Antiques Roadshow on Skye

[Music] so [Music] [Music] [Applause] this week we've traveled to the west coast of scotland and to a special place known the world over for its outstanding natural beauty we're on the island of sky but apart from its physical beauty sky has a special place in our history the story of bonnie prince charlie escaping over the sea to sky in the face of a pursuing english army reads like a novel sounds like a legend but is in fact true he may have never won the throne but it was here that he escaped with his life the story of bonnie prince charlie is really the story of the epic struggle for the throne between the scottish house of stuart and the german house of hanover that struggle resulted in the final defeat of the highland army at the battle of claddon in april 1746 the scottish prince was then pursued across to the western isles by english troops under the duke of cumberland a young jacobite supporter 24 year old flora macdonald disguised the prince as her maid and with the help of a local boatman smuggled him over the sea to sky where they landed on the 28th of june 1746 eventually the young pretender escaped to france the story of how flora saved her prince from certain capture is now part of highland legend and as you would expect sky has its mementos of bonnie prince charlie and here at dunwagan castle are two of the most significant this is an old jacobite toasting glass the toast was god save the king then the glasses were thrown in the fire which is why so few survive this one's important because it's inscribed to donald macleod of skye who was the boatman who helped the prince and flora macdonald to escape and just before they parted flora asked the prince for a lock of his hair to remember him by and here in flora's locket we have that final parting gift they never saw each other again well all of that helps to explain why sky is such a popular tourist destination and the new bridge linking the island to the scottish mainland was built to take the ever increasing flow of tourist traffic some 35 miles from the bridge nestling around a well-protected harbour is the small fishing town of portree and that's where we've come for this week's antiques roadshow our home for the day is the town's community centre so let's now join our experts with the people of sky well i have to say the most unexpected thing to see on the island of sky is a collection of martin wear i'd never have believed it and why have you got it well it's a family collection creation yes my grandfather's sister was married to robert wallace martin the potter and so many of the things we have which were my father's collections have never been out of the family that's amazing so there's a direct family link with all these pieces i think this is an extraordinary thing because the martin brothers one night you can tell me rather than i tell you i'm sure i shouldn't tell you anything really i don't know about but they were one of these extraordinary late victorian studio potters there were four brothers working in london trained in dalton as a stone mason all over the place who set up in the early 1870s making what we would now call studio pottery can you tell me family secrets not really they were just looked on as totally eccentric martin brothers martin ware is a very distinctive type of pottery i think you'd know these straight away wouldn't you yes one thinks immediately of the birds these wonderful grotesque birds they're based on a roman form where the head comes off strictly speaking they're a bottle and a cup but they never are i think they're just an expression or victorian fascination for the grotesque each one is a personality aren't they we always used to think of them as our father's friends well i'm sure they were or they all looked like somebody were you ah do you think they're caricatures of people oh yes definitely you do and you said earlier that they were so easy to recognize my father walked into an auction room in carlisle where we lived many years ago and there was one actually being auctioned and he saw from the back of the auction room he said that's a martin ware bird and he put his hand up and bid five pounds for it got it i got it well that was a long time ago i have to say things have changed 40 years ago yes i mean years ago do you know the values i mean in current marketing terms we're looking at about five or six thousand pounds there possibly more and one with a family link i think you could raise the price a bit more but of course it isn't just the birds they were very good at making salt blade stoneware in a slightly japanese style within size decoration there are about with what dalton were doing at lambeth but the great thing about martin where apart from decoration of course is that it's all clearly marked there are the names on the bottom and very often the date and fulham or southfield or where they were made do you have a particular favorite amongst these pieces i like mr pick quick he's wondering he's wheelbarrow it may be mr bigwig but he's actually some friend of theirs i'm sure you can see it was the kiln farm and after a few too many whiskeys or something like that i quite like this i like this one it's so different without without without the coloration the decoration and it's unusual in being on glaze it's a great piece of sculpture and the face is wonderful very powerful and i think it's david with his heart probably isn't it yes i mean in price terms as you probably know i mean this is probably about a thousand pounds that's one of a pair well you could make it more then that's such a quirky piece you know i think a collector would pay probably getting under a thousand pounds for that but