Dear Lee,
Last month we watched an online auction of the belongings of a well-known dealer and friend. She dealt in top quality antiques for more than 50 years. So when her famous Tiffany Peony lamp brought $250,000, no one was surprised. But after the sale, the lamp was examined by an expert and found to be a fake. My friend had bought this lamp for her home from a well-known dealer over 50 years ago, before modern methods for testing metals, glass chemistry, etc. were available.
With today’s equipment and techniques, fakes are easier to find. In 1970 the Ford Museum bought a 17th-century rare “Brewster” chair similar to the few other Pilgrim chairs known to exist. A modern woodworker had wanted to prove to curators that he could make furniture pieces as good as the old ones using old tools. To demonstrate his skill, he made the chair and deliberately hid a clue—he used a modern tool inside a piece of it. In 1977, long after the museum announced and exhibited their spectacular antique find, the woodworker informed the museum he had made the chair and could prove it. All they had to do was X-ray the leg and they would see a hole that was pointed, made by a modern, electric drill bit, not rounded like old drill holes. The story broke that this chair was a fake made by a still-living woodworker who tried to fool the experts. It was taken off display but can still be viewed sometimes when the museum talks about fakes.
In 2015, a desk was shown at the Winter Antiques show in New York. It was identified as a Bingham Family Civil War Memorial Secretary, a period piece with inlaid bone decoration and slogans. It was vetted at the show as antique and sold to a dealer who sold it to the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art for a rumored $375,000. In 2017 the desk was removed to be studied. A 2018 story in an antiques newspaper reported that a forger, Harold Gordon, had embellished an antique desk with the bone inlay. All the well-known expert dealers were fooled. Most fakes are found with incorrect patina or construction, nail holes, modern screws or new paint. But we received a letter from Michael Rodman who was a dealer and a typographer, who knew the piece was a fake from the pictures. The type style used for the inlaid slogans was Times New Roman (similar to the font used in this newsletter) that was not created until 1932. (See Kovels’ Letter to Lee, July, 2018.) It was the first time we had thought about dating an antique using a type style!
Today it’s even easier to be fooled. Many paintings worth thousands of dollars have been faked and sold by legitimate dealers who had been fooled. Glafira Rosales was an art dealer who sold the Knoedler Gallery millions of dollars’ worth of fake paintings before being caught and sent to jail. Some of the fakes were even the wrong color and size.
Remember the saying: “If it’s too good to be true, it usually is.” Shaker boxes, weathervanes, metal garden furniture, recasts of bronze figures, tin store signs and cans, figural napkin rings and folk art are all being copied today. Small glass wares by Heisey and Fenton, Depression glass, and even old bottles can be copied, sun-colored, or embellished with painted decoration to look rare. Midcentury furniture is being “reissued” and is much less expensive than the vintage original pieces.
