Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer

Apollo, Jan, 2005

Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer

Roger Warner

The Regional Furniture Society, 20 [pounds sterling]

SBN 09543481 1 9. To order tel: +44 [0] 1761 4178

Roger Warner's antiques shop in Burford which he ran for over fifty years, had a notable influence on British taste. His memoirs amusingly depict the trade and the dealers and collectors he knew. This extract describes a sale at Allensmore House, near Hereford, in October 1957:

All the attic bedrooms still contained their original eighteenth-century simple oak four-poster beds. The auctioneers men, preparing the sale, had been told to take the hangings off the beds, and when I first saw them they were piled ready to be burnt. I can remember asking for them to be sold to me, and they then went to Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia where they formed the curtaining and covering of window scats in many of the houses, in the library, a Second Folio of Shakespeare was discovered lying on a window seat. Among the items I intended buying in the Ballroom was a very large ten foot high oil painting of the full length wedding portrait of a Pattershull husband and wife of around 1810, painted by Hobday, the Bristol artist. In the background could be seen a stone garden seat which I was later to acquire ... I bought the picture for two pounds, the opening bid being from an old man of one pound, and this I was to sell to the London picture trade. They in turn sold it to go to a Scarborough collector, to join the collection of pictures being formed there. Sadly, the house to which it was sent later slid slowly down the cliff face, with many of the contents--probably including this picture--being lost.