We – that’s the family – have decorated the study at home with “curiosities” picked up cheaply at auction: cheaply because we have usually tended to be attracted by bric-a-brac that fits our own (classical) interests but doesn’t have much widespread appeal. Not many people are as keen as we are to pay any money at all for 1920s busts of Sappho, or nineteenth-century plaster versions of the emperor Vitellius.
It has changed somewhat in the past couple of decades, though – because online bidding has become standard at most auctions everywhere. It’s no longer a question of finding a hidden treasure at a local country sale and getting it for a song with an in-person bid in a room that is full of those who have come with their eyes on something completely different. Now, the six other people in the country (or even further afield) who are also passionate about 1920s busts of Sappho have already found it online and are ready to outbid you with no more effort than a quick hit on their keyboard. The age of serendipitous bargains has largely gone.
The compensation though is that we too can browse the online catalogues and bid from home. And just occasionally there are still, by chance, some bargains to be had. That happened to us last week.
Next to our array of Greek poets and Roman emperors good and (mostly) bad, we have put some popular images of autocrats and monarchs ancient and modern. Along those lines, we spotted a characteristic nineteenth-century “Staffordshire” pair of “Victoria and Albert” on sale in an auction house in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (they are at the top of this post). It was part of a large private collection of Staffordshire pottery put up for sale. Some we had no interest in (a load of ceramic greyhounds, for example; no thanks). But no one else seemed much interested in this pair. The other bidders, I wondered, might have known something we didn’t. But too late, as – before we finished wondering – we had our snip with the online bid.
The only problem was that familiar peril of online shopping: the size. How many times have I bought a dish for a present online, only to discover that what I thought was a salad bowl was actually a small dessert plate? To be fair, the dimensions are always clearly stated, but it is easy not to concentrate on converting them into “real” size. In this case it was the other way round. Surprisingly, Victoria and Albert turned out to be just short of half a metre tall. Not what we had expected.
So, they are now standing there, almost dwarfing poor old Vitellius, who is properly put in his place.
The post Our new big queen appeared first on TLS.