Amidst all this two decades of upheaval, there were a few very smart cookies who kept buying. You only have to look at so of the results of Sothebys and Christies to see what bargains could be picked up in those desperate days. But so much stuff was just consigned to storage to await better times and often forgotten to eventually present itself all dusted off to the affluent post-war generation who were clamouring for nostalgia and had the money to pay for it.
What a time it was! You could do almost anything, travel and work almost anywhere. Of course, we didn't realize it then but we were living through something of a golden age in the twentieth century. Jobs were plentiful, the economy was booming and the confidence level was very high for the future. People today living through the slumping nineties probably have no idea what I'm writing about. We didn't understand the meaning of the word deflation in those days. We did have inflation though which changed the minds of lots of people about putting money into antiques. They saw it as a hedge against rapidly depreciating currencies as well as putting your money into something of quality. Yes, even in those days there was quite a disgust about the bulk of modern furnishings being pumped out through the retail system.

The early seventies were a time when publishers were beginning to realise the potential of the antiques market. The first few price guides appeared in the late '60s and were often scoffed at by old time dealers who had spent a lifetime learning their trade. Their knowledge was locked away in their heads and not that accessible to the new breed of younger collectors. Indeed, the later flood of books did a fair bit to de-mystify and shake up the old boy network. One unfortunate side effect though of this publishing- phenomenon was to create a breed of Ôinstant experts'. People with whom one conversation or a look at some of their collection brings to mind immediately the proverb ÔA little knowledge is a dangerous thing'.

Driven by a veritable flood of new enthusiasts, entranced by anything old, the seventies saw the start of the expansion of the market not only from its traditional bases in Europe and North America to all over the world but the start of interest in virtually anything of any collectability. This left a lot of older dealers quite bemused and frazzled as to how tastes were changing. It's one thing to learn about traditional antiques and how the styles evolved, shell out a lot of cash to open up a dignified shop premises only to have fashion/the economy change and find you are confronted by spenders who only want vintage door knobs or old gas station signage. But that was the seventies - change, excitement and opportunity.

In 1972 I established Williams Books to bring in reference material whilst at the same time I was getting my feet wet bringing in antiques from the U.K. If there ever was a time for an amateur to jump into the antiques business and make money it was the early and late seventies. I would bring containers of furniture back from Britain and have them wholesaled on the street in very short order. I can remember buying things that I knew little about or what, in some cases, they were used for only to find that they sold overnight. It is a fact that we sold more Art Sales Index Price Guides in 1979 than ever before or since.

No-one really knew where things were going in this antiques explosion. I should have known because one of my jobs was writing about antiques and collectables for North American newspapers and magazines. I got to interview some of the really big names and I naturally pumped them for all they were worth for market tips. The most telling information came from Christopher Wood who had left Christies and branched out on his own as an author (Dictionary of Victorian Painters) and gallery owner in Motcomb Street.

Art has always been at the summit of the money heap but up until the early Õ70s it was very much the preserve of the St. James dealers. The demand for art was such that a shortage of material led to Victorian art being rescued from obscurity and re-assessed. This opened up the market to many younger and aggressive dealers the only question being 'How high could the market go?'

The beauty of going to the top of the tree is that experts have an acute feel for the market which could rarely ever happen in Vancouver because of the lack of activity here. All we can do is get the reports out of London, Paris and New York and try to make some sense out of what's happening and where it's going. There,with affluent customers coming through the doors and chatting to the dealers about their purchases, you have the inside track. Wood, despite the general consensus that perhaps prices had peaked - after all, hikes of 500 per cent in a few years were quite common, was very bullish for the future.

He foresaw that the big names like Alma-Tadema would continue to rise in value even though they have dropped from high five figure sums in the early 1900s to a few hundred dollars in the 1960s. His 'Roses of Heliogabalus' Oil painting (52" x 84") is a classic case of vagaries of the market. Sold in the 1960s for the giveaway price of a few hundred dollars, it fetched around $80,000 in 1973 and a colossal $3 million in 1993!

Egad, should I ever have followed his advice! Down the street from Wood's Gallery on Motcomb Street I came across another Victorian classical painters' work of a maiden by John William Godward. The asking price was around $40,000 and I was really tempted. But being young and somewhat impecunious, I passed it up to the tune of around a half a million profit today. I did follow his advice on some of the minor artists he felt had potential like G G. Kilbourne.
Vancouver's Uno Langmann Gallery was a wonderful repository of 19th century art (as it is now) in the 1970s at prices the world hadn't yet discovered. Indeed, there was nothing like a trip to England to get you racing around the city after you came back to snag the good value that was seemingly almost everywhere. Another interview conducted in the art world was with the late Denys Brook-Hart whose gallery was located down by the water in Lymington, Hampshire. He had authored two books on 19th & early 20th century British marine painting and was very proud of re-discovering the Manchester artist William Edward Webb and was promoting him through exhibitions. Brook-Hart felt that Webb had a long way to go but the market has since only proved him partially correct. Webb's star has risen to the tune of around a 500 percent increase since 1980. Not bad but nothing much compared to the Victorian 'biggies and the later boom in British early 20th century impressionists and the rise of regional interest in Scottish & Irish painters.

By 1980 everyone in the antiques biz was in an upbeat positive frame of mind. When new shipments came in from England, local collectors would rush in and buy and buy and buy. Sotheby's had opened a Vancouver office and was holding auctions at the Bayshore, Deelers Antiques & Royal City Antiques had expanded into mini chains of antiques stores in Western Canada. Canada discovered it's native painters with a Frederick Varley hitting a record $170,000 that year and a Cornelius Krieghoff fetching $140,000. The latter up some seven times the amount routinely paid ten years previously. Jack, my business partner and I decided to open up Hampshire Antiques. This, along with everything else, kept me so busy that I actually had to turn down writing assignments. It had been almost impossible up to that time for new kids on the block to rent a store on Granville Street but by late 1980 empty premises were starting to pop up. This was the first sign that the economy was starting to slow a little. This, although we didn't know it at the time, was the start of a long slump of a kind never experienced since the 1930s.

In part two of this personal look at the past three decades, I'll tell you how the antiques world really did turn itself upside down and how Expo 86 saved the Vancouver antiques trade. We'll also take a look at the art boom of the century and how some dealers made a fortune catering to the Japanese bubble economy of the late eighties. This should all happen no later than next spring.

Part three will probably materialise in the Spring of '01 and will chronicle the ups and downs of the nineties.