The European Field
By
Professor Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S.
I
OF THE PLENITUDE AND INTOXICATING EFFECT OF EUROPEAN ANTIQUE-SHOPS—OF THE LARGE SHOPS AND OF THE SMALL ONES SMELLING OF CHEESE-RIND—AND OF THE NUMEROUS STORIES WHICH ARE USED AS ENCOURAGEMENT FOR AMATEUR ANTIQUE-HUNTERS
Publisher’s Note: Charles A. Doolittle, F.R.A.C.S., because of his wide knowledge of European antiques, was made Furniture Polisher to King Ferdinand of Bulgaria early in 1913, retaining his high position for several years. He was decorated with the Order of the Holy Quail, first class, for exemplary bravery during the Rumanian attack on Tirnova, when for three consecutive days, under heavy shell fire, he remained under a Louis Quatorze sofa, polishing it with as much care as could have been used under normal conditions.
Whatever one’s bent in antiques may be, he will find it encouraged in Europe to a point undreamed of in America. Antique-shops are as plentiful in every large European city as were saloons in South Boston not long ago; and their contents, in many cases, have an equally intoxicating effect.
Uncultured persons who go into them with the intention of purchasing just one small Louis XV eggcup will frequently emerge with increased learning and laden down with a Provençal dough-trough, a pair of stirrup-irons, half a dozen French prints, an old leather purse, four pewter plates, and a large painting of a vaseful of wild flowers.
The streets of Paris are punctuated with shop-signs which read ANTIQUITÉS; the streets of Rome and Florence and Milan and Venice are spotted with ANTICHITA signs; just around every corner in Vienna and Berlin is an ANTIQUITÄTEN shop. The word for antiques is approximately the same in all languages, as a result, of course, of an international agreement between antique-dealers who wish the tourists to enjoy their travels.
The shops start in the expensive shopping districts with the large, impressive, brightly lighted establishments where important-looking salesmen remove individual treasures from safes and cupboards, exhibit them proudly and learnedly, and quote prices on them that cause a pale green flush to steal over the face of the unsuspecting quester after antiques.
They end in the little side streets with small dark shops smelling of a peculiar blend of cheese-rind, fish-glue and unfinished subways, in which the pallid proprietors wait with old-world patience for customers to come and fight indefinitely to get a four-dollar article reduced to sixty-five cents.
The latter shops, of course, are of the greatest importance to the itinerant or catch-as-catch-can antique-hunters; for it is only in them that one stumbles on something rare and costly that has lain hidden in a shop-corner, regarded by the shopkeeper as a mere piece of junk—something, for example, like one of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels or a piece of genuine fifteenth-century arras tapestry or one of Henry the Eighth’s marriage certificates or a coal scuttle which was used by Madame du Barry—something that can be bought for a dollar and a quarter and sold for ten thousand.
It is scarcely necessary to point out that the antique-dealer is usually thoroughly conversant with the value of his possessions, that being his chief business in life. Still, he sometimes makes a mistake, as do such highly respected oracles as Senator William E. Borah, David Lloyd George, and Benito Mussolini; and it should be the aim of every true antique-hunter to encourage him to make all that he can.
Wherever one moves about in European antique-circles, one is apt to hear the story of the helpless amateur who stumbled into a Marseilles antique-shop and bought an amber necklace for twenty-five dollars. When he got it home, he took it to a large jewelry shop to have it valued. The jeweler, after examining each bead with great care, offered its owner a thousand dollars for it. This aroused the owner’s suspicions, so he took the beads to an expert and thereupon learned that each bead was engraved N à J in very small letters, and that it was a string that Napoleon had given to Madame Pompadour as a little token of his esteem.
Some of those who tell the story declare that the lucky owner sold the beads for ten thousand dollars. Others say that he sold them for twenty-five thousand dollars. The most enthusiastic antiquers claim that he received fifty thousand for the string. But a little matter of fifteen or twenty-five thousand dollars should be nothing to amateurs in antiques, especially when such sums are merely matters of conversation and cost the converser nothing at all.
The foregoing story, and the thousands of others like it that constantly go the rounds in Paris and Rome and other antique centres, are all true; but certain of the ignorant view them with suspicion. They should never be viewed with suspicion because all the people who tell them almost always state that they happened to friends of personal friends of theirs; and this, as is well known, is always symptomatic of rock-bottom facts.
