an appropriate toy for a Presidential election year.” Dressed in red and white striped pants and a jacket with tails, the figure is complete with accessory leather bag, umbrella, straw hat and cigar.

Another outstanding Ives toy is the woman Suffragette. Like the Stump Speaker, the Suffragette is in all-original condition. Both toys carry individual estimates of $5,000-$7,000.

Making it an Ives trifecta, an always-popular circa-1885 Sparring Pugilists toy depicts two African-American boxers who punch at each other when the clockwork mechanism is activated. It is expected to make $6,000-$9,000 at auction.

Many desirable Gunthermann clockwork toys with black subjects will be offered. A circa-1910 banjo player sitting on a stool is estimated at $1,400-$1,800, while a ball juggler with a “watermelon” body could realize $1,000-$1,500.

A clockwork toy that Haradin said he has never seen before is a depiction of a black tumbler dressed in a suit and straw hat. The rare Gunthermann production carries a presale estimate of $3,500-$5,500.

The catalog cover lot is a scarce, German-made black-face Jiggs (as in “Jiggs and Maggie”) automaton. Made of papier-mache, cloth and wood, the circa-1910 toy stands 23 inches high and is estimated at $3,500-$5,500.

A whole host of popular comic characters is found in the Liffman collection, including Spic & Span and many other “jigger” toys; Amos & Andy, and Snowflake on Spark Plug. There are also many “generic” types of black toys, e.g. mammies; plus folk art and black ephemera. More than 100 minstrel and other black-theme posters and paintings will be auctioned, with a price range that runs from $300-$3,000.

“There isn’t a type of black memorabilia that Allen Liffman overlooked in his decades of collecting,” said Haradin. “There’s a huge variety, with an emphasis on figural pieces.”

Among the other black-related items Liffman amassed are lawn sprinklers, trade signs, Aunt Jemima advertising and premiums; ceramics, pinball and other games; canes, ventriloquist’s dummies, and humidors, including a rare card player seated on clay pipes, which would hold crossover appeal with collectors of tobacciana and gambling items.

Bank collectors are expected to show keen interest in the sale’s two featured bank collections.

“Both the late Waldo Hutchins III and the late William H. Labelle Sr. were members of the Mechanical Bank Collectors of America, and both had very nice collections. They were veterans of the hobby,” Haradin said. “Bill Labelle did most of his collecting in the 1960s and ’70s, while Waldo Hutchins built his collection mostly in the 1970s and ’80s.”

Cast-iron mechanical banks in the sale are led by a beautiful J. & E. Stevens Girl Skipping Rope, est. $18,000-$25,000; and a blue-dress version of the Kyser & Rex production known as Mammy and Child, with provenance from the Rick Goldstein collection, est. $20,000-$30,000. An exquisite J. & E. Stevens Darktown Battery bank, with its popular depiction of African-American baseball players, is entered with a presale estimate of $7,000-$9,000.

More than 230 still banks will be available at the auction, including some very desirable spelter and cast-iron forms. An appealing polychrome-painted cast iron Football Player, replicating a helmeted player in primitive-style uniform with football held overhead, would be a prize in any collection. It’s expected to score $2,000-$3,000 on auction day. There will be many coveted architectural banks offered in the sale, as well, including a Building with Belfry, est. $2,500-$3,500. The spelter selection includes an unusual bank in the form of a cigar-smoking black boy standing on a ball, and several rare non-bank treasures – among them, a figural black “dandy” watch holder.

A prestigious circa-1890 American toy, the 22-inch-long Ives Cutter Sleigh depicts a handsome “walking” horse whose action cleverly simulates pulling a sleigh. The example in RSL’s Dec. 1 auction is one of only four such toys known to exist. It is expected to command $30,000-$50,000.

Many other excellent toys will be up for bid, including a pristine circa-1906 Hubley Santa Sleigh, est. $3,000-$5,000; horse-drawn American tin, cast-iron and European automotive toys, and a few bell toys.

RSL’s Saturday, Dec. 1 auction will begin at 10 a.m. Eastern Time. For additional information on any item in sale, call Ray Haradin at 412-343-8733, Leon Weiss at 917-991-7352, or Steven Weiss at 212-729-0011. E-mail raytoys@aol.com or geminitoys@earthlink.net.

