2 September 2009 - 15:47When We Started Loving Antiques

Since time immemorial people have had old furniture. But when did an old piece of furniture become a valued “antique”?  The short answer is during the latter half of the 19^th century in Britain and in the 1920s in the U.S. It is no coincidence that an interest in antiques developed at these times.

In mid 19^th century Britain many styles of furniture were available, but very few people collected antiques.  Prior to the 19^th century expensive furniture had been the prerogative of a small elite. This changed with the industrial revolution. A new class of consumers arose who they wanted to mark their new-found status through the purchase and furnishing of their houses.  But this class of new consumers tended to be unsure of their taste, so they bought copies of furniture favored by the elite.

But, increasingly after mid-century the quality of these copies declined.  This set the stage for a new hierarchy of prestige in furniture with the inferior copy at the bottom, the fine copy in the middle and for the first time, the “original” at the top.

Antiques were seen as not only beautiful in themselves, but also valuable because of their rarity. This same principle of scarcity-equals-value, explains why caviar is so expensive and prestigious, and why precious stones cost as much as they do.[1]

In 1835, the renowned design critic Pugin decried contemporary taste as bankrupt and immoral. He urged people to look to the past and adopt a Gothic (Christian) style of furniture.  After mid century pleas to adopt pre-industrial styles of design were taken up by John Ruskin and William Morris.  Although they advocated furniture in old styles using preindustrial forms of manufacture, their romantic perspective reinforced the prestige system that placed a high value on antiques.

Further, antiques (which could appear to be inherited like ancestor portraits) provided the newly rich with the material symbols of a genealogy.

But what happened in America?  During the 19^th century, there was little interest in antiques.  Of course, there were some east coast Anglophile elites who copied the latest fashions in England, but these were a small minority.  Some early American furniture was shown during the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, but there were few collectors and no general interest.  A more widespread interest in antiques developed in the 1920s driven in part by the display of early American furnishings in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1924.  This seal of approval set off a frenzy of collecting American antiques during the 1920s. The idea of collecting European antiques was spread to the middle classes through the influence of robbers barons like William Randolph Hurst and others who imported boatloads of antiques to fill their mansions.

And so, the irony is that antiques emerged after the mid 19^th century as a symbol of conservative rejection of the new industrial, capitalist society.  But because they were rare and expensive, the people who could best afford them were the rich industrialists.

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[1] On the other hand, the extraordinarily high cost of diamonds is not so much accounted for by their rarity, but the monopoly practices of mining companies like DeBeers, who stockpile vast quantities of diamonds off the market, coupled with a brilliant advertising campaign “Diamonds are forever”, which suggests that they are the only suitable stone for an engagement ring.