II
OF THE ULTRA-SATISFYING ANTIQUE-SHOPS OF ITALY—OF THE DASH AND SPIRIT OF ITALIAN WORM-HOLES—OF THE SUPERIOR SHOP-FILLING POWERS OF THE ITALIAN ANTIQUE-DEALERS OVER THAT OF THE FRENCH—AND OF THE MODERN TENDENCY TOWARD CRABBEDNESS IN THE FRENCH DEALERS
Generally speaking, the antique-shops of Italy are more satisfactory than those of any other country because of the fire and verve with which the Italian shopkeepers fight against attempts to make them lower their prices; because of the inventiveness and resource of the ancient Italian furniture artists in turning out the best worm-holes known to science; and because of the enormous number of places where ancient and mediæval art objects can be bought for as little as eight dollars per object—duplicates obtainable from Fifteenth Century craftsmen at a moment’s notice.
A very charming American lady recently declared that of all the Italian cities, Florence was the most fascinating and attractive. She had not, however, been fascinated or attracted by the scenery or the architecture or the churches or the picture galleries. “Why,” she explained, “you can get antiques there at half the prices that you have to pay in Rome and about a quarter of what you have to pay in Paris!”
This fascinating feature is due to the fact that there are so many Cinque Cento artisans still living in Florence. Nevertheless, the French antique-shops are superior in general grace and style to the Italian because the ancient Italian workmen now living in Florence lack a certain dash and spirit which seem to be common to the French—except in the matter of making worm-holes.
The Italian worm-holes stand at the very pinnacle of the worm-hole world; and when an antique Italian workman really exerts himself to worm-hole a piece of oak, the French workman stands aside in reverential amazement. The French workman, however, has the dash.
Before purchasing antiques in Europe, one should acquaint himself with the various brands of dash which may be observed in different sorts of furniture. French furniture dash, for example, is much dashier than Bavarian or Ukrainian dash. Czecho-Slovak dash and Bulgarian dash are quite dissimilar. Subscriptions are even now being taken by the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities to establish classes in furniture dash.†
The average Italian antique-dealer will crowd into a given space, say, four wooden candlesticks made to represent four angels, two or three Venetian glass mirrors, a Savonarola chair, seventeen pieces of china, three wooden chests containing fifty-six square feet of surface and eleven miles of worm-holes, a dozen venerable and tattered altar cloths, made by ancient weavers and embroiderers in Naples in 1919, and a few wrought-iron odds and ends removed from a palace in the purlieus of Pisa by a prominent palace-wrecker.
In the same space the average French dealer seems unable to find room for more than one dough-trough, two pewter plates with the salamander of Francis I done on them in repoussé, a pair of Louis XIV curling-tongs, and a washed-out-looking portrait of a satin-clad and powdered-haired lady whose face has the lop-sided aristocratic appearance that will only be found in true aristocrats or in persons who have been kicked by mules perchance in their early days. And the portraits which are on sale in every Parisian antique-shop are sometimes most valuable because the general unpleasantness of the aristocrats which they represent serves to make every beholder wonder why the French Revolution didn’t start exterminating aristocrats about a hundred years sooner.
At any rate, the superior shop-filling ability of the Italian dealers is one reason why it is far easier to indulge one’s passion for antiqueing in Italy than in France.
A disappointing feature about the French antique-shops is the apparent indifference of the shopkeepers to the attempts of customers to engage them in violent and interesting altercations over the prices of their wares. This is a modern phase of the antique-business and ranks, in France, with such inexplainable matters as why man-sized boys wear little tight knickerbockers that come only halfway down to the knee, and why a Parisian who apparently lives in comfort in his home or a hotel with the thermometer down to forty degrees will shriek with anguish when any one raises a window in a railway compartment in which the temperature is hovering around ninety-four degrees.
In the old days when a Parisian antique-dealer placed a price of fifteen hundred francs on an article, the prospective buyer offered five hundred for it, and then the argument began. The dealer shed tears; swore that his business standing would be shattered if he dropped a centime in price; mentioned his sick wife most touchingly; gave a long history of the antique in question, showing its great value; beat his breast and begged the purchaser not to ruin him; and ended by selling the article for seven hundred francs.
To-day, when a Parisian dealer places a price of fifteen hundred francs on an article and the customer offers five hundred for it, the dealer is more than likely to smile quietly but contemptuously, remark, “M’sieu jests,” and refuse to converse further on the matter. This removes the zest from the proceeding. One does not care to purchase antiques as one purchases collars; one goes elsewhere.
