Items from over 80+ consignors and various Important New England & Florida Estates to include Outrageous Carved Oak (Horner Quality) Dining Suites; Italian Renaissance Furniture; French Ormolu Furnishings; Important Continental Silver; Art Glass; 18th & 19th C Chests etc.; Danish Moderne; Fabulous China and Sterling Services; Period Lighting; Estate Fresh Oriental Carpets; Superior Estate Gold, Platinum & Diamond Jewelry.  Also many original artworks, including pieces by John Hering, Hans Klat,  Herbert Pollinger, Victor Vasarelly, Roy Nichols and David Anderson as well as more than 100 other important 18th – 20th C. Oils, Watercolors, Bronzes, Sculptures, Prints & Drawings.  Note:  Make sure to watch our website as this is only a sample.  You will not want to miss this Spectacular Auction Sale!  Quality Consignments are welcome for future Auction Events.

Incorporating inherited or recently acquired antique furniture into an existing décor can add warmth, pedigree and distinction to your home. Even if the old doesn’t technically match the new, there are dozens of tricks, tips and attitudes you can adopt that will bring the room together and make it a welcoming haven that beautifully showcases your style.

1)      Don’t try too hard. Matchy-matchy aspects can date a room and bring it down anyway, so why force parallelism between pieces that don’t match and never will? If you have a modern end table on one side of a sofa, don’t position your antique table at the other end. Put the antique table under a window instead. Let it have a place of its own.

2)      Be true to yourself. Hide nothing. A beautiful piece of antique furniture is a beautiful piece, no matter what happens to be standing nearby. Don’t cover a table—or any other antique furniture– with a blanket in an effort to blend styles. Rather, place a runner on the table with a color that picks up and plays off of other colors in the room.

3)      The same principle applies to throw pillows, knickknacks, wall art, and other movable splashes of color. You’d be surprised a how well a small but consistent streak of blue can tie an otherwise disparate room together.

4)      Be playful. Recognize that the flexibility of the room and the flexibility of your aesthetic can allow each to bring out the best in the other. Antique furniture from a certain period may not convey your exact style, but the way in which it entered your life says something about you. If this piece of antique furniture belonged to your grandma, remember that your grandma is part of who you are. Let the room represent all aspects of you, not just a filtered few. See what happens!

5)      Finally, remember the most important rule of interior design—if you like an item, then it doesn’t matter why. In some mysterious way, a group of items selected by one person have a common thread that binds them together, whether the thread is easy to identify or not. If everything in the room is yours, and everywhere the eye falls it falls on something that you find beautiful, then in some magic way, the room will feel comfortable, balanced and pleasing to others. Design, like any other art, is half science and half magic. Enjoy your new-old antique furniture, and have confidence in your instincts!

By Erin Sweeney

If you mention the name David Rittenhouse in Philadelphia, your listeners will likely think first of the tree-lined streets of Rittenhouse Square, the neighborhood named in his honor. Born in 1732 and raised in Norritown, Rittenhouse developed an interest in astronomy and mathematics early in life and later became a major contributor to science and innovation in revolutionary America. He is most widely recognized as a Philadelphia inventor, surveyor, astronomer, friend to Benjamin Franklin, president of the American Philosophical Society, and the first director of the United States Mint.

But in the minds of collectors and enthusiasts of antique clocks, David Rittenhouse was first and foremost a clockmaker. Specifically, he was the designer and creator of two antique clocks which, in terms of innovation and complexity, are considered the most important clocks in the United States and among the most important in the world. Both clocks still exist and are still in Philadelphia– One of the two is owned by Penn Hospital, and the other belongs to Drexel University and is kept on display in a University picture gallery.

