History repeated itself in 1990 when the year unfolded much like 1980 had. We were at the top of a bull market in antiques and art this time fuelled by huge pay-outs from Wall Street and leveraged buying by the Japanese.

In May, the most expensive painting ever sold at auction, Van Gogh's rather dull 'Portrait of Dr. Gachet', fetched a staggering US $75 million in New York. Two months later in July an incredibly ornate 18th century Florentine pietra dura badminton cabinet became the most expensive piece of furniture sold at auction when it sold, in England, for 7.8 million pounds.

In art, the Japanese were on a buying binge for French Impressionists and the Americans for modern art. In the UK, British dealers were promoting the pants off early 20th century pictures. In antiques, the Japanese had driven the price of French art glass up ten times in as many years and anything old and American was the fad in the States. In England it seemed everything was going through the roof but Cassandra's were already predicting a slump.

In such heady times it's hard to think that parties always end sometime and this one, went down with an awful hangover. By 1991 major auction houses were involved in a bloodletting of reducing staff and in London there were reports of suicides in the art trade. Centuries-old firms went into liquidation along with some of the new boys on the block like Mint & Boxed, the toy specialists.

In Vancouver, the most notable casualty was the Granville Antique Gallery which disintegrated amidst allegations of fraud and incompetence. 3007 Granville became available (GAG hadn't paid the bills in months) so we came out a winner in this disaster. Incidentally, the gallery was revived under new ownership but failed a couple of years later to be re-invented again by our neighbour, the Shaugnessy Antiques Gallery. Our move to the 3000 block Granville had been planned for years and proved to be a lifesaver. The old maxim about the three keys to success in retail "Location,location & location" was amply evident here. Our walk-in traffic doubled and, most importantly, our tourist count increased dramatically turning July and August from two of the slowest months of the year into two of the busiest.

But things were changing for the worse, the world was sliding into a deep recession. For Japan, the second largest economy in the world, it proved to be a slump on the scale of the 1930s. In England about 50 per cent of the antiques trade either went bust or simply closed up shop. The real estate market collapsed, with weekly foreclosures in the tens of thousands. Regretfully we had to reduce staff and hunker down to weather the storm. Toronto was hit much harder than Vancouver. A huge nail in the coffin for many business was the ill advised introduction of the GST tax in 1991 which put a 7 per cent levy on virtually all goods and services in the economy. This was and is the worst tax to ever hit Canadians. The antiques trade fought to have an exemption as taxes were paid long ago on antiques and secondhand goods, but to no avail.

By 1993 the Vancouver antiques trade was getting support from an unlikely source - the immigrants of Chinese origin who, naturally scared out of their wits by the Chinese government, had settled up and down the West Coast. House prices had soared because of strong demand and furnishings followed. The previous October saw the first officially sanctioned auction of Chinese antiques in Beijing but attendees found the quality quite varied.

Over the years the BC film industry had grown in leaps and bounds and by the early '90s was the third largest production centre in North America. This activity became an unexpected source of income for antique dealers. Some closed up shop and became strictly suppliers for props operating out of warehouses while most enjoyed some income derived from rentals to movies.

Although most of the art market was still moribund, Old Master paintings returned to fashion and Michelangelo's drawing, 'Holy Family on the Flight to Egypt' made a record 3.8 million pounds in London in July '93. The November before saw a record price for a jewel encrusted snuffbox when the London dealer, S. J. Phillips, paid 1.06 million pounds for it in Geneva. High prices, as we all know, tend to give full employment to the faker and forger. There were two notable ceramic cause celébés in the early '90s. A Staffordshire potter, Noel Thorley, greatly alarmed Wedgwood collectors when he was exposed for making some very convincing fakes. Another scandal unfolded in England at this time regarding the early 18th century Staffordshire figure market. Noted London dealer, Alastair Sampson, was one of many taken in by over $I million worth of fakes dumped on the market in the mid-eighties but not discovered as such until much later. In the year 2000 there seemed to be copies of almost everything!

In the auction world, Christies raised it's buyer's premium to 15 per cent on lots under $75,000, shortly after Sothebys had initiated it. In 1993 Diana 'Dede' Brooks became president of Sothebys' world wide operations. In October, 2000, she pleaded guilty to collusion in a US anti-trust case. Sothebys pleaded guilty to price-fixing and other anti-trust violations and agreed to pay US $45 million in fines over five years. In making her plea Ms. Brooks claimed that she had only been acting under orders from her former boss, ex-Sothebys' chairman, Alfred Taubman. Taubman strenuously denied the charge. Brooks then faced the possibility of three years in prison and a fine of US $100 million when she was sentenced in January, 2001. Christies managed to secure amnesty from Federal criminal charges by handing over documents which pertained to the anti-trust investigation but still faces problems with cases brought by overseas litigants. Both auction houses have to refund hundreds of millions of dollars to clients, Also in 1993, the collecting world was astonished by the 7 million pound bid for an early 19th century brass calculating machine. Christies was left with egg on it's face, however, when the terminally ill bidder, a Zurich dealer, failed to pay up, as did the elusive underbidder.