everybody wants a bird i think this is wonderful i mean it's a real it's really made my day and i'm delighted to meet you and delighted to see you thank you very much thank you i was told that they were doing something and i can't remember which louie it was well they're definitely not louis they're george tyson louis french george english yes and these are very very english candlesticks indeed and they're good how long have you had them they belonged to my grandparents but then how long before that before that right they were made in london in 1764. fully hallmarked and there's a date letter there date letter i for 1764. and you have there a leopard's head a lion pass on to the makers mark over there for a man called ebenezer coca who made them uh he was a prolific candlestick maker mid-18th century you find this sort of candlestick which are called shell cornered candlesticks for the obvious reasons they've got a shell at each corner and you find these from around about the 1740s until the late 60s this is late-ish for them 1764. but they're they're nice candlesticks and they are a very standard pattern and i suppose 10 years ago might have been might have been looking at sort of 3 000 but today i think you'd probably be pushed to get 2 000 for them fifteen to eighteen hundred pounds i would think would be roughly speaking much of what you'd get the first thing you notice is the wonderful original color and the beautiful original grasses it just couldn't be better do you know where it came from well family came from north west england manchester cheshire derbyshire right wonderful because i would have said shropshire myself something somewhere like that certainly north west midlands at your end you've got a very a wonderful sophistication those raised panels with the crossed banding around it and the very simple thumb molding it's absolutely terrific the brasses are totally original all the drawers and as i mentioned the end panels have got mahogany crossbanding the piece itself of course is oak i don't know i mentioned that did i mahogany crossbonding which really gives enables us to date it because in the country they weren't using mahogany on a piece of furniture like this until the middle of the 18th century the legs and the feet the cabriole legs with the pointed pad foot would suggest that in fact its original design is much nearer 1720 1730 but the fact it's got the this type of brass and the mahogany must put it to the middle of the century because in the country they just wouldn't have been using mahogany much before then it's a lovely size and actually a very useful height yeah it's a curious height most dresser bases would be just a little bit lower you've obviously loved it because there is no possibility that you could buy this in a sale let alone from a dealer's showroom for less than about four thousand pounds is wonderful this quintessentially english seascape shows all the hallmarks of the youthful work of a man called james webb born in 1825 and by the middle part of the century was painting extremely accomplished seascapes and this particular piece shows the influence of artists such as turner and possibly even bonnington who were the great seascape painters of the early part of the century had you thought that it was an english picture or no idea but i thought it was dutch personally and the books appeared to me to be that well it's just possible that it's seen either in foxton or even on the east coast of england where of course a lot of dutch fishing boats came in so it's not impossible that that's the case but certainly it is without a doubt by james webb and it's full of life and uh the quality of of painting and this wonderful impasto here as a waves break on the fishing boats as the fishermen land the catch and certainly here in the uh in the sails of the boats in the distance it's very skillfully handled later on in his life his works are rather more formal and very grand and i think this actually has in a way a greater charm than a rather big set piece do you have it in short at all or anything like that no no no no no no no just the household insurance household insurance well um such a nice youthful work i think would probably make between five and six thousand pounds um and you know you ought to insure it for a little bit more than that but uh they're very hard to come by in this sort of condition and this sort of quality i think these are these seagulls they are cigars yes yes my wife said it was dope we thought it was dead well don't try and clean them off for goodness sake because they're meant to be there a little bit there it's nice to put a plant do you use it for plants yes yeah mother-in-law's town or um uh with the damage about 20 pounds they are getting quite collectible our childhood ears like that again people like um as pedestrians again yeah so uh they're becoming popular that's damaged give it a good pull smooth but firm that's it so the idea is for it to go through these hoops is it that's right yes it goes five ten eight and nine if it goes to three so i mean it's a bit it is like a a bit like a pinball machine um i mean was it when when you acquired it um how was it described to you it was so to us as maybe a bagatelle it's i'm sure uh dating from 1900 1910 so late victorian very early at wardian um i would have thought we're talking about perhaps 150 to 200 that's very very nice isn't it an evening i bet they squawk a bit when they lay there well it's it's what the shape is what's called a loving cup it's what we term printed and tinted yes a printed brown outline and then colored you know see the little jockey um colors here the blue and the pink and the green is all just been