What makes these Rittenhouse clocks so valuable? A brief history of antique clocks and clock-making can provide a bit of context. Before the industrial revolution, when most Europeans and Americans lived an agrarian lifestyle, clocks were not a common personal possession. When it came to dividing and marking the hours of the day, a single clock in a town square could provide all that most people required. Between about 1663 and the mid 1800’s—prior to the rise of regular working hours and train schedules– household clocks in America were owned by the wealthy few. And before David Rittenhouse, most household clocks required weekly winding, had only an hour hand, and ran on relatively simple mechanisms driven by long counterweights that hung down below the clock face. Long pendulums required a distance between the clock face and the floor, and cases were often built around the mechanisms in order to hide them. These early antique clocks were called case clocks, long case clocks, or wags-on-the-wall. (The term “grandfather clock” didn’t come along until the 1800’s.) This was the general state of the household clock around 1742 when David Rittenhouse began turning his fascination with astronomy and mathematics to the purpose of clock-making.

A close look at the famous Drexel clock reveals some of the fascinating features unprecedented among the antique clocks of its time. For example, the main face contains not only an hour hand, but also minute and second hands, as well as a hand pointing to the month of the year. In addition, Rittenhouse designed the central face with a lunarium, a device that tracks the phases of the moon. To the left of the primary dial, a smaller face shows the location of the sun and moon at any given point the zodiac. The little moon in this dial actually rotates on its axis from a darker to a lighter side, in keeping with the phases of the real moon. Within the lunarium, a dial reveals the day of the month. The clock can play ten different chimes as well, according to its setting.

Most significantly, a miniature model of the solar system is set above the clock face—six planets orbiting a tiny sun in a circle about eight inches wide. This is called an orrery, and before the construction of the Drexel clock, Rittenhouse had already created two large and astonishingly accurate orreries, one of which had been donated to Rutgers University.

By the time he built the Drexel clock around 1773, his orreries had launched Rittenhouse’s reputation as a scientist. With his ingenious contributions to clock making, Rittenhouse established himself as a representative of the strong intellectual and innovative capacity of the colonies.

Both famous orreries and several antique clocks designed by Rittenhouse survive to this day, and some of them—like the Drexel clock—still work. With careful conservation, they may continue keeping accurate time well into the future.

Erin Sweeney

8/20/2010

As any good horologist—a student of antique clocks and the history of timekeeping—can tell you, our relationship with time and the way we mark its passing are as flexible and transitory as any other aspect of our culture. Clocks, for example, have been in existence for a relatively short period considering the control they now exercise over our daily lives. In medieval Europe, clocks were useful to few outside of monasteries, and those clocks that did exist did not have faces, only chimes to ring the hours for ritual and prayer. In later years, clocks were designed with an hour hand that rotated around the clock face via gears turned by a slowly lowering weight. Clock faces were positioned in tall towers in order to provide room for the weights to drop. One clock at the top of a tower, inaccurate by a variance of an hour or more each day, could still adequately meet the timekeeping needs of an entire town. Galileo’s observations of pendulum movement in the late 1500’s led to smaller clocks that could eventually be placed inside of homes, at least by those wealthy enough to desire and afford them. And in the mid 1800’s, the industrial revolution brought the next rapid wave of changes to antique clocks and our dependence on timekeeping.

Mechanization and mass production began and were refined during this period. Factories rose. Lifestyles shifted away from the farm and toward standard working hours in offices and on assembly lines. Train schedules regulated commerce and industry. Timekeeping became more personal– and accuracy more important– then ever before. Enter the age of the pocket watch, a tiny clock with a minute and even a second hand that one could carry easily in one’s clothing. Pocket watches provided the ticking heartbeat of the American economy and lifestyle from the Gilded Age until the end of the 19^th century, when, inevitably, they were replaced by an innovation even smaller and more convenient.

In approximately 1908, with World War I a decade away, clockmakers Hans Wildorf and Alfred Davis formed a partnership with a Swiss watchmaker who agreed to help them develop a clock mechanism small enough to wear on the wrist.