III
OF THE APPROVED METHOD OF DOING BUSINESS WITH AN ITALIAN DEALER—OF THE ARTISTIC DECEPTION OF THE CUSTOMER—OF THE MASTERFUL PROFANITY AND THE UNCONVINCING ASSEVERATIONS OF THE DEALER—AND OF THE ULTIMATE SATISFACTION OF BOTH PARTIES
The purchase of antiques in Italy, in order to be successful, must be attended with enormous amounts of subtlety, gesticulation, swearing, lying, and passion. The proceeding is, or should be somewhat as follows:
The antiquer first locates an antique-shop, which he does by walking along a street until he is struck in the nose by a peculiarly fusty odor, faintly resembling recently disinterred boots, and finds the proprietor sitting in a gloomy corner of the shop writing, or pretending to write, in a ledger and giving an excellent but unconscious imitation of a large spider observing the approach of a juicy bluebottle fly.
The customer greets the proprietor simply but elegantly, and the proprietor, going on with his writing, replies in an apparently perfunctory and preoccupied manner. Then the customer proceeds to look about. He notes without interest the worm-eaten sideboards and chests, the paintings of anæmic bunches of flowers, the bronze mortars and pestles made in Florence, the Venetian mirrors that make the face look as though it had been run through a clothes-wringer, the venerable priests’ vestments and coatments and pantments, and the hanging silver lamps made out of superb tin; and finally his eye lights on, say, a marble plaque of a Pope’s head from a monastery wall.
It has an air, that plaque. He examines it carefully while pretending to scrutinize a small but offensive painting of Saint Mark’s by Moonlight. The buying fever seizes him, and he prepares for action.
“Have you not a pair of beaten-iron candlesticks in the Venetian manner, projecting straight out from the wall?” he asks the proprietor, making gestures like a candlestick. He asks this question in order to provide a smoke-screen for his future movements.
“No, signore,” replies the proprietor gloomily. “We had them, but they were sold yesterday.”
“Ah,” says the customer in disappointment. He starts as though to go; and then, as an afterthought, he picks up a bronze mortar and weighs it meditatively. “This little thing, now,” he ventures. “The price unquestionably is prohibitive, eh?”
“A very fine thing, very old and very fine,” says the dealer, examining it appreciatively. “And very cheap, signore; very cheap. Four hundred lire only, signore.”
The signore laughs loudly and bitterly and turns away with a shudder. “Cheap!” he ejaculates in scornful tones, “Cheap! You mistake me for two millionaires. Madonna! What a price! For such a thing as that good-for-nothing imitation in the corner, that pretended Pope’s head, you would probably charge such an impossible price as one hundred lire!”
“Hah!” says the dealer, staring carefully at the customer. “Hah!” Then he goes over to the corner and looks at the Pope’s head as though he were seeing it for the first time.
“Signore,” he says solemnly, “this is a very fine and very rare piece. It is an historical piece. I will sell it for one tenth of its value.”
“Ah, true?” asks the customer sarcastically. “And what is that, signore?”
“Six hundred lire, signore,” replies the dealer calmly.
“Body of Bacchus!” gasps the customer, as though he had been mortally wounded. “Six hundred lire! Are you mad, signore? It is robbery! The thing is good for nothing! It would be dear at sixty lire!”
“Signore,” declares the dealer earnestly, “your words are an insult. That Pope is worthy of a museum. Look at it, signore! In the large establishments you would pay six thousand lire for it. Signore, I am experienced in the buying and selling of antiques. In selling it at six hundred lire, I am giving it away.”
The customer shakes his head pityingly. “Poor little one,” says he, “that Pope’s head is a forgery. It probably cost six lire. In buying it at all you must have fallen among thieves.”
“Signore, it is not true,” says the dealer indignantly. “It is a gift at six hundred lire.”
“Pah!” says the customer, wagging his extended thumb and forefinger at the level of his ear to signify utter contempt and disbelief.
“Then what will you give, signore?” demands the proprietor in exasperation. “Name me a fair price and let us speak about it.”
“No,” says the customer, “I do not want it. Your prices, signore, would make a cow weep.”
“Then name me a price,” insists the proprietor. “Come, name it and let me hear.”
