The Tale of the Green Windsors

The Saturday auction preview was unusually well attended. On the day before the sale the gallery was teeming with the usual mix of dealers, knowledgeable collectors, as well as the casual retail crowd. The sale had been heavily advertised, and the untouched contents of this Hampshire County home had attracted buyers from afar.

At the preview we met and exchanged pleasantries with many acquaintances, including several dealers whom most would consider "high end". Their presence at the preview guaranteed that the purest and most desirable pieces would probably sell for more than we could justify paying for them. Nonetheless, we assessed everything in the sale that interested us and returned home from the preview to plan our best course of action.

At 10:00 on Sunday morning the gallery was once again filled, though now the audience were mostly in chairs arranged in neat rows at one end of the rectangular hall. Facing us, on the opposite end of the room, the items to be sold were similarly arranged in neat rows and on tables. The three or four "stars" of the sale had been placed on a raised dais between buyers and the rest of this large collection. The auctioneer mounted his podium and, after a brief introduction, the bidding commenced.

As we had anticipated, prices were high, spurred upward by a bank of telephones through which absentee bidders won a share of the estate. At 12:00 noon we had raised our hands a few times, but had not yet bought anything.

One lot in the sale offered us a bit of hope: a set of five bow-back Windsor chairs in old green paint. Had they been pristine, we probably could not have considered buying them. Our hope sprang from the fact that each of the five chairs had at least one defect: the first was missing a stretcher, while the second had two broken legs; at least two had cracked spindles, and one of the bows had a rather prominent break.  Surely, we thought, the condition of the chairs would discourage the "upstream" dealers. We, on the other hand, had the skill to take parts from the most damaged chair to replace broken elements in the other four. In this way, we surmised, we could restore a set of four, utilizing parts from a sibling, preserving the integrity of the smaller set.

When the chairs came up for bid we aggressively outbid the floor. In the ensuing silence we noticed that one of the auctioneer's assistants was still on the phone. The assistant nodded to the auctioneer, and the caller became the high bidder. Two more bids from the phone took us to our limit, and we sat helplessly as the chairs were hammered down to the anonymous phone bidder.

About a month later, on another Sunday morning, as we were setting up at a show in Western Connecticut, we spotted two of the green Windsors in the booth of a prominent Connecticut Americana dealer. While we examined one of the chairs to confirm that he was indeed our anonymous phone bidder, he returned from his van with two more. The restoration work had been done flawlessly, and it would have been difficult to determine which elements had been repaired.

A few moments later, the dealer reappeared, this time with a fifth chair in one hand. Like the others, this this one had been fully restored.

But in his other hand was the biggest surprise: a sixth chair, identical to the five, and -- according to the ticket on the set of six -- in "original condition."

The set of chairs sold at the show, for a sum of money far in excess of our "aggressive" limit. Had we been the buyers, had made the necessary repairs, and offered the restored set of four at a sensible price, with an honest disclaimer, could we have sold the chairs so quickly?

We hope so.

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