By 1995 the overall market was slowly climbing back. The Internet was making it's first appearance with even the providers stating that it would be some time before it became a revenue producing proposition. Many dealers at that time found it hard to understand the concept because they didn't own computers and found, like myself, the whole idea too far out from their own orbits. This gradually changed as the market changed and all sensible dealers know that they can't beat the market. At Hampshire Antiques we joined the 20th century, in this regard, just before it ended.

During 1996 the BC economy started to weaken due, in large part, to no change in government. House prices started to stall and eventually fall as more people left the province in search of greener pastures. They didn't have to go far as both Alberta and Washington state were booming. A fair number of Chinese immigrants, their fears allayed somewhat, went back to where they came from for better work and business opportunities. This weakened the economy further and our sales in the shop reflect this.

The American economy was on a roll and we started to see our Oriental customers displaced, big time, by confident Americans backed up by a strong dollar. The Jackie Onassis sale in April showed how crazy people can go at auction under the media spotlight. Arnold Schwarzenegger anted up US $772,500 for J.F.K.'s secondhand MacGregor Woods golf clubs. There was an antique Louis XVI desk which was estimated at $30,000-40,000 and sold for US $1,432,500!

By the late '90s, the third industrial revolution started to create wealthy business magnates on a scale not seen for a hundred years. The rich become incredibly rich and their impact on the top end of the art and antiques market was massive. Just as the Rockefellers, Duponts, Mellons and the like bought the best of the 18th century and earlier, the Gates, Lloyd-Webbers, Safras and Kirkham were now buying the best of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In Vancouver though, we saw nothing much of this. We just didn't have million-dollar-plus inventory in the city. One recalls the actor, Richard Gere browsing through the city's shops and not finding anything significant to buy. We started to see the British dealers again responding to their market bounce-back. Lots of smalls and even containers of good furniture made their way back to the more buoyant English market. At Hampshire Antiques we had a flood that closed us down for a month in the fall of 1997. The silver lining was that we took the opportunity to renovate the store. We exhibited in the newly inaugurated Vancouver Antiques Show at the Trade & Convention Centre at Canada Place in October, which really drew in the crowds. Around this time Swift's Antiques, in Marpole, closed. This century-old firm's building was bought and torn down for redevelopment.

1998 saw the 'dotcom' boom in full swing and the US stock markets really took off. Antique and art prices zoomed, also illustrating, without a doubt, how economies affect the price of luxury goods. Other world areas were not so fortunate. The Nikkei stock index was off fifty per cent from its high of a decade ago and antique prices keep falling in Japan. Trends in antiques and collectables speed up considerably so a comparison with the stock market is apt. Moorcroft pottery took off after the hoopla of the centenary year celebrations. Chintz pottery was at an all-time high. China, in general, continued it's ascent over silver and other metal antiques. Most younger dealers entering the business opted not to open stores but, instead, to try out the international markets via the Internet and trade sales. This meant no takers for the many antique shops that were closing down.

It is ironic that in a year when most Vancouver antique shops struggled to say alive, the rest of the Western World was enjoying the best year in a decade for sales of antiques and art. Records were broken monthly as fortunes made on the stock market were pumped into the art market.

The wild stock market continued to create wealth, on paper anyway, and the American market boomed. Bill Gates created a record for an American painting sold at auction when he bought George Bellow's 1910 sporting scene "Polo Crowd" for US $27.5 million. At a much more mundane level, we shipped a truckload of furniture to our Seattle mall outlet and it all sold in less than seven weeks. That furniture had been sitting in our store for a considerable period of time eliciting no interest at all. Indeed, the disappointing Vancouver economy continued to slump, with local interest in quality antiques at an all-time low. Shops closed at a rapid rate decimating such areas as Kerrisdale, which once had a cluster of shops on the Boulevard. Now there were none.

By spring 2000, the high-tech market finally started to slide and kept sliding until the end of the year. That unsettled the market somewhat and we notice a drop-off in tourist spending in the late summer.

Amazing prices did still abound though. Over a million pounds was paid for John Lennon's piano on which he composed "Imagine." In December, a French furniture sale saw record prices for 18th century furniture, with a Boulle small table fetching over US $6 million and five other pieces passing the US $1 million mark.

Clearly, at these prices, there are huge amounts of money to be made in the antiques business internationally but risks also abound. If an item isn't just 'right' or fashion moves on, then there can be some spectacular collapses as various works fail to meet their reserves or dealers are stuck with 'dead' inventory.

Like everything else in modern life, the pace in the antiques world is going faster and faster. It used to be that for an antique to fetch a spectacular price, with all other things being equal, it shouldn't have had recent exposure in a shop or auction. "Memories were too short." was the maxim generally accepted, but not any more. Our business has become unpredictable, where prices often go all over the place much of the time and items sold just a few years ago can be resold, sometimes for huge sums, making incredible profits for the owners. This is just a function of the vast sums of money out there and the instant millionaires created who become new collectors and jump, unannounced into the art and antiques market.

What of the foreseeable future? Well, it seems beyond a doubt that the US economy is in recession. At the very high end of the market there is enough 'secure' money to pay more and more for the very fashionable items. The mid to lower end is weakening somewhat and prices are falling especially in the ceramics field where demand has dropped off significantly for many name collectable items, like Royal Doulton and Hummel which, the Internet has proven, are much more common than we originally thought. Even the mighty Moorcroft market has stabilized toward the more rare and unusual. That really seems to be the story for the start of the new millennium.