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Graduates can look to auctions as a career, while Apple provide a rich seam of collectables
Students have headed back to college, pupils to schools, but there are also a lot of new graduates and school leavers looking to their careers now. Should they consider becoming auctioneers?
Having started at the bottom and worked my up, I have no regrets. I still think the best way in is the traditional one: starting as a porter at one of the larger auction houses, graduating to cataloguing and developing specialist knowledge in your chosen field while studying for a fine arts valuation qualification. There aren’t many courses left around the country, but they are worth doing if this game is for you.
A lot of the auction business has already gone online, and I have no doubt that more will in future. However, I also believe that there will always be brick-and-mortar salerooms for people to visit, view and handle the goods first, particularly at the top end of the market where prices run into the millions.
Auctioneering as a career still holds a lot of promise and the chances of setting up your own business and working for yourself in the long term are greater than in most other industries. It’s something you might want to have a think about.
Meanwhile, with the release of the new iPhone 16 Pro at £1,000, it’s worth remembering that Apple products are already sought-after collectables, with some of the earliest Macs selling for hundreds of thousands of pounds. The 1993 Apple Newton MessagePad, the 1998 iMac G3, the 2003 Apple iPod and the 2007 iPhone can already command decent prices if the condition is right.
They all feature in the collection of the Science Museum, providing a fascinating study of the development of technology and its association to social development over the past 40 years and more.
If this is the attitude that the Science Museum has to these objects – presenting them as museum exhibits – then you can be sure that they will also make their impact on the world of collecting in years to come. Millions of iPhones may be circulating the globe as we speak, but as they get updated and the defunct ones disappear, eventually only a limited number will be left to become sought-after collectables. The development of mobile phone technology, as they morphed into handheld computers, thereby changing the way the world communicates and interacts socially, has been the biggest game changer of all. Expect it to be a force at auction as a whole new niche collecting area develops in the future.
Why the Glorious Twelfth means Thorburn to me
This is an area of pheasant shoots, and while those ready to take aim will have to wait until October 1 for that, August 12 was the start of the Red Grouse season.
While blasting birds out of the sky has never been my passion, the paintings of game birds by Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935) are. His depictions of pheasant, grouse and ptarmigan are pre-eminent among British bird painters of the past century, as prices at auction will confirm. A decent watercolour of any of these birds in a moorland setting will have no problem encouraging bids up to the £25,000 mark.
Collectors have long taken aim at Thorburn but I suppose he really came into his own when the popularity of shooting spread from the landed gentry to commercial shoots in the 1980s. Born the son of a miniaturist painter who worked for Queen Victoria near Edinburgh in 1860, Thorburn had little to no formal training except for a brief stint at art school in St John’s Wood. What really set him on the road to his life’s work was a stroke of luck. In 1887 when the Dutch artist J.G. Keulemans fell ill, Thorburn took over the commission from Lord Lilford of Northampton to complete the illustrations for the seven-volume Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands. By the time he finished his career had taken flight. He even designed the first Christmas card for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), of which he became a Vice President.
The son of Robert Thorburn (1818-85), portrait miniaturist to Queen Victoria, Archibald was a Scottish artist with an obvious yearning for the unequalled grouse moors of The Highlands, but nonetheless spent the second half of his life in Surrey.
He moved to Hascombe, not far from our Fernhurst rooms, after his marriage in 1902, and his grave can be found at St John the Baptist church in Busbridge near Godalming.
Victorian values have all that it takes to attract a modern taste
It never ceases to amaze me how what are, frankly, in my opinion a series of unattractive daubs flung together in the name of Contemporary art can make millions at auction when highly accomplished and rather beautiful Victorian landscapes can be had for buttons.
I suppose that fashions change and, with them, tastes. Don’t get me wrong, I think a great deal of Modern and Contemporary art has a lot to offer, but it is also rife with mountebanks. However, the flipside of what has been a rather subdued market for late Victorian and Edwardian painting is that you can pick up stunning art for very little indeed.
Just browsing through one of the online auction platforms the other day, I worked out that, with a fair wind behind me, I could fill a whole wall with stunning Victorian and Edwardian watercolours for less than £2000. Some of the pictures looked a bit tired, but closer inspection revealed that they simply needed a new mount and frame, and at these prices this was very much a realistic option.
I have also seen some evidence of prices recovering for rather better examples of the period, and, of course, outstanding artists like our own much-heralded local talent, Helen Allingham (1848-1926), have always done well.
Tastes may change but a devotion to their craft, with a painterly approach and sensitive treatment of subject matter, means that the potential for Victorian and Edwardian artists will always be there.
I have no idea whether art like this will enjoy a renaissance in years to come – although it certainly deserves to – but those cherry picking now will be in the best position to capitalise if it does. And if prices remain in the doldrums, well they will have a fantastic selection of art gracing their walls, which they will never tire of.
Successful art and antiques businesses must work out how to appeal to younger buyers
One of the great obsessions in our industry is how you attract the next generation of buyers and sellers. Forty or fifty years ago, newly married couples tended to go to auction to buy furniture and decorations for their first home. Then the era of mass consumerism, with its disposable, flatpack furnishings, took over, tastes changed, and the local general weekly auction started to look like a thing of the past.
Well, half a century on we’re still here and as relevant today as we have always been. Yes, we have had to adapt, offering more specialist sales, better catalogues, clear costings and, in the advanced technological age, live bidding via the internet.
What hasn’t changed are the twin thrills of finding something special hidden among the day-to-day items and the charged atmosphere of competitive bidding and ultimate victory as the hammer comes down. I’d say they are as attractive characteristics of the auction process for the young as they are for the more mature among us. However, by themselves, they are not enough to sustain a healthy level of business going forward. As auctioneers, we must make sure that the new generation feels as well-informed and comfortable with the process as its predecessors. In modern parlance, it’s known as building a trusted brand.
Dealers face similar challenges. I was chatting to one last week about his recent experiences standing at antiques fairs. When times are uncertain or tough, he said, he adapts the stock he presents on his stand so that it appeals to richer, older people who are less likely to be affected by fluctuating financial fortunes.
However, what he really wants for long-term success are new, younger buyers who are setting off along the road to a life of collecting. They may spend less in the short term, but they will be around longer, graduating to more valuable pieces as life goes on.
The other challenge for both him and auctioneers like me is the changing nature of buyers. When I started in the business, most people who bought at auction were dealers who would turn up every week to restock and spend a reasonable sum. Now more private buyers are raising a hand or clicking a mouse to bid – and very welcome they are too. However, fewer take the form of traditional collectors looking to see what’s on offer, week in, week out. A far greater percentage are those wanting something to decorate their house with, which means they tend to be one-off purchasers. This means we must all be much more proactive than ever before to make a success of this business.
