As regular visitors to this site are aware, I’ve been watching the health of the Victorian antique market recently for concrete examples of this trend and I thought I’d take another quick glance at some fresh auction results that speak to the decline that we’ve been seeing lately.

I’ll open by saying all is not in the dumps.  There is money still out there aggressively chasing select items, but I can tell you that there is no distinct pattern that we can extract.  Items such as the late English Victorian Jockey Scale armchair shown at the top of the page surprised me as it reached $10,000 via 25 bids.  Were you to remove the scale looking something like an antique sewing machine fastened to the side, the chair is fairly unremarkable itself.

Some items are seeing better prices than from only a few months ago, so the market is certainly schizophrenic.  This Laminated Rosewood bed by John H Belter saw a $19,000 price tag in February but a comparable bed recently fetched $29,000 at auction.  While the overall trend is down, a confluence of buyers at any moment in time can drive bidding up.

I was recently left a bit queasy by the $1,500 that this cabinet fetched at auction.  Months ago, in a stronger market, this cabinet would have fetched $4,500 to $6,000.

Pieces by J & JW Meeks appear to be caught in a time-warp, fetching near their usual pricing as if they are in a different market altogether.  This Meeks “Hawkins” pattern Rococo chair recently fetched $5,000, albeit at the low end of the range.

I recommend that you pick up a copy of this weekend’s edition of the Wall Street Journal or read the article here on the state of the antiques market, in general.  Aside from being an interesting article which addresses the broader antique market and not just the niche that we favor on this site, RareVictorian.com is also mentioned.

The article’s premise is that due to shifting tastes and economic pressure on consumers it is creating quite the buyers market for antiques.  I, for one, have been taking advantage of it whether my budget should be allowing me or not.

I was the recent high-bidder on this 3-piece Egyptian Revival set by Pottier & Stymus with marked mounts bearing “P&S” to confirm their maker.  It also appears they may have their original upholstery and purportedly came out of a famous Tarrytown castle formerly known as Carrollcliffe but known today as Equus.  I’ve never been so excited in my 4 years of collecting and will be picking them up tonight.

As I have captured the process of my recent Merklen Brothers restoration in high-definition video, stay tuned in the months ahead for the journey of restoring these Pottier & Stymus chairs captured in another video series on this site.

There is no recent auction activity on this fairly well-known chair design so I can’t compare the price I paid to “typical” auction levels, though I can compare it to retail levels of other comparable Egyptian Revival sets by P&S at $29,500.

As you can see, I am availing myself to the current pricing trends and will probably be curbing my sales in the meantime.

If you’re interested in following along in my journey to research and educate myself in the world of Victorian antiques, you can be notified of new articles automatically by submitting your email address here. If you prefer viewing blogs in RSS readers, the link is at the top right of the page.

For those of you who collect books on antique furniture and cabinetmaking, you may want to call Joslin Hall Rare Books and have them send you this catalog, number 313.

It just arrived in the mail yesterday and it has 41 pages of 288 books dating back from the 1800s to present. I spotted about 3 books relating to 19th century furniture that I purchased and a few others that I couldn’t justify spending the money on, but would love to have.

Rather than ordering the catalog, you can peruse the full list of books here at their website.

Related items currently available for sale

Sometimes I think that there is a rush to judge too quickly that antiques that we run across have been made in America. This bookcase is certainly a very nice one, but I think the tile inserts led the seller to believe it must have been made by a prominent American maker. The reality is that during that time, most of the skilled craftsman that were in America were of German or French, or at least European, descent. The reason we have all these great pieces is that these European craftsman came to the U.S. and brought their extensive training with them. Many of the names whose furniture we value most are 1st generation immigrants. But not all of them came to America! Some stayed behind and they still made furniture over there!

All you need to do is look at the book by John Andrews, “Victorian and Edwardian Furniture“, and you’ll get a taste for what European (primarily English) Victorian furniture looks like. Guess what, it looks a lot like ours. You’ll see there a lot of French-inspired designs that look like pieces that we would jump to attribute to Roux, Marcotte, etc. There are pieces in there that mirror pieces that I have recently seen attributed to Kimbel & Cabus and Herter Brothers.  In the case of the bookcase above, they are attributing it to Pottier & Stymus. I haven’t done enough digging to say that they are correct or not, but a quick glance had me reaching for the Andrews book on a hunch that more research is necessary.  If you’re interested in researching Victorian furniture and their attributions, I feel it very necessary that you remember to also look abroad when identifying furniture.

More detail and images on this bookcase that is selling are here.

I ran into these photos on Craigslist yesterday as I was looking for a Victorian bed. Craigslist listings may provide some good deals but their minuscule photos do not provide any means of checking the condition of the item that you’re looking at. When photos are uploaded to Craigslist, they’re downsized to reduce the storage requirements on their servers. The result is a 5-7 kilobyte image. The average size of a file produced by today’s 7 MP cameras? 3.5 Mega-pixels, which is 500-700x more detailed than a photo after it is uploaded to Craigslist.

Looking at the photos above, I was not tipped off that the bed wasn’t an authentic antique (the seller didn’t state one way or the other). The pictures are dark and not detailed. I asked for some better pictures from the seller and once the “normal” pictures arrived in my Inbox, I could see some things that told me that the bed was relatively new.

I own one modern reproduction bed from Indonesia - something we purchased for our first home when we were newly married before Victorian fever hit me. Their indigenous mahogany wood and stains have an unmistakable look that once you see it a few times, you can spot them a mile away. Their carvings, while smooth, are slightly wavy in a way that Victorian carvers didn’t produce.

The bed above is missing some things that you would expect from an antique:

1. Age-Appropriate Wear: old dings, finish wear, patina. No old bed has feet that aren’t scraped up
2. Dust: although furniture gets cleaned, the average non-professional will leave some gunk impacted in the nooks and crannies somewhere
3. Walnut Composition: most of these mid-quality Renaissance beds were walnut - not mahogany
4. Variation in Color: refinished or new furniture looks uniform in color as this bed does
5. 19th Century Dimensions: probably the most telling tip-off is the fact that this bed is King Size and wasn’t modified! Not possible in the 19th century; at least not in the mainstream market.

I got this from the seller after inquiring as to the age:

“This bed is hand-carved, reproduction, solid mahogany (no particle board). My error was to leave out the word “reproduction” in the ad, but I am certainly not trying to present it as an antique!”

Since I’m not a fan of reproductions, I’ll skip this bed and keep looking.

Hopefully the hints above will be helpful to some. Some of the smaller regional auction houses that I visit don’t have printed catalogs (with detailed lot analysis) - what you see is what you get and you need to be able to identify these on your own.

A recent purchase of mine is the music cabinet pictured above and below. It is one of several finds that I’ve made at Stoudt’s Antique Mall in Adamstown, PA. You gotta love an antique mall with 700 dealers and a brewery/restaurant with some of the best beer and hamburgers you’ll find anywhere. “Furniture Fanatic” has started a good thread on the message board for folks to post their favorite antique haunts from around the nation. Stop by the thread and add your favorite antiquing spots.