added over the print and we come to the maker because the piece in fact is marked on the bottom john and robert goodwin who are staffordshire makers and they were working up until around um 1860s or so so we could safely date this piece at around 1850 1860. and the value of the piece because it's it's so big and so chunky and such a handsome piece would be certainly in the region of six to eight hundred pounds thank you really suits me down to the ground this one are they old family pieces yes and my aunt gave them to me in 35 years ago and do you know how long she had had them oh probably another 40 years they're actually typical of the early upholstered chairs in the early victorian period oh yes if i just show you here you've got this serpentine line here this deep sprung seat it's one of the first chairs to have this type of sprung big steel coil springs inside there yeah and again they've got the nicely padded back like this very comfortable and the padded arm like this they're magnificent chairs you know you don't find them like this anymore they're so comfortable and then you look at this mahogany this is made of mahogany this nice scroll here on all these leaves this is an 1840 chair 1840 1840. going back here with this decoration is going back to the 1740s 1750s it's a very popular style to revive this i think each one would make certainly a thousand pounds each so i think a pair of them you'd expect two thousand two thousand two to two and a half thousand pounds yes but that means for ensuring them if you went to a shop to try and replace them yes three thousand thousand so you've really got to look after them thank you very much all that information my great grandfather may have acquired it in paris we have a passport from that date he was in paris shortly after the wreck of russian war but that's just hazarding i guess the clock is indeed french and the date of manufacture is going to be just around the turn of the century maybe just before but the most unusual thing is that it is not in a european style it is of course very much in the chinese style have you ever seen a bamboo case like this before no well if you can imagine that the average carriage clock has a fairly plain brass case this one is actually molded to form the branches of bamboo and then all around we have these quite remarkable little panels including the back door which is nice because very often the door which is not seen is glass but all the way around these panels now they're really almost surreal aren't they we've got these wonderful things going on in tree tops and stylized lakes and accentuated bridges very much how at the time the europeans might have perceived the far east to be like i can't actually shed any light on the maker because the movement is is numbered right down there in the bottom left but there's no factory stamp i mean it would have been lovely if you've been by origico or draco or one of the good makers but in the absence of a stamp i can't specify exactly who would have made it but suffice to say that although dirty it's still got its original lever platform which is good it still works and well it could do with a little bit of a clean inside to be honest it's certainly the sort of thing that if you were replacing it retail you would be looking in terms of towards four thousand pounds other than the fact is a little bit dirty a hundred percent fine i'm not sure whether that's chinese or japanese well it is the chinese teapot they love these bamboo handles it's got these little ivory insulators while the printed bamboo spout and you know really nice solid weight and the cover fits nicely it's a very very attractive piece of silver where did it come from actually it came from my grandmother uh and it came down to my grandmother through her system well these were made for the european market they weren't actually made for chinese consumption and chinese silversmiths started making silver for the europeans going back to about 1810 [Music] this is a particularly nice example because all this decoration is applied to the outside of the teapot it's not just being embossed yeah but it's actually being cast and laid on it's very typical you've got all these prunus blossoms or cherry blossoms and little birds flying about and it goes all the same way around the side and uh a little bit of sacred fungus on the lid and a very nice touch is this uh yes that little little butterfly butterfly it's about a it is solid silver yes it's got two marks on it one a chinese mark and the other one hc which if i remember right here someone called chong and all these pieces were made either in hong kong or shanghai i can't remember which one he comes from now i mean this is not this is not this isn't worth a fortune we're not going to be able to retire on it but chinese silver has become a lot more popular um 20 years ago no one really wanted it at all no one knew anything about it but people started collecting it there were a couple of books published on it which raised the interest in it and a teapot like this today um would have a trade value of six to eight hundred pounds and you should probably be ensuring this about twelve hundred pounds when we got married my wife and i decided that when we furnished the house we would get antique furniture because we like old things and about 30 years ago we saw this table in an antique shop we liked it and we lived with it and loved it ever since what is so nice about this is the way that the way the gate legs opens perhaps awkwardly but rather amusingly naively you've got this very nice serpentine side on your side and my side and the front yes and they haven't gone the one stage further it's not a concertina