View the fully illustrated catalog and sign up to bid absentee or live via the Internet at www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

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View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Antiquities-Saleroom to auction ancient cache Nov. 16

Mayan polychrome cylinder, Kerr Rollout 8277, Mayan Territories, Mexico, circa 600-900 AD. Estimate $15,000-$20,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

DENVER – Antiquities-Saleroom, a subsidiary of Artemis Gallery, will conduct their next online auction, Friday, Nov. 16, at 10 a.m. MST. Showcasing lots from Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Middle East, India, China and the Far East, and the pre-Columbian Americas, all items in this auction have been legally acquired and are legal to sell. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.

“We pride ourselves in full compliance with UNESCO and various national treaties and we feel that is the only way to ensure confidence in our clients. All items offered for sale are guaranteed to be authentic and not ‘in the style of’ any ancient culture, or your money back,” said Teresa Dodge, co-founder and managing director of Antiquities-Saleroom.

According to Geoffrey VanderWoude, Antiquities-Saleroom’s latest hire and a graduate student of Classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, perusing this latest auction offering is like taking a tour of the art of the ancient world. “It’s an amazing array of art that one would normally only expect to see in the highest-end galleries or museums. This auction selection includes spectacular pieces I would never get to see or handle in any of my courses,” said VanderWoude.

Highlights to the Egyptian selection include an Egyptian granite lower torso of a striding king whose identity was erased from history when the inscription on the reverse was deliberately obscured in ancient times; two exceptional mummy masks – one from the New Kingdom, the other from the Late Dynastic/Ptolemaic Period; an Egyptian faience amulet of Sekhmet; an incredible Egyptian polychrome stucco head of a lioness; an Egyptian gilded head of an ibis with Christie’s provenance and a selection of painted Egyptian cartonnage panels.

Among the fine offerings from the Classical and ancient near-eastern civilizations include rare and beautiful stirrup jars of great King Agamemnon and the Mycenaean’s; an exceedingly fine Babylon cuneiform biscuit – King Nebuchadnezzar II incised in translated cuneiform documenting taxes in the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II; Athenian Red Figure vessels, including an Attic red figure cup by the Heraion painter; a portion of the published Byron Farwell Collection – excavated from a necropolis in Ordona; an Etruscan terracotta votive of a youth, ex-Christie’s; and a Greek Campanian red-figure bell krater.

From the ancient Roman Empire, the auction highlights include an exquisite matching pair of bronze eagle chariot fittings; an ex-Christie’s Roman marble sarcophagus fragment and a huge Roman marble bust of a Roman citizen, who took a risk making his business in the provincial empire, along with interesting pieces of Roman glass, remarkably designed and well-preserved.

Among the Indian and Indo-Greek selections includes a Greek marble head of a woman – a product of Alexander the Great’s conquest of India, and an intricate paintings in a Mahabharata / Ramayana Hindi book from the 19th century.

Highlights from China, Indo-China and Japan include bronze, sandstone and stucco busts of Buddha; an archaic Chinese Zhou Dynasty ritual food vessel, bronze bells and mirrors; numerous Khmer bronze examples, including a Khmer palanquin bronze hook in the shape of a dragon; a bronze votive yablet of Buddha and a published Japanese Haniwa terracotta figure.

Finally, a large number of exceptional pieces from the ancient Americas complete the auction where you will find pre-Columbian art of the Nazca, Moche, Chancay, Inca and Aztecs. A few of the major highlights include a rare Valdivian stone fish palette, whose provenance includes being sold by Sotheby’s; a Nazca polychrome killer whale vessel; a Panamanian gold openwork lizard pendant weighing in at 76.5 grams; a superb Veracruz standing warrior; an ex-Sotheby’s Colima ceremonial dish that has a tree with tropical birds perched on it; and one of the most outstanding Mayan pieces you will find – a Mayan polychrome cylinder – Kerr rollout 8277, which is not just a beautiful piece, but an extremely important part of Mayan history.

“Every auction lot starts at the price, at which it can sell, with no hidden reserves,” said Dodge.