“Sixty lire!” shouts the customer defiantly.
“Sixty lire!” wails the proprietor. “Presence of the Devil, signore, I paid five hundred lire for that object. I am a poor man, signore, and the thief of a Government takes everything away in taxes—the luxury tax and the tax for the wounded and the export tax. One must live. Come, signore, give me five hundred and fifty lire and take it.”
“Madonna!” cries the customer in a rage. “I would not pay five hundred and fifty lire for a dozen of them. I will give you one hundred lire and not another soldo.”
“Ah, Madonna!” shrieks the proprietor. “You are stealing the bread from the mouths of my children. Ah, my God, but this business is ruining me. No, I will not do it! Come, signore, take it for five hundred and let us weary ourselves no longer with fruitless talk.”
“It is useless, signore,” declares the customer firmly. “I will not pay your price. Come, now: here is my last word: wrap it up and take three hundred lire for it.”
“Body of Bacchus,” moans the proprietor. “We cannot deal together, you and I. Go to a cheap shop, signore. I—I am not a noted dealer, signore. I cannot do those things. Farewell, signore.”
“Three hundred lire,” says the customer firmly.
“Three hundred and fifty,” counters the proprietor.
“Three hundred,” insists the customer hoarsely, starting toward the door.
The proprietor gives his shoulders the tremendous shrug which, in Italy, signifies that the shrugger can do nothing more to prevent you from utterly wrecking yourself by your colossal idiocy. He reseats himself at his desk and paws around among his papers with sudden and complete absorption.
“Three hundred and twenty-five,” says the customer, holding the door half open and making what the modern school of diplomacy would call a gesture of departure.
The proprietor capitulates, rolling up his eyes and tossing his hands in the air to show that he accepts misfortune’s dread harpoon in a sportsmanlike spirit. “You have a bargain, signore,” says he genially, rising and unhooking the marble plaque of the Pope from the wall. “To-morrow I shall have candlesticks of beaten iron in the Venetian style. Come to-morrow and I will sell them to you for nothing.”
IV
OF THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN ANTIQUES AND OIL STOCKS—OF THE CONFOUNDING OF EXPERTS BY FRENCH AND ITALIAN ANTIQUE-FAKERS—AND OF THE MOST ADVANCED METHODS OF FAKING
The percentage of antiques among the antique-shops of Paris, Rome, Florence, Berlin, and Vienna is said by some to be about the same as the percentage of good investments among the oil and mining stocks of America. Sometimes an antique is easy to detect, and sometimes it is not so easy.
There are a number of experts who claim to be able to expose a worm-hole that would deceive any worm in the world; but there are occasions when groups of the most serious and profound experts become embroiled over a particular painting or piece of furniture, some claiming fiercely that the article in question was produced in 1519, and others maintaining noisily that it was done in 1915. The only satisfactory way in which such a matter could ever be settled would be to have a war over it.
Large numbers of experts have also gone into ecstasies over certain beautiful Old Masters: expert has purchased a painting from expert, running up the price at each change of hands until its cost is on a par with that of a new Town Hall; then some low, coarse, non-expert has come along with an X-ray machine and shown, by X-raying the paint, that it is so new that its value is somewhat less than that of a dog-house.
The best of the renaissance and primitive and seventeenth century artists now producing Italian and French antique paintings are full of quaint conceits for the intriguing (if one may use so coarse an expression) of experts on paintings. They welcome the cynical and wary purchasers who start to examine a painting by looking at its back in order to make sure that the canvas is old. They beam affectionately at the suspicious buyers who must have a certain number of cracks to the square inch of surface, who count the fly specks with loving care, who test the paint with alcohol in order to find out whether it is new paint or old paint, and who hunt so assiduously for that rich and mellow golden-brown tone that comes only with age.
A golden-brown glow on a painting is a sign that it was painted back in those good old roistering, swashbuckling days when the most sincere fighters and the noisiest drinkers wore lace frills around the bottoms of their short plush sport-clothes. Fortunately the same beautiful effect can be obtained by dissolving licorice in water, pouring the result on the canvas and rubbing it around for a few moments with the palm of the hand. Very beautiful and realistic fly-speck effects may be added by dissolving gum arabic in water, coloring the liquid with sepia and Chinese ink, dipping an ancient toothbrush into it, and spraying it on the canvas by drawing a match along the toothbrush bristles. The wisest fly that looked at the result would declare unhesitatingly that a yearly fly-convention had been held on the painting ever since Christopher Columbus abandoned the flat-earth theory, and that all the leading speckers of the fly race had tracked their muddy feet on it at one time or another. It’s a poor human that can’t beat an insect.