action look at the color this is beautiful beautiful honduras mahogany beautifully grained lovely color quite a weighty flap it's really quite comparatively heavy but again just looking at the front here you've got this marvelous egg and dark molding here and just wonderful bit of carving almost sort of taken from elizabethan type decoration of elizabethan jewellery of the sort of late 16th century so that sort of look um have you any idea what date the table is well we thought it was mid 18th century it was so to us as chippendale but i think that thomas chippendale himself would have not have designed a card table although very sweet slightly awkwardly slightly naively with those two legs in the middle let's close it up again and look at that i think it's rather fun but it's that chippendale period of about the 1750 1755 period i think if we look in his director we'll see similar features but not identical features and i couldn't tell you whether somebody's borrowed this from chippendale or chippendale's borrowed this from somebody else what i i think is fascinating to me is this almost trump lloyd effect with the legs because if you get it at one angle it looks square yes but in fact they're sort of cut like a diamond and more obviously here at the collar on the foot yeah but it's such a weird strange optical illusion as you as you travel round the table like that i think with this arrangement of the legs it possibly isn't a london piece it's just a good major city piece a major provincial city but nobody could be sure about that what i am sure about is it's a beautiful piece of antique furniture do you remember what you paid for it 30 odd years ago we thought we paid a terrible lot i think we paid somewhere around 360 pounds what do you think is worth today i i suppose it's worth four figures but i i don't i really do not know well it's certainly worth four figures isn't it it's certainly worth that and i'm sort of hedging as i talk to you around even perhaps around 10 000 pounds really yeah i think it would cost you that in a shop today at least but we wouldn't sell it it's part of the furniture and we love it this one slightly less because as you can see it's a bit on the bent side do you know what it is oh it's uh well we call it a fender because it sits in front of the fire that's quite right it is a 17th century french adjustable far fender or great it's got a date of 1674 on it and there is no doubt whatsoever but that is the genuine date and it is very very rare in this time they would actually fold up and take the fender with them every time they move from room to room very unusual indeed and i think that if you saw it a specialist stand in the fair i think you could possibly pay from a thousand twelve hundred pounds for it french 1674. there's just there's just lumps of silver polish there so how do i clean it just you don't just yeah you don't need to put any form of cleaner on it at all it just that gets through the holes into the movement and gunges it up over a period of years now one of the problems that occurs with virtually all forms of collecting is the problem of cleaning now over cleaning is a problem that you confront on the roadshow many times paul's now particularly in the court in the case of bronze and many metals if we take bronze there are two coins very familiar to all of us one brand new as it comes from the mint bright and shiny the other colored by what is called patination this is the effect of wear handling everything that metal goes through in normal daily use and the quality of a bronze and old bronze is exactly that it's that word patination now paternation can either be as in this case a medal formed in the factory or in the foundry by the artist and this is the color that the artist in the foundry wanted it to be it doesn't whether it doesn't wear it stays like that so if someone starts trying to polish that they're making a grave error they're destroying it they're destroying the artistic integrity they're destroying the value the whole thing becomes a meaningless object and the detail is polished away as well what's happening here now here with this door plate we can see all over there is a variation of colour now this has occurred quite naturally it's occurred by weather by corrosion by people handling it by all the things that it goes through in over years this is a 19th century piece it's been around for a long time an archaic bronze buried for centuries of course has a wonderful pattern which is the effect of the earth on it so the pattern actually adds value yes it does bronze on its own is a rather bland material pattern adds enormous value so what's happened here now these are pieces where cleaning has taken place this one which would have looked like this has ended up even flat dull all the color and interest has gone out of it and cleaning has taken away everything that one would want of any quality in that bronze and with this one it's even worse this would have been this oriental bronze started out with wonderful tonality and color and richness and over the years maybe over 50 years a long time constant polishing has removed anything would have given that an appeal it's very odd this isn't it because um most people would think that that was the way it should look i mean they they're passionately fond of spring cleaning quite innocent and they innocently polish away at the end i must have this shine i must have it shiny but what they've got to remember is that every time you polish any metal except gold you are removing the surface all proprietary cleaners are effectively corrosive or or in one way or another now is this absolutely an invariable rule it applies not just to bronzes