For details phone Dodge directly at 720-936-4282 or email AntiquitiesSaleroom@gmail.com.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

Attic red figure cup by the Heraion Painter, Athens, circa 6th century BC. Estimate $28,000-$35,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Large Indo Greek marble head of a eoman, Indus Valley, Hellenistic Period (4th ventury BC). Estimate $15,000-$20,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Matching pair of Roman bronze chariot fittings, circa 1st century BC / AD. Estimate $5,000-$7,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Roman marble bust of a man, Turkey, Roman Empire, circa 2nd-3rd century AD. Estimate $15,000-$20,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Babylon cuneiform biscuit, King Nebuchadnezzar II, circa 630-562 BC. Estimate $4,000-$5,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Veracruz standing warrior, Pre-Columbian, Remojadas style, circa 300-900-AD. Estimate: $6,000-$9,000. Image courtesy Antiquities-Saleroom.com.

Kennedy’s to auction estates of prominent citizens Nov. 16-17

Among the antique furniture is this seven-piece Victorian walnut and rosewood grained parlor suite in red velvet. Estimate: $1,000-$4,000. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

BATESVILLE, Ark. – Kennedy’s Auction Service of Selmer, Tenn., will sell the estates of John Quincy Wolf and Alexander C. McGinnis on Nov. 16-17. Friday’s auction will consist of a large collection of estate gold and silver coins. Saturday’s auction will consist glass and antique collections. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.

John Quincy Wolf was head of the English department at Southwestern at Memphis, a noted author and music historian. Alexander Clyde McGinnis was a real estate broker, historian and former supervisor of the Farmers Home Administration in Independence County, Ark.

A few examples of the fine coins and currency in Friday’s auction are a 1795 Braided Hair silver dollar; pre-1935 U.S. mint gold coins; more than 500 gold pesos; Lafayette silver dollars; a collection of U.S. bank notes including a Batesville, Ark., $10 note; U.S. silver coins, more than $500 face value; foreign gold coins; uncirculated rolls; collector coin set books; and U.S. mint proof sets. An 18K gold Rolex Day Date watch will also be sold.

Saturday’s auction will consist of the Wolf and McGinnis families’ glass and antique collections. The auction will include Persian rugs, antique furniture, cut glass, art glass, sterling silver; Civil War guns, medals, rare Indian artifacts, World War II German weapons, clock collection and antique toys.

John Quincy Wolf Jr. was born in Batesville, Ark., on May 14, 1901, son of John Quincy Wolf Sr. and Adele Crouch Wolf. He was known as Quincy to distinguish him from his banker father. Wolf earned a bachelor’s degree from Arkansas College (now Lyon College) in 1922. In 1923, he received an MA in English at Vanderbilt University. Wolf married fellow Arkansas College employee Bess Millen of Malvern In 1931. Shortly thereafter, Bess and Quincy began collecting antique glass and furniture. The couple settled in Memphis, where he would spend the rest of his career on the faculty of Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College) and where the couple would raise their two daughters. Wolf completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins in 1946. He compiled a library of ballads and folklore from the Ozarks that remains without equal.

Alexander Clyde McGinnis, born June 28, 1916 was president of the Arkansas FFA and a graduate of the University of Arkansas. His first job was supervisor of the Farm Credit Administration in Harrison, Ark. On April 12, 1941 he married his college sweetheart, Marian Liles of Fort Smith, Ark. Going into the Army in 1942, he was a member of the 505th Ordnance Company, and served with the 3rd Armored Division of the American First Army. Clyde was a real estate broker, news writer, columnist and former supervisor of the Farmers Home Administration in Independence County, Ark. McGinnis helped organize the Independence County Historical Society and was editor of the society’s award-winning publication for 30 years. He was on the board of the Arkansas Historical Association and was state president in 1966. McGinnis began a lifetime of collecting as a young FFA student with Indian relic collecting as one of his projects.

For details contact Kennedy’s Auction Service at 731-645-5001. The auctioneer notes that this is only a partial listing of the inventory. Visit LiveAuctioneers.com to view complete catalog with photographs and to place Internet live bidding.

View the fully illustrated catalog and register to bid absentee or live via the Internet as the sale is taking place by logging on to www.LiveAuctioneers.com.

ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE

1795 Flowing Hair Bust silver dollar. Estimate: $1,500-$4,000. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

1834 Classic Head $2.50 gold piece. Estimate: $400-$1,100. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

Loetz Phänomen Genre 29 vase, 8 inches, boldly etched ‘Loetz / Austria’ on the base, iridescent silver drizzle over gold. Estimate: $500-$1,500. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

Civil War Colt Model 1860 Army revolver, manufactured in 1862. Estimate: $1,000-$6,000. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

South Jersey free-blown water pitcher, light green glass with applied spiral threading, applied solid handle with crimped end, broken pontil, 10 7/8 inches tall x 9 inches diameter. Estimate: $1,000-$6,000. Kennedy’s Auction Service.

Israeli president opens new Jewish museum in Moscow

Israel's President Shimon Peres addressing a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Jerusalem. Image by Michael Thaidigsmann. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

MOSCOW (AFP) – Israeli President Shimon Peres on Thursday opened a major new Jewish museum in Moscow that tells the story of Jews in Russia from czarist times through the horror of the Holocaust to the present day.

Peres and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov opened the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which is based around Moscow’s stunning Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage, designed in 1926 by constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov.

“There is no museum like this,” Peres said at the opening ceremony. “This is great historical evidence of the greatness of man but also his weaknesses.”

President Vladimir Putin hoped the new museum would become “a place for dialogue and agreement between peoples,” said a statement read at the ceremony by Lavrov.

“Any attempt to review the contribution of our country to WWII victory or to deny the Holocaust is not just a cynical lie but a forgetting of history,” Putin’s statement added.

The building was handed over by the Russian authorities to Moscow’s Jewish community in 1999 after it stopped being used as a bus depot. Its redevelopment as a museum has been designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates.

Before it was turned into the Jewish museum, the building also served up to last year as the temporary home of the Garazh modern art exhibition center of Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich’s partner Darya Zhukova.

The galleries aim to evoke the lives of Jews in Russia since the late 19th century using historic exhibits, letters and also 13 hours of video testimony recorded with Russian Jews living all over the world.

High-tech multimedia rooms aim to recreate the sights, sound and even smells of the past. By contrast, a memorial gallery offers complete silence where visitors can remember the tumultuous history of Jews in Russia.

Jews were repressed in czarist times when starting in the late 18th century they were largely forced to live in an area of the western Russian empire known as the “Pale,” where many lived in impoverished towns known as shtetls.

Hitler’s armies in World War II then occupied most of today’s Belarus, Ukraine as well as western Russia, leaving Soviet Jews exposed to the full brunt of the Nazi killing regime.

Heavily targeted during the 1930s purges, Jews suffered even after World War II in the USSR under Stalin’s rule, especially when the purported discovery of a so-called “doctors’ plot” against him unleashed a wave on anti-Semitic hysteria.

Nonetheless Jews have over centuries made a huge contribution to Russian culture, ranging from the writer Sholem Aleichem, the Vitebsk-born artist Marc Chagall or the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the Stalin camps.

Of major interest are newly declassified documents relating to the fate of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary in World War II and them mysteriously disappeared in the Soviet prison system.

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

Parisian charged with selling fake artwork by M.F. Husain

Prolific Indian artist M.F. Husain, who died in June 2011 at the age of 95. This work has been released into the public domain by its author, Ayaz360, at the English Wikipedia project.

PARIS – A Parisian has been charged with flooding the market with forged paintings of India’s most famous and controversial modern artist, M.F. Husain, a newspaper reported Thursday.

The 32-year-old man, identified as Sofiane B., was arrested last month following a complaint from a city art dealer, Paris daily Le Parisien said.

The suspected forger was charged with a number of offences including importing forged art works and placed under judicial supervision on bail of 80,000 euros.

Based in the working-class northern quarter of Saint-Ouen, where the city’s most famous flea market is located, Sofiane B. reportedly sold two paintings he claimed were works of Husain for 130,000 euros ($165,000) to an art dealer.

Maqbool Fida Husain, dubbed the “Indian Picasso,” was a former Bollywood poster artist whose career took off after Indian independence in 1947.

He was forced to flee his country in 2006 after death threats from Hindu extremists and died in London in June last year at the age of 95.

Hindu ultraconservatives including the regional Shiv Sena party in Husain’s home state of Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, denounced his works as pornographic, blasphemous and an affront to national values.

The controversy over his naked depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses, however, failed to dampen the enthusiasm of overseas collectors.

In 2008, one of his paintings, influenced by Hindu epic The Mahabharata, fetched $1.6 million at Christie’s in London.

