The Art Newspaper

BADA fair offers a sense of safety for dealers

Exhibitors discuss uncertainty over June fairs after last year's demise of Grosvenor House

By Viv Lawes. Web only
Published online: 30 March 2010

London. There were two main topics of conversation amongst dealers at last week’s British Antique Dealers’ Association (BADA) fair, 17-23 March, in Chelsea, London: the amount of stock shifted; and the five art and antiques fairs scheduled for London this June, which many consider excessive after the 2009 demise of the Grosvenor House fair. The uncertainty over the June fairs helped foster a sense of safety in BADA.

Jonathan Coulborn, scion of Thomas Coulborn & Sons and chairman of BADA, said that good business had taken place throughout the fair, while the statistics showed that footfall was just over 19,000, 12% up on last year and a fraction more than 2008. A matter-of-fact exchange between two long-time exhibitors summed up the general feeling amongst dealers: “It hasn’t been at all bad, has it?” — “A helluva lot better than I expected”.

There were eight first-time exhibitors, including Godson & Coles of London. Proprietor Richard Coles wanted to test the ground early in the season following disillusion with the Winter Art & Antiques fair at Olympia. He won the Best Stand Award for a fashionably eclectic display of 18th-century furnishings juxtaposed with Modern British art. An English burr walnut bureau from about 1720 sold for around £100,000, while a pair of gilt armchairs by Thomas Chippendale Junior, from about 1805, identical to a period suite supplied to the Stourhead estate, Wiltshire, went for £65,000. A large 1959 untitled work by Sandra Blow (1925-2006), which Coles recently bought at auction in Cornwall, sold later to a new client, who saw it at the fair, for around £48,000. Blow refused to sell it during her lifetime and it was exhibited in her retrospective at the Royal Academy in 1994 and Tate St. Ives in 2001-2002.

Clocks and furniture are still the bedrock of BADA, and Montpelier Clocks, Cheltenham, had several successes topped by a Benjamin Vulliamy longcase regulator, about 1790, the only other known example of which is in the Royal Collection; it was bought by a British private collector for around £180,000.

Carolyn Bayley of Jay Roger Antiques, who specialises in small scale furniture, sold 14 pieces through the fair ranging from £2,000-£10,000, more than last year. “I think people have reached the stage where they want to buy something they enjoy rather than get 0% interest in a Building Society.” A prize piece was a small mahogany Irish chest, a generic form of scaled-down tallboy, which went for £10,000. By contrast, John Robertson of the Bourne Gallery, which sells traditional modern and contemporary paintings, said his fair was 20% down on last year: “The announcement of the [UK] general election has made middle England withdraw”. His best sale was a 1970s work, Sunlight on the Estuary, by Rowland Hilder (1905-1993), for £6000.

Joe Mitchell, modern silver buyer at Payne & Son, Oxford, said that traditional clients have gradually accepted contemporary silver over the last three years. The work of young, Korean-born silversmith, William Lee, which has been exhibited internationally, went down a storm, and included £4000 for a 30cm high twisted sculptural vase.