If it were not for these happy devices the antiques now existing in the world would be arbitrarily limited—a condition of things destructive to the wide dissemination of culture and dismaying to the Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities. Fortunately, paintings may be aged without waiting for years to pass over them. One way is to cook them in hot ovens. Another is to take an old, decrepit painting and paint something more interesting on top of it. Or one may take a new painting, cover the back with glue, and paste an old canvas over it.
Some of the most experienced antiquers carry little bottles of alcohol in their breast pockets; and when they are investigating a picture with great care, they slyly produce the bottles and surreptitiously pour alcohol over it in order to find out whether or not the colors run. If they run, the picture is new. If they do not run, the picture is old. So, at least, the experts say. The idea is excellent; but happily the dealers have learned that if they cover a painting with a sort of transparent glue, it will resist the action of alcohol and confound the experts. Also, dealers of intelligence have remedied the unkind fate that seemingly limited the work done by Old Masters to the paintings they produced in their lifetimes. What could be simpler and yet more beneficial to the patron than to add the signature of an Old Master to a painting and let the patron discover it for himself? Many of the most priceless Old Masters in existence have reached America in this way, and many a millionaire’s home would be a gloomier place to-day were it not for this simple but pleasure-giving little device.
There are certain technical points about antique-collecting in Europe that are easily picked up by the antique-collector in two or three years’ time.
Venetian glass, for example, breaks more readily than ordinary glass. When in doubt about a piece of Venetian glass, strike it one inch from the base with a small hammer, using a stroke of fourteen foot-ounces to the square inch. If the glass breaks, it is Venetian.
Then there are Capo di Monte saucers, which, when scaled over the surface of a smooth body of water, will skip several times more than an ordinary china saucer. One should pick out a broad lake and scale all questionable saucers over its surface with an under-arm motion. A saucer, if genuine Capo di Monte, should skip at least eight times before sinking. The lake may then be pumped out with a bicycle pump.†
V
OF THE SOURCE OF THE WORM-HOLES IN NEAR-ANTIQUE FURNITURE—OF THE LATEST WORM-HOLE MACHINE—OF THE MODERN METHOD OF PRODUCING ANCIENT WOOD-CARVINGS IN FIVE MINUTES—AND OF THE UNLIMITED FURNITURE OWNED BY MARIE ANTOINETTE
The collector of antique French and Italian and other foreign furniture is to be congratulated upon other benevolent circumstances that prevent supplies of wonderful old things from approaching exhaustion.
So long as there are any ancient houses in France and Italy, just so long will the manufacturers of French and Italian antiques have enough working material of absolute genuineness. This is due to the fact that the wainscoting and all the concealed woodwork of these venerable houses have been heartily eaten by many generations of true worms. Whenever a house is pulled down, therefore, the Old Masters of furniture-making flock to the scene and acquire large stocks of truly worm-holed wood. This, when incorporated into the magnificent chests, tables, sideboards, and other pieces which are destined to fill the antique-shops of Paris, Rome, and Florence, catches and holds the eye of the purchaser. It is obvious to any one—or at least to any amateur—that any piece of furniture which contains such intricate and symmetrical worm-holes must have been made before the worms started to bore, and must, therefore, be very ancient.
The old, worm-eaten wainscoting is used to make the shelves and drawer-bottoms of sideboards which are known as credenzas in Italy and crédences in France. It is also drawn on for the backs and bottoms of chests, for picture-frames, for wooden stirrups, and for almost any beautiful, wonderful old thing Milady or Mimister brings home to exhibit upon the sitting-room table.
The fronts and tops of chests and sideboards may, however, be made of new wood and will probably look just as well. For example, the new wood can be carved even more prettily than the old, and when the carving is finished, the manufacturer turns over the product to three or four muscular hirelings whose sole duty is to injure furniture. They are armed with large sticks of various shapes, and their activities are limited to chastising the wood with extreme severity. In this way the chests and sideboards acquire, in a matter of half an hour, the scratches and indentations for which slow centuries might otherwise be required. The wood is given the proper color by boiling it with walnut rind. Or it may be given the peculiar irregularities of great age by applying nitric acid, which eats into the surface, and then coloring the marks of the acid with permanganate of potash.
