Downsizing - a sobering experience

Not exactly Christie's - Gorringes' auction rooms in Lewes

If there's one thing I've learnt in the course of the lengthy downsizing process that has taken most of the past eighteen months, it is: buy at auction rather than from dealers.  A lesson learnt rather late in the day, but brought home by the sad experience of disposing of surplus items as a result of moving to the Shoebox.

We sold some furniture and paintings with the house in Ribérac.  Before doing so, we had obtained estimates from auctioneers in Bergerac.  The sums estimated were fairly risible, but the amount we needed to get rid of was substantial enough to consign some items to them, most of which sold.  We brought the more valuable items back to the UK, and sent some paintings to Christie's in South Kensington.  In the best case the sale price was more or less what I'd paid about twenty years ago.  In the worst case it turned out that a pair of paintings I'd treasured as a decent investment, and which had been valued by Christie's on a previous occasion, were not by the artist I'd thought, so were worth about a tenth of what I'd anticipated.  I brought them back to the Shoebox.

Buying from a dealer and then selling at auction is likely to be a loss-making process in any event, since a dealer may well have bought at auction and then added his mark-up and cost of restoration.  You hope that prices in the meanwhile will have risen sufficiently to cover the difference.  Alas, this is to reckon without changes in fashion.  The fall in value of "brown furniture" - those cherished mahogany pieces from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - is little short of scandalous.  Great if you're buying - you can pick up a fine chest of drawers, two hundred years old, for the cost of a flatpack from Ikea.  But not much good if you're selling.  You're likely to have a similar experience with early nineteenth-century porcelain,which is now seriously out of fashion.  

My experience of sales at Christie's in South Kensington, Lots Road auctions in Chelsea, Burstow and Hewett in Battle and Gorringes in Lewes has been a dispiriting exercise.  On the other hand, we simply don't have the room any longer for the bits and pieces concerned, and I've just had to conclude that the return on the original investment has to be  measured in the enjoyment I've had from them, rather than in the (catastrophic) financial context.

In the greater scheme of things, of course, none of this is important: objects are just that.  But it's a little heartrending, nonetheless, to see one's small treasures disappear for a trifle.  My only consolation is that we need four dining-room chairs for the Shoebox, and I'm hoping to pay not very much for some sturdy eighteenth or nineteenth century items that are currently out of fashion but still appreciated by old fogies such as yours truly.  

Antony Mair