we're discussing now brass silver all these metals with the exception of gold yes effectively if you polish any metal you are polishing away metal if you keep going eventually after a very long time you'll end up with nothing thank you very much i know my father inherited them from an uncle who lived in portugal and we think he bought these four from auction in portugal in about the 1950s i think they're tea jars and the square ones are square so they could fit the maximum number in the hold good yeah i think that's really that's pretty good yeah they are um that they're exactly what you say they're two jars either cylindrical or the square ones the funny thing is that these shapes are um are not chinese shapes at all they're not no um because uh in fact the square form comes from way way back in uh in the 17th century when the the dutch were making glass vessels to go in ships of the same sort of size so exactly to fit into grids these are made uh in the second quarter of the 19th century from between 1825 and 1850 and there are if you look at them you can see that the subjects on on the cylindrical ones and the square ones are much the same yeah this one down here for example there's a little man crossing a bridge and you can see that in fact he's got what looks like a sort of an axe or something like this it's actually a parasol and it's because this is the sun peeping down here and these are clouds i think they're marvelous objects with the with this continuous scene around them but the other little bits and pieces we can look at for example the collar on here this is rather strange looking looks like almost like a mask and in fact it's uh sometimes called a cloud collar or can look like what is like a collar on a uh a vestment in fact it's based on what is called a magic mushroom as it were a rui head so it's in fact a very common motif which carries on on all kinds of chinese portions for hundreds of years so this is getting towards the end of it so these these vessels here are simply sort of european eyes are westernized whereas this one in the middle that is actually not pottery it's porcelain exactly the same date right as the rest of them and it is chinese this is sort of mid or slightly maybe slightly later than these but it's certainly 19th century so that they're all chinese portion made at a place called jingdojian in southern china and i think this pair would probably be about two two and a half thousand pounds for this pair the same maybe a little bit more for these the fellow in the middle the singleton is is probably not quite so interesting and i think maybe um four to six hundred pounds okay yeah great most people associate crossbows with switzerland but here we've got a very interesting english example that dates from the 1790s early 1800s you do get continental ones but this cocking lever and flip up rear sight is very much associated with these particular english ones it's a stone bow because it shoots either small stones pebbles or even compressed clay pellets rather than the more normal arrow what distance would you think it might be effective i've actually shot one of these and i i could hit a tin can with one of these easily at 45 yards these were used extensively in the 19th century and there's a book by a chap called daniel higson which describes the operation of these and tells you how to make new springs and also the strings for them would you would you repair that yes if it were mine i would get a very fine razor saw and cut that away and look to see what was wrong underneath it and then either joint it by gluing and splicing or perhaps a screw with a concealed top on it yeah but certainly i don't think i could live with that repair on it tell me what you paid for it i paid something in between 50 and 75 pounds for it in the early 70s well i think you could safely put another note on the 50 at the moment i've seen ones in far less good condition than this make 200 350 pounds and one that's got its original string is still nice and bright without any serious pitting very interesting to see it this is a copy a very fine copy i may say of the deluxe edition of shackleton's heart of the antarctic tell me about the book are you an antarctic collector not specifically antarctic just expedition books not really i do try and get first editions where possible this was a gift from my father-in-law um shackleton didn't get on with captain scott and he decided after scott's first expedition that he would go and try for the south pole and so he went off with the crew down to the antarctic and was he didn't manage to make the poll but he did manage to get further south than anybody else had got and this was the expedition when he actually uh they discovered the magnetic pole all this when he was in his early 30s now there were two editions of this book the ordinary two volume one in blue cloth with silver silver covers and this one which is in vellum which is limited to 300 numbered copies as i'm sure you know and this little sign here which is the sign of the penguin was the sign of the press the private press that they had down in the antarctic they actually produced on this expedition the first book that was actually printed in the antarctic at the sign of the penguin they had to warm the ink with candles and all sorts of things they had the most enormous trouble but they produced something that is now very very rare um the aurora australis which is a little book down there now this limited edition of the heart of the antarctic in the two volumes has an added bonus it has the third volume which is signed by all the members from shackleton right the way through to edgeworth david and douglas mawson of the shore