The new wood, of course, must be carefully worm-holed. The crudest variety of worm-holing is done with a shotgun. The result looks sufficiently wormy to suit the most captious worm-hole collector; but one can always find a Number 10 shot at the bottom of each hole. The shotgun method, therefore, is not acceptable to members in good standing in our Society. The worm-hole machine, which is used by several of the leading Parisian chineurs, is a new and excellent invention. Its front is a square plate with serpentine grooves in it. When the plate is pressed against a piece of wood and the handle turned, a number of slender augers push out and make a cluster of worm-holes. A turn of a lever changes the position of each auger slightly, so that the worm-hole pattern does not recur.
But the best worm-holes in the world are made in Italy by hand. The auger with which they are made is bent in an irregular shape; and the purchaser of a piece of furniture which has been worm-holed with it is at liberty to thrust wires into the holes in order to investigate their wormy crookedness.
The most thorough furniture manufacturers, knowing that the careful collector will rap on the furniture in order to see whether dust falls from the worm-holes—as would be the case if the hole is the work of a normal worm—should be careful to fill the holes with wood dust.
In a number of the antique-shops along the Rue Saintes-Pères and the Boulevard Raspail in Paris, one may see many specimens of carved wooden panels about a foot and a half long and about five inches wide. Every one of these has been taken from old châteaux and palaces which have been recently torn down. This statement is obviously reasonable; for if it were untrue, practically every château in France would be standing to-day, whereas nearly all of them have long since been demolished to provide the great number of wooden panels that have been placed on sale in the past few years. The panels are attractive and not made by great pressure—a method sometimes used in France and Italy in making cheap antiques. Pressure-carvings, as they are called, always show a bent grain; whereas the small carvings show a severed grain.
But in order to save a few châteaux for tourists to visit, it was decided to make panels somewhat artificially, so to speak. That would make a tourist twice happy: he could visit a château and look at the panels; then he could return to Paris and buy them to take home. Iron moulds were heated until they were white-hot, and then pressed against very dry wood. When the moulds were removed and the burnt surface brushed with steel brushes, the wood had the color and the polish and the texture of ancient carvings. A dose of Number 10 shot from the manufacturer’s shotgun supplied the worm-holes for each panel, after which they were ready to be sold to the travelling public for about four dollars apiece. Their cost was approximately forty-five cents—twenty cents for the wood, twenty cents for the labor, and five cents for the shotgun cartridge, and thus an embarrassing problem was solved to the contentment of everybody concerned.
Articles as large as mantels for generous fireplaces are made by this burning method and passed on to eager collectors at prices that distress the proletariat greatly and cause frequent demands for an equal distribution of wealth.
There is a wood-carving company in Paris which advertises that it will be glad to deliver the furniture of any period to antique-dealers at a moment’s notice.... There are workshops of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine which produce boule cabinets decorated with birds, beasts, and flowers of which André-Charles Boule might well have been proud.... There are places in Auvergne where the best ancient artists in the world turn out furniture which Parisian dealers later are kind enough to guarantee to have been owned by Marie Antoinette.
There is a true benevolence in all this. Culture is spread, and many people otherwise innocent of history learn that Marie Antoinette furniture is similar to that produced under one of the Louies. It is quite untrue, however, that she sent it all over to this country in the Mayflower.
VI
OF THE VIOLENT PEWTER-COLLECTOR AND HIS PATOIS—OF THE PECULIAR PASTIMES AND PLEASURES OF THE PEWTER-HOUNDS AND OF THE DANGERS OF FOREIGN PEWTER
The pewter-collector provides a pleasant source of income to European antique-dealers; for he is one of the most ardent collectors. Pewter, as is well known, is a base metal made of tin, to which a small amount of antimony, copper, or lead has been added. It was originally made for use in the homes of the wealthy before the days of pottery and china; then it was used in kitchens of great houses; churches which couldn’t afford gold or silver services had pewter services; taverns had complete outfits of pewter pots and tankards which could be thrown promiscuously by intoxicated guests without damage to anything except the guests.
When properly cleaned, old pewter has a soft, silvery lustre that is highly esteemed by all collectors; and a true pewter-lover will travel many miles for the privilege of handling a pewter plate, hearing it cry and taking rubbings of it.