The Paris art dealer to whom Sofiane B. had sold the paintings became suspicious when he contacted the London auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s to sell them and they cast doubts on their authenticity, according to Le Parisien.

The seller then asked the dealer to proceed to Dubai, where Husain spent the last years of his life and had a studio, to authenticate the works.

He even gave the dealer 15 other watercolors purportedly done by Husain and they too turned out to be fakes.

Paris police suspect Sofiane B. had been selling fake Husain works around the world since 2004.

Husain’s departure from India followed attacks on his home and galleries showing his work, death threats and even an $11.5 million bounty on his head.

He said in 2008 he was homesick and longed to return to Mumbai, where he trained at the Sir J.J. School of Art, but accused the government of not being prepared to provide him with the protection he needed.

Husain, who often went barefoot and was once thrown out of a Mumbai private members’ club for not wearing shoes, accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010, admitting that his advancing years made it impossible to fight his detractors.

Indian ministers had tried unsuccessfully to tempt him home.

The artist always said that nudity symbolised purity, insisting that naked goddesses were a long-established part of the country’s iconography dating back to antiquity.

Many saw him as a victim of the fierce communalism that gripped India in the 1990s and early 2000s and of the socially conservative country’s tough censorship laws.

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

Furniture Specific: Mess hall duty

Closing the vertical blinds even partially, as illustrated on the right side of this photo, eliminates a large amount of the direct sunlight.

In many traditional homes, and in many of the “other” kind, which seems to include mine, there often appears to be a preoccupation with the dining room. Other parts of the house are important, but the eatery is special. The living room is usually reserved for entertaining important guests – no kids, no fun, no food and no pets allowed. But the dining room actually has a real purpose. And it also excludes most of the things forbidden in the Living Room with the exception of the part about food.

Since dedicated eating space is such a relatively new innovation in American architecture and since the idea of all matching furnishings in that space is even newer, it is interesting to note how much tradition and importance have been assigned to the space and the furniture. Even the area designated for dining in Thomas Jefferson’s masterpiece, Monticello, was not set with a permanent table. Small tables were arranged from storage along the wall to accommodate the correct number of diners for each event. After Jefferson, things got a lot more ritualized in America. In fact during the mid-Victorian period in America the Dining Room accumulated so much symbolism and mystery that the former Chair of the Office of Advanced Studies at the Winterthur Museum, Kenneth L. Ames, wrote a book in 1992 to help us make some sense of it all. The book is titled Death in the Dining Room & Other Tales of Victorian Culture, published by Temple University Press. Despite the daunting title it is an easy, entertaining and rewarding read and actually sheds light on several complicated Victorian customs, rituals and traditions. It also explains a lot about my grandparents who were born in the early 1880s.

But most of us don’t have an example of the magnificently symbolic sideboard made by A.G. Fourdinois in Paris in 1851 and exhibited in the Great Exhibition in London the same year. We don’t even have the American version, made by Bulkley & Herter, which was shown at the American Crystal Palace in New York in 1853. It’s just as well. We generally wouldn’t have neither the time to study the symbolism nor the energy to clean all the majestic little “dustable” places incorporated into the designs.

What many of us do have, however, is a room, or at least some space, reserved for those eating occasions that require a more formal atmosphere than the kitchen bar or the breakfast nook. It may not be fancy. It may not be expensive. The furniture is probably not what we would see at the White House or even at a smart private club, but it is ours and we probably spent more on it than we care to admit. So now the problem is to take care of it so we don’t have to spend that outrageous amount of money again before we are ready.

Here are some general thoughts about maintaining your dining room furniture on a regular basis. Most of it is common sense coupled with a little elbow grease mixed in with some people skills.

Other than water, the greatest enemy of your fine furniture, dining or otherwise, is strong light – primarily sunlight. We all love to see the sunbeams twinkling brilliantly across the polished surfaces in our dark caves, but learn to think of those sunbeams as laser guns or atomic blasters. While they may deliver a warm mellow glow to your skin after a day outside, they will do the opposite to the color in your antique dining table – and chairs – and sideboard – and corner cupboard. Over a period of years exposure to exterior light from a window or sliding door will seriously drain the intensity of the color of the wood in your furniture. This is especially true of harsh direct sunlight but it even includes incidental light that manages to pry its way in through a north window.