party so these were all the people who actually went on shore and did the work do you know why they're those people signed over there and those people signed over here i just assumed that they'd run out of room in this place well yes it does look like that isn't it but in fact this particular page went off to australia because these two are australian and they and they had to sign separately so they signed separately and they sent it back but it does have some rather nice illustrations which were done by george marston who was one of the artists out there and these were actually done in the antarctic and reprinted here which is which is rather fine i i love this particular edition of it as i say because it does have the extra antarctic book with all these other wonderful illustrations that were actually uh conceived in the antarctic which i think is is tremendous and a book like this of course is appreciated enormously um in value over the years certainly in the last 20 years it's gone up enormously do you have any idea of this well it was valued 15 years ago for insurance purposes and it was valued then by not acquiring bookseller at 300 pounds and the only increase i've made to that valuation through insurance is up to 500. well i i'm never sure whether you should ensure books because i think burglars go for other things other books but um they're too heavy for one thing but the value of this now is certainly well over 2 000 pounds it's in super condition all the vellum is creamy milky white there are a few spots but this this is this is old age nothing terribly serious um and it's a lovely set it's lovely to have and the idea that the sure part they actually signed the book that's a nice thing but i do read it it's very immediate i use it it's a great read he was actually knighted after this he was knighted in 1909 which is when this book was produced at the ripe old age of 35. anyway thank you very much for bringing it here i think generally this is an organization i think perhaps it was made some of them were made in the mainland but generally i think org need to keep out the they're called wins to keep out the draft if not the actual gale even though that is obviously what it was made for the interesting thing about them was as there are no natural material on automate no trees or anything they were made from driftwood and the original ones in fact were very very crudely made literally from bits of wood they found on the beach whether they did any actual wrecking to produce the wood i don't i don't know if that's recorded but no they were made out of materials that they had to hand which on awkney i understand is very limited exactly lovely thing thank you yeah that's very um very typical you know johnny turk portrayed as a big fat oriental yeah it's real crypto racism that was designed to get to get people going but these are wonderful seen one i'll be your light i love you yeah yeah yeah that really is just like my cat i'm convinced as a secret smoker did you have any other um pieces uh from this set was there anything else nothing else to line up because originally it would have been part of a cabaret or a solitaire a solitaire being for one person a cabaret for two and it would have a nice little tray um to go with it with a similar kind of decoration and a little cup and saucer and a little milk jug but it was actually made by the micelle factory which is this blue cross swords mark on the base and that's the mark that the mice in factory used it's still got that lovely honey colored building which if we look at here you can see that lovely honey color later it became much brassier and much pinker um and then this little sweet little romantic scene which was indeed these kind of scenes were used in the second half of the 19th century but it's the nice gilding and the lovely classical motifs that give us the dates of 1835 it's also got this lovely stepped cover and a lovely double-headed mask finial and because it's such a rare shape and the micen factory is so popular still and certainly if you were ever to sell it on the open market you'd be looking at an excess of a thousand pounds for the for the tea pot lots of these around nice object but not terrifically valuable thank you very much i was given it by an antr in canada who sent it over for me as a present i've had it for a number of years so when you you had it it was in this condition yes yes it's known as shibuyama wear and it's a little table screen it's the from the magic period which is after 1868 um probably the last few years of the 19th century and it has two designs of shiboyama wear which in fact is a buildup of lacquer and on this side here it's completely flat it's a thinner layer of lacquer known as hairy machia so on this side we've just got a very simple design of birds and carved ivory frame which is absolutely lovely we have these silver mugs which all are also chased so it's a serious piece of table furniture um and then we come to this wonderful park which i think both see it together better like that um so on this side we have taki machia where which is when it's raised this is rey's lacquer the japanese have three dreams and they put these scenes on a lot of their furniture on a lot of their pictures summer peace and tranquility are either mount fuji an eagle or a persimmon and we have the most wonderful array of coloured bone we have mother of pearl ivory and then these tiny little red obviously meant to be little fruits they're probably coral so it's known as a table screen um do you know what it's worth um not really i got it valued last year i was talking about a few hundred pounds right well i think to be pleasantly surprised to hear that