This small, wearable watch would be called the “Rolex”, a name chosen for its brevity and pronouncability in any language. The Rolex was not the first wristwatch in existence, but at the time it was the most famous on account of the durable “screw crown” mechanism that protected its gears from dust and damage. The most well known of all Rolex models would become the “Rolex Oyster”, which featured a double locking screw crown that kept the casing both airtight and watertight.  In an early marketing campaign, Wilsdorf asked the famous swimmer Mercedes Gleitze to wear an Oyster during one of her swims across the English Channel, and the campaign proved a success when the watch survived.

This success, combined with the popularity of wristwatches in general after their distribution to soldiers during the war, paved the way for the wristwatch to become the signature timepiece of the 20^th century.

The history of clocks is a history of time itself, in a sense. And collecting antique clocks can be a fascinating hobby. Among collectors of antique clocks and watches, some of the most prized finds are early Rolexes and variations of the original Oyster. Santos Dumont, Patek, and Cartier are also names associated with rare early wristwatches, the most prized being ladies models as watches were first worn on the wrist by women as jewelry.

But a note for novice collectors of watches—beware! Keep in mind that watches, even more so than other antique clocks, are easy to counterfeit. Common forms of counterfeit work are wedded watches or “frankenwatches”, in which one or more of the mechanisms have been repaired or replaced while the other components remain original. These can be very difficult for non-experts to identify. Enjoy your adventures in horology, but if you intend to make a major investment in any antique clock or watch, be sure to have it reliably examined and appraised.

Erin Sweeney

8/20/2010

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When Teddy Roosevelt refused to shoot a bear that had been pursed to exhaustion and tied to a tree, he inspired Morris Michtom, a candy store owner, to design and sell a stuffed bear in his honor. This happened in 1902, and the Michtom bear with its jointed arms and legs would become the grand ancestor of one of the most popular and iconic toys in America. A century later, of course, it would also become a sought-after item among collectors of antique toys. But the Michtom bear shares this distinction with another bear, the Steiff bear, a toy designed and launched independently by German toymaker Richard Steiff at approximately the same time. Steiff was allegedly inspired by the sight of bears performing in a circus and wanted to create a toy that was jointed, soft, and somewhat human-shaped, part toy bear and part doll.

As all bear collectors—arctophiles—know, both Michtom and Steiff bears were a huge success. And since their popularity began to surge in 1904, any bear created before that year is considered one of the very first teddy bears in America, a rare and valuable find in the world of antique toys.

A wide diversity in teddy bear styles and features began to proliferate in 1906, and during the century that followed, many famous bear manufacturers rose and fell on the same waves that shaped American and European history. German bears, for example, experienced a reduced distribution to America during World War I. Only one German bear maker, Bing, managed to continue production during the war. This allowed British and American toymakers a new foothold in the teddy bear market, and when a certain British bear created by J. K. Farnell and Co inspired A. A. Milne to write the immortal Winnie-the-Pooh books in 1926, their ensuing popularity led Farnell bears to take their place beside Steiff and Bing bears as one of the most collectable antique toys of the present era.

So what sets Steiff, Bing, and Farnell Bears apart from other bears and from one another? As far as early Bing and Steiff bears are concerned, not much. In fact, Bing fought legally with Steiff over many early similarities between the two bears, including the famous button-in-ear feature. Early Bing bears had a metal plate attached to the ear with the letters GBN imprinted in a triangle. But after Steiff’s legal challenges, this identifier was called a “mark”, no longer a “button”, and it was moved under the left arm.

Both early Steiff and Bing bears had boot button eyes, usually black. Early Farnell bears had button eyes too, but later Farnell versions were distinguished by eyes made of amber colored glass. All three companies made their first bears with long, curved arms, spoon-shaped paws, and seams running up the front of the bear rather than the back. They also made their bears out of mohair and gave them features meant to resemble real bears, such as humped backs and longish, realistic-looking noses. Farnell bears often had stitched “claws” on the backs of their paws.

