Tuesday 12 June 2018

Cash in the attic


Today I begin the process of getting the mother and child sculpture back into a presentable condition. Fix baby's head. Replace mother's arm. Replace fingers, toes and sundry bits and pieces, clean and re-surface - not, as they say, necessarily in that order.

By the time I have finished it will be worth less than I am being paid to repair it, but right now it is worth nothing. It was cast in Soho, London, sometime in the late 19th century and has languished in an attic for many years. A sculpture that is all about caring is now being cared for. I stopped it from being thrown in a skip.

People used to come to my workshop in Bath with a damaged item and ask if it was possible to repair. I would tell them that you can repair anything which has not actually been reduced to powder, but sometimes it made no economic sense. Antique dealers would try to get me to repair something so cheaply that they could still make a profit on resale. I would tell them to go away.

One day a woman came to me with a plaster depiction of a German Shepherd dog, very similar to the one above. You won these things at fairgrounds by throwing wooden balls at coconuts.

Her dog was broken into two pieces and I tried to be as polite as possible when I told her that it would cost about 50 times as much as it was worth for me to put it back together. She sighed and explained that her elderly father had won it at a fair many years ago and it had great sentimental value. She had knocked it off the mantlepiece whilst dusting that morning. Please go ahead with it, she said.

I glued the two pieces back together and filled the join. I was going to touch up the crappy paintwork when I had the idea of reinforcing it from the inside by filling it with plaster. I was not as experienced in those days.

As the plaster set, it pulled on all the opposing angles formed by the legs and body, and the whole object began pulling itself apart, leaving a multitude of crazy cracks all over the outside surface. I looked in horror as it made little pinging sounds of self-destruction for a few minutes.

I took it to a paint specialist who spent several days filling and repainting the whole thing until you could not see that it had suffered a catastrophic disaster through my stupidity. I paid her about £250.

When the woman came to collect it she said, "That's fine. Thank you. How much do I owe you?"

"Oh, call it £20," I croaked.

26 comments:

  1. Not a lot else you could do really. I wonder how many times this sort of thing happens, more than you would think I suspect.

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    1. Given that a lot of 'experts' are making it up as they go along, I would think so.

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  2. Oh no ..... you must have felt sick and you were trying to make it look nice. The man who cuts our trees told us he drastically chopped back an ivy in an old lady garden..... when she saw it she burst into tears ..... her recently deceased husband had planted it !!! XXXX

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  3. You are a very honorable. I used to handle antiques, too, and once I let a customer convince me that I could remove her miniature portrait out of its Faberge frame...only the portrait was painted on ivory and it was very tightly jammed into the frame, and I had it half way out when it came to me that I could easily shatter the thing, and why did I let that customer talk me into doing this?? Luckily, I eased the portrait out, but I never volunteered my services like that again. Close call.

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    1. Over the years I have had to handle objects which are worth more than I would ever earn in years. You make very careful plans before you begin, and you always make allowance for the worst thing that could happen. There is no compensation for sentimental value though.

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  4. And to think that the woman might've thought that £20 was a lot of money to pay for a little glue!
    Greetings Maria x

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    1. I justify my prices on the grounds of experience these days. Part of my experience involved making mistakes. This is why bankrupts are often sought after in the business world.

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  5. One of life’s good guys.

    LX

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  6. Sounds like one of my good deeds.

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    1. It was an act of desperation, not a good deed.

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  7. I am addicted to some of the antiques programmes on TV and sometimes it amazes me just how much folk will pay for what looks like rubbish to me. Mostly I am right but just occasionally an item fetches such a huge sum at auction thatI am astounded - I suppose it shows that I just don't know what I am talking about.
    Nothing new there then.

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    1. I am often amazed by how undervalued some things are. Objects which would take me a month to make quite often sell for about £500.

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  8. You are an old softy after all.
    There has been a TV series about folk bringing things to a troupe of expert repairers that we have watched. They all go away with 'tears in their eyes' at the wonderful transformations. Never is money spoken about though.

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  9. Good for you. i think any one of us would have done the same.

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  10. I like the dog image. It looks happy and smiling.

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  11. Replies
    1. That is probably when the first mould was made.

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  12. I feel your pain! I once put an iron through the antique silk tulle veil f a customer - it wasn't all that hot to begin with but I should have used a pressing cloth and I don't know what I was thinking. It made a few noticeably arge holes about the point where the veil hit the floor. She didn't give a toss, weirdly. But I still feel like Genghis Khan about it over 20 years later.

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