One of the most obvious things you can do is to pull the drapes on the offending window or door. Yes, it will be darker but you aren’t in that room very often for very long. When you are not there close up the room. Open it when you need the space and feel free to turn on the electric lights. That source of light, while not ideal, is not as harmful as sunlight.

Aside from light source protection one of the one simplest but most beneficial things you can do for your dining set is to rotate it. No matter how careful you are with light pollution and exposure to heating and air-conditioning vents, the components of a set of furniture eventually will start to exhibit minor differences in color, cleanliness and wear based almost exclusively on how the components are arranged in their space and how they are used. The backs of chairs exposed to a window for many years will eventually fade, while the fronts of the chairs on the opposite side of the table will too – not to mention the sides of the table if it is not covered. And if you use your set on a regular basis and the same people sit in the same place every time, sooner or later the location of the sloppy eaters becomes apparent from the condition of the table itself, the tablecloth, the chair and the carpet. Pick a single date in the year, like your birthday or the first day of spring – anything as long as you are consistent from year to year – and use that day to completely rotate the orientation of your dining room set – table, chairs, carpet, china cabinet, art work – the works. Just keep telling yourself “change is good.” The major caveat for this operation is not to attempt to move all this stuff by yourself. Sure you can move the chairs and the artwork and the plant stand but it takes at least two people to move a full-size dining table. Do the same for a china cabinet and sideboard, especially if you are moving them out of the room to rotate the area rug under the table.

One final note about light and fading: Placing objects of decoration on a tabletop for an extended period of time can often lead to undesirable consequences. In the case of the silver or mirrored tray placed in the center of the table to hold the magnificent artificial flower arrangement, even if you rotate the table and everything else in the dining room, the same spot in the center of the table is covered. Years from now when you examine the bare table in adequate light you will see the dark shadow of the sheltered spot, coincidentally shaped exactly like the tray. To a lesser extent the same holds true for wide-bodied candle stands, epergnes and pottery. Be mindful of what you place on the table and for how long you leave it there.

One of the best acquisitions you can make for your dining room table is a set of custom-made high quality table pads. You can mess around for years with rubber sheets, quilts, blankets, tablecloths, placemats and all the other low-cost substitutes, but eventually you will grow tired of the bother and disgusted with the inadequate results. When that happens call a good furniture restoration artist (you should know one anyway) and ask what brand of table pad he or she recommends and who sells them. It will be easier than you think. In most cases the company will send a local rep to your house to measure the table and show you samples of the bottom suede or velvet lining and let you pick your color of top vinyl covering. After placing the order your pads normally arrive in about two weeks. Good ones will come with latches or locks that hold individual sections of the pad together while they are in place on the tabletop. But do not leave the pads installed permanently. They should be stored in their original box in a horizontal position when not in use.

And speaking of storage – are the extra expansion leaves of your table standing up in the hall closet (bedroom closet, kitchen cabinet) awaiting their next use? The longer they lean against the wall in the closet the more likely they are to develop a bad case of “no longer straight and flat”. In other words they will warp, just like any long board or piece of plywood standing on edge against a wall. The leaves should be wrapped loosely in thin blanket and store horizontally (along with the table pads) under your bed, out of the way.

Finally you should produce a filmed inventory of most of your household belongings, but especially of your expensive and better furniture and antiques. If you can afford it have this done by a professional who probably has better equipment than you do and who can edit and label your final product. Keep this inventory in a safe deposit box along with the professional appraisals you have had done of your better stuff items.

There are lots of other things you need to be doing on regular basis for and to your furniture but those are for another time.

Send your comments, questions and pictures to Fred Taylor at P.O. Box 215, Crystal River, FL 34423 or email them to him at info@furnituredetective.com.

Visit Fred’s website at www.furnituredetective.com. His book How To Be a Furniture Detective is available for $18.95 plus $3 shipping. Send check or money order for $21.95 to Fred Taylor, P.O. Box 215, Crystal Fiver, FL, 34423.

Fred and Gail Taylor’s DVD, Identification of Older & Antique Furniture ($17 + $3 S&H) is also available at the same address. For more information call 800-387-6377, fax 352-563-2916, or info@furnituredetective.com. All items are also available directly from his website.

ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE

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