Among antique toys, Farnell, Steiff and Bing teddy bears are considered relatively safe items to collect since they are difficult to counterfeit. But always check the tags on your antique bear and keep an eye out for certain features like real mohair (not synthetic), velvet paw pads (rather than cotton), hand stitching, and wooden rather than metal or plastic joints. Also keep an eye out for “wood wool” stuffing, a kind of soft wood shaving. Even when the era of wool stuffing began in the 1920’s, Steiff, Bing, and Farnell were still using wood wool to stuff their bears’ heads.

Is your Steiff, Farnell or Bing bear valuable? As with all antique toys, the answer depends on the prevailing market and the condition of the bear. But recent buying guides have placed a Steiff jointed bear with a blank ear button, circa 1905, at about $1,225. Farnell and Bing mohair bears made before 1917 may be offered at similar prices. If you own a bear made during this period, or any plush antique toy, keep it safe. If you need to clean it, do so gently with a damp cloth. Better, have it cleaned by a professional. It’s easy enough to explain the popularity of the teddy bear—teddy bears are huggable! But this also makes them rare and valuable among antique toys, because they don’t tend to last long.

– Erin Sweeney

I love reading all the style magazines and checking out all the tabloids.  I’m not reading the articles, but more scanning the images to see who is wearing what vintage couture.  These days it seems celebrities and their stylists love to mix and match vintage with new.  I love that!  To me, nothing spices up a great pair of jeans and a t-shirt than a stack of Chanel bracelets on your wrist or even a pair of retro Vans.

I know I know, some of this stuff you can buy new today, but does it really have that “worn in” feel?  I mean, to me it screams “I’ve got tons of money but I’m going old skool cause I can!”  – and you can too!

Let’s take a look at who was seen wearing what…

For starters, numerous female celebrities are sporting Tiffany & Co.’s Victorian era diamond encrusted pendant necklace.  I love that even Tiffany’s is looking at making old new again!

Penelope Cruz hit the red carpet wearing a vintage Gianni Versace white gown.  She really rocked the gown by not overdoing the accessories.  A simple clutch, and chandelier diamond earrings.

Another trend hitting the red carpet are stacking bangles.  You can get the same look by passing the new high priced designer bracelets for stacks of 1950-1970s rhinestone encrusted celluloid or Bakelite ones.  The more bling, the better!

In May – InStyle magazine was inspired by Faye Dunaway and the white eyelet dress she wore on the set of Extraordinary Seaman (circa 1969). Vintage “Eyelet” dresses are a dime a dozen at your local vintage couture hot spot, and on eBay.  Add a splash of color with a great tortoise bangle and a great pair of sandals!

This floored me…remember when you were in high school or college and “top siders” were all the rage?  Thereee back! Nordstroms is still them in silver – yes, you read right…SILVER.

Aviators are still as hot as they were when we saw Tom Cruise wearing them in Top Gun.

Debra Messing come to find out is a huge fan of vintage jewelry.  I caught a glimpse of some of her prize possessions and what I noticed is she has very eclectic tastes.  Many jewelry collectors follow a specific artist, or period – she is all over the board, and I love it!  I believe she is a follower of “If I like it, I want it”

Another celebrity expressing their passion for vintage?  Scarlett Johansson!  What does she crave?  Like most women, shoes. Alas she collects vintage silhouettes from the 1940s and 50s.  That’s her idea of glam!  I know I can’t pass up a great pair of heels!

Last but not least, host Cat Deeley from “So You Think You Can Dance”   She’s loves a good flea market find or she’ll do a complete turn and sport something by Alexander McQueen.  I love versatility!

Have you seen a celebrity wearing vintage? Tell us about it – here!

The Richard Wright Collection of Moorcroft Pottery

Tuesday 21 September

New Bond Street, London

July 24th, 2010  !0am

Featuring Fine Art and Prints, Porcelain and Pottery, Modern Decorative Arts, Sculpture, European Glass, Fine Jewelry, Native American, Orientalia, Textiles, Furniture and Toys.

Reyne interviews more dealers who display items they have attained while out picking. In this episode we see antique glass plates that were bought for a song and some interesting sewing items that are worth a lot more than you would think.