When the House & Garden team recently published a round-up of incoming trends, colours and decorating ideas – many of which are re-emergences from the mists of time than anything new – Meissen porcelain figurines were on the list. Whereupon Jo Israelsohn, Managing Director of Portrait Communications (clients include Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler and Studio Duggan), Instagrammed a picture of the Meissen dancer that has been in her family for at least four generations. It was brought to London in the late 1930s, when her Jewish great-grandparents took their children and fled Poland, following the passing of the Nuremberg Race Laws, and as the annexing of the ‘Eastern provinces’ was beginning. Jo describes how, as a child, she admired the figurine with its “impossibly fine porcelain lace bodice and skirt,” thinking about “how carefully my great-grandmother must have packed it." She asked her grandmother if she could please inherit it.
Lots of us live with furniture, pictures and objects that carry stories. “I often buy things as a travelogue of place and time,” says Patrick O’Donnell, colour specialist and brand ambassador for Farrow & Ball. Then there’s familiarity – sometimes it doesn’t so much breed contempt as sentiment, like the kitchen table that has borne witness to our children’s weaning, upbringing and countless birthday parties.
Sometimes, it's the grandeur or the distinction of the object's history that is most appealing. This proven by the continued interest in attic sales, estate sales, and iconic collection sales, where you can find pieces that are not only valuable on their own merit, but hold within them what Jonathan Rendell, Christie’s Deputy Chairman, Americas, describes as “a piece of history.” Nicky Haslam, for instance, bought from the Christie’s-organised Reddish House sale of Cecil Beaton’s belongings, where things that went under the hammer were not only museum quality, but were imbued with the remembered spirit of the Bright Young Things and the glamour of Cecil’s photography and film work. With that comes memorabilia – items whose worth relates almost entirely to who they belonged to, or where they’ve been. The Savoy Hotel sale starts today, and among the 3000 lots is a framed photograph of Maria Callas, who was one of the hotel’s most famous guests, as well as a copy of the score for the opera Anna Bolena which she performed in 1957.
Jonathan compares such things to the relics of saints and holy men that gained such currency in the Middle Ages. Certainly, stories increase our reverence for an object and can shift our aesthetic appreciation, on occasion enabling us to see beauty even in something that might objectively be questionable. An object's value can increase according to the importance of its story; sometimes that's a financial value (think of those estate sales, and celebrity memorabilia), but other times it's emotional (Patrick’s travelogue buys, and what we inherit or have lived with long-term). Sometimes, indeed, it can be both. Because through the stories, the pieces offer a tangible connection, linking us to time, place and person. Returning to the Meissen dancer, Jo didn’t know her great-grandparents, and “my grandma didn’t talk about the past at all. She had a 60-year silence order because of her work as a transcriber of interrogations at Bletchley Park as a young adult – but I have this, and my imagination.”
And it is in the layered connections, and our curation of them, that our interiors become particular to us. The combined furniture and objects tell “our story of our journey through life,” says Benedict Foley, with far more depth and meaning than any short-term “I saw it online and liked it,” purchases.
Desire and appreciation can also lead us to seek out the unknown stories behind the things we own. Porcelain marks, which became widespread in Europe after the Meissen factory in Saxony adopted a mark in 1723, can indicate the maker, where and when it was made, and more. So if you do decide to find your own Meissen figurines, you can still determine something of their history. Research might lead to the start of a new (highly enjoyable) personal journey, and an ensuing significant collection. Other times the story can come to you: when Lucy Clayton of the Kensington Dolls House Company bought a pair of four-poster beds from an Instagram antiques dealer, it was James Mackie who informed her that they were designed for Chatsworth House by Lord Snowdon.
But such unwitting purchases hint at a more general movement that auction houses have picked up on – the phenomenon of “stories being lost between generations,” as Thomas Jenner-Fust, Director of Chorley’s Auctioneers, puts it. “We’ll get all sorts of things that might have been in a family for two hundred years. Often nobody knows anything about them, who the portraits depict, or why there’s a collection of silver nutmeg graters.” This disconnect can lead to a disconnect from the pieces themselves. It can be tricky to house a grandfather clock in a two-bedroom flat where every square inch counts, but to part with the lot is to lose bespoke provenance and personal memorabilia. We can’t all be Cecil Beaton or the Savoy, but there’s a lot to be said for holding something that our great-grandfather also held, even if that’s just a pipe or a pen.
In Thomas' information is a prompt to be better at recording the stories that we do know. He recommends putting stickers on the back of paintings and anything else that can take it, with information as to when it was bought, where it was bought, and what it is. He adds that it is a particularly pertinent exercise for anything that is purchased abroad as “laws can change on taking antiquities out of a country, and in the future being able to date a label can determine whether something can be legally resold, or not.” We could fill a notebook with such details, or embark on a cataloguing task, complete with accompanying photographs. And, if we have the opportunity, we should ask parents and grandparents for stories, and in turn pass them on. (Though arguably too many stories, whether old or new, can make it hard to get rid of anything, my own overflowing rooms being a case in point.)
But perhaps one day one of our grandchildren or godchildren will look longingly at something that we’ve treasured and ask to inherit it, thus carrying it into the future and taking us with it (a concept that will appeal to some more than others.) In the meantime, to go back to that earlier mentioned round-up of decorating ideas, if you’ve been holding on to story-saturated mother-of-pearl inlaid trinket boxes, alabaster lights, stubby wine glasses, or stainless-steel cutlery, now might be the moment to bring them to the fore.