Pewter-collectors speak a technical language which has little or no meaning to persons who have never been exposed to the pewter-germ: and it is in the antique-shops that one hears the pewter-lovers running on by the hour. The cri d’étain, or the “cry of the tin,” is not, as might be supposed, the noise which the pewter-collector makes when he finds out the price of a piece of pewter. It is the noise which genuine pewter always makes when the collector holds it close to his ear and bends it backward and forward. Pewter always refuses to cry for some people, but it is certain that there is a cry in it, just as it is certain that there is a lady in the moon, though few of them are ever able to see her.
All the pewter made in the old days in London and Paris and the German cities bore on its back the small private mark of its maker, due to the fact that a certain standard of metal was required by law.
The chief recreation of the pewter-collector is to search out several pieces of pewter, place tissue paper or tinfoil over a mark, and then diligently rub the paper or foil with some blunt instrument until a copy of the mark has been transferred to it. Two advanced pewter-collectors will squabble for hours as to whether the best rubbings can be made with cigarette-paper and a hard pencil, or with tinfoil and an ivory penholder, and as to whether the best results can be got by heating the pewter before taking the rubbing or by leaving it cold.
The most excitable pewter-huntsmen keep little books of pewter-rubbings on their persons, and think nothing of spending two or three hours trying to locate a given mark in their books. If interrupted in this pursuit, they become violent and use hideous language to the interrupter. They exchange rubbings with each other, and can spend as much as eight or ten hours in brooding over half a dozen dilapidated pewter plates. When they have hopelessly disagreed over the proper method of taking rubbings, they can argue for weeks over the best method of cleaning pewter, which develops an almost impenetrable crust when it lies neglected in a barn for half a century, as most of the genuine appears to have done. Some hold out for ashes and vinegar; others for boiling with hay; others for oxalic acid mixed with rotten stone; others for hydrochloric acid; others for oxide of tin; others for Calais sand and elm leaves; others for soft soap, rotten stone, and turpentine. One of the most delightful things about collecting this metal is that you can experiment for years with pewter without making any progress.
The same thing is true, of course, of all sorts of antiques. Only a short time ago the official expert of the French Government carefully examined a portrait owned by a Parisian lady, and pronounced it a genuine Leonardo da Vinci. The lady was about to sell it to the Kansas City Art Institute for the modest sum of $500,000, when another celebrated dealer examined it and declared emphatically that the painting was a copy, and not a Leonardo da Vinci at all. Both of the experts had international reputations and should have been qualified to know exactly what they were talking about. The Kansas City Art Institute, however, decided not to part with its money just then; and the lady at once sued the second expert for $500,000. Our Society hopes that when she gets the money she will endow us; and we have written her to that effect; but probably she is busy just now.
I myself found a gem of a pewter inkwell in a little Parisian shop one day, properly marked and battered and time-worn. It had a cylinder for ink, a cylinder for sand, and a space for pens; and its age was declared by the dealer to be one hundred and fifty years. By haggling exhaustively with him, I beat him down from one hundred francs to fifty francs, and bore off my prize in triumph. When I got it home, I examined the interior of the ink-cylinder with an electric torch and discovered that the inside surface was bright and shiny. On a guess, it was only about eight months old; but what of that? Eight months is eight months, and what is antiquity, anyhow? If you ask a geologist you will get one answer; if you ask a debutante you will get another. As for me, I used a little acid inside my inkwell and hope to dispose of it to a friend. It is already months and months antiquer than when I bought it.
Almost every Parisian antique-shop will, if pressed, produce a pair of pewter plates with the salamander crest of Francis I on the bottom of each plate in repoussé work—work done by hammering the under side of the plate until the desired figure is raised on the upper side. These salamander plates are charming and should be bought by the pewter collector. If he gets too many he can always use them for sinkers when fishing—or they may readily be employed as wedding-presents.
Generally speaking—speaking, that is, as our careful advice to the vast body of travellers who wish to take home a few attractive antiques as souvenirs—it is best to make purchases as soon as possible after arriving in Europe. If one remains there long enough the antiques will be absolutely genuine by the time one gets home.
Notes
† Donations for this worthy cause may be sent in the form of certified checks, postage stamps, or unused golf balls to Dr. Milton Kilgallen, Floral Park City, Florida.
† See From Broad-Axe to Peanut-Roaster, by Emmet Gilhooly.