Monday 20 June 2011

Confessions of a Sniper

This is last night's purchase - the photo taken from the computor screen, because I was not allowed to drag it off by eBay, and it hasn't arrived yet.

I spent rather a lot of money on it - almost £450 to be precise. Why? Because it appears to be English and dates from the 17th century - it's well over 400 years old. I have never seen one outside a museum and ones in this condition dating from around 1650 sell at auction for about two or three thousand pounds - on a good day. This one appears to date from between 1550 and 1600, according to Eloy Koldeweij - Christie's Dutch expert on early candlesticks, whose hefty tome I recently bought for a great deal of money too.

Of course, there is always the danger that this one itself could be Dutch, but I don't think so. It is supposed to be sent from Berkshire, England, and has the word 'English' and the number '1590' hand-written on the base, along with some inventory numbers, as if from a museum or private collection. Of course, the words could have been invented by the seller himself, but that would be a bit cheeky - wouldn't it?

I panicked slightly when I saw the seller's email address at the check-out. It includes the word 'dijk' - Dutch for 'dyke', and he is quoting a 7 day waiting time for it to be posted 1st class from Berkshire - somewhat longer than I would have expected. If it arrives from Holland, then I will be giving a lot of thought to sending it straight back to him.

Then again, many proper English sticks ended up in Holland (and vice versa) for reasons already mentioned in previous posts, and if it did turn out to be Dutch, then I think I would at least get my money back. If it does indeed turn out to be English, then I have no idea what it would fetch at auction, and neither have the dealers that I out-bid on it, I dare say. I put £1250 on it as a 'snipe'-bid, just to make sure I got it, so maybe I got off lightly.

So, it is going in my growing collection of early base-metal candlesticks (the youngest is about 1700) and will be gloated over until I take the lot(s) to a London Christie's auction - if and when I can bear to part with them.

Put it this way, there will probably come a time when I cannot afford to keep them anyway, and by that time it will be even rarer - like disposable income.

UPDATE: Now this is creepy, but VERY interesting. Thanks to the wonders of modern, indiscreet technology, I have been able to access private communications between the seller of this stick and a government office, and I now know that he does indeed come from where he says he does. I even have his full postal address. I have not hacked into anything, it's just that the government office he has been dealing with have been careless enough to post up a series of communications on the net in PDF form, and just typing in his email address has lead me straight to them, at the top of the page.

Careful what you say in private communications with government offices!

16 comments:

  1. That snipe of £1,250 was very risky. If another sniper had done similar, you could have ended up paying that amount.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's a very handsome piece, whatever it is.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I don't leave a bid for anything more than I am prepared to pay Eileen. That was my max, and I would have paid it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think you really need a pair Tom!

    ReplyDelete
  5. I have got completely out of my depth just reading this Tom - I can't believe that anyone would pay that kind of money unseen - or do you see it first beore you part with the money?

    ReplyDelete
  6. I hate to tell you this Tom, but I actually made that last year. The top is from a cheap Welsh candle stick, the middle bit is from my sink plug hole, and the bottom bit is from a sawn-off bell. I hope this doesn't put you off your tonight's beer!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Don't listen to Cro, Tom.

    I'm positive it's genuine. My mate Dijk spent ages engraving dates etc. on the bloody thing after we bought it from the barman one drunken evening.

    After we unscrewed the light bulb from the top and removed the flex and cheap shade (some skill involved there), me an Dijk got into a bit of a giggling fit knowing the guy who might be tempted.

    Like I said, 100% genuine.

    ReplyDelete
  8. If you find yourself completely out of your depth when confronted with something like this, then don't buy it, Weaver - unless you really like it, of course. If you do go for it, then trust your judgement and weigh up the consequences of being wrong. I depend on people with a windy attitude NOT to have to pay through the nose, then I will be depending on brave experts to pay through the nose later. These days, everyone is an expert on glass - what a drag when you're trying to buy.

    ReplyDelete
  9. You must have posted that up when I was writing the above, Chris. If you'll carry on putting up with me calling you a c***, then I won't bar you - this time.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Oh, and BTW - isn't time we had an update on how your bee-hives are going, or are you just resting on your laurels having cobbled the last one up?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Oh they're going fine alright Tom. Time has not been friendly to me ant the mo. I'll be writing a to have a right moan about it soon enough.

    Dijk said you'd say that. 'Water off a ducks back', I replied...

    ReplyDelete
  12. Anyway if you bothered to be put to sleep reading my MAIN blog you'd know why I haven't had much time with the bees...

    ReplyDelete
  13. Good luck with the candlestick collection. Re indiscreet communication from government departments, when I worked in an office near the palace of Westminster we often received their mis-dialled faxes marked "Secret". We just read them (never at all interesting) and binned them.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Tom, what with all these candlesticks you have, I was wondering if you have any electricity in your house? They have some really neat, energy-efficient bulbs now.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I have worked in sensitive government installations, Elegance, and have been forced to sign 3 copies of the Official Secrets Act - purely in order to climb up the walls of old medieval castles. These emails I mentioned above are mostly taken up with confidentiality clauses and warnings about how insecure email systems are, with dire warnings about ignoring them if you receive them in error. Then the council turns them into a PDF and posts them worldwide!

    Believe it or not, Maybe, it would cost about 3 times as much to illuminate the house with good quality, beeswax candles than to use electricity. If we used parrafin ones or - more traditionally - tallow, the three-monthly re-decoration bill would be even higher.

    ReplyDelete
  16. These auctions are worth and really awesome...
    Penny auctions

    ReplyDelete