if you were to buy it in a shop it would be worth about 5000 pounds really i can't believe that well that's lovely do you have fairies in your glen um no well i was very unromantic of you because this artist certainly did have fairies in the glen and in fact that's exactly how he titled this sort of picture because to him the fairies of the glenn were the silver birches which are those wonderful light trees now do you know this artist no i don't know you know anything about this painting at all not at all it was given to my mother when they moved from one house to another house in inverness and then it came over to sky when they came to sky and i was given it well this is on that this is a very scottish painting uh from the second half of the last century by an artist called john mcworth and this is the frame that it was originally sold in this is gold and it's gilded onto the oak so you can see the grain of the wood if you look at most frames victorian frames it's a smooth surface now this was uh this came out of the sort of gilding that the pre-raphaelites and rosetti liked but do you know who gave it to your mother yes it was unlike color from shetland who were in woola manufacturers as work was my father um and maybe that's sort of the connection because actual fact mum and dad have got the same painting but much much smaller and probably given around about the same time you see it just shows you how popular and how influential and how popular that painting was at the royal academy this painting the fairies and the glenn it was so popular that he kept repeating it in different forms but this is a this is a really rather magnificent repeat and obviously that's what the public required and this is what made him plenty of money but it's but also history reverses as well because mcguerta now is not a terribly popular artist yes it's worth um two or three thousand pounds which is a reasonable sum of money for a present but it is you know for somebody who was so important in his time you would expect it to be perhaps worth you know maybe in his lifetime it was the equivalent of 10 times we're interested to know what its nationality is because some people have told us it's dutch and somebody else has said it's austrian right it's it's very categorically and straightforwardly dutch absolutely typical of the best dutch furniture of around 70 50 70 60 even be 10 years later if it's a slightly provincial area of holland the main part of holland itself part of the netherlands it's got all the details you'd expect in the middle of the 18th century in england rococo details if you look at the doors here all this these wiggly sea scrolls these lines here are typical of that middle part to third quarter of the 18th century in a way the sort of thing that chippendale was doing a little a few years earlier than that but it's exactly what you expect architectural furniture repeating the architecture inside all these numerous little drawers very very nicely made indeed i mean it's wonderful quality what more can you ask for but i'm just going to open the the flap because again i want to just show how nice it is inside you're probably used to it here but i love this and we've got again traditional things which wouldn't have been on a bureau an english borough of this date this well for example wouldn't be there in the set by this or really it's only 1730 it's disappeared from the english bureau really um of course we have secret inverted commons drawers here very typical and this lovely again architectural flowing shape beautiful color inside it's exactly what you want to see from a piece of 18th century mid 18th century dutch furniture and the lovely shape of the bottom here the concave convex drawers it's a great piece of furniture it's got the little secret that some of these have surprisingly is typical of these grand dutch pieces of furniture this is worth far more with this hidden canted drawers in the size than it would be without so it's actually better to have this early version but there's one more feature of this which i think is remarkable it's escaped the scalpel pieces like this in the 18th century were plain either in walnut in this case or slightly later on they've been mahogany a hundred years later the dutch revisited their high period of furniture of the 17th century where everything was in laid with marquetry so a piece like this comparatively plain all over the surfaces the flat the doors the drawers all over would be inlaid with flowers two lipsticks yes i know i know exactly the sort of thing you mean it's fairly common and it's taken us a long time to actually realize that those pieces of the fake or later altered pieces and this is the original this is how it should be have you any notion of what it's worth today no i'm not sure i want to know i mean the auction value of this is going to be certainly 20 000 pounds and could easily with the influence of dutch furniture the dutch people buying their own furniture if it made 30 000 it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest absolutely amazing well i must say we've had a wonderful day here on sky the island has showed great hospitality to bonnie prince charlie 250 years ago and obviously that tradition lives on so our warm thanks to them we're now back over the sea from sky down to the welsh border and gwent where we'll be at the same time next week so until then from all of us here in sky goodbye in fact next week the antiques road show will be at the later time of 7 15 and next night on bbc one big stars for a big show the royal variety performance

Channel: UK TV - a small archive

Views: 30,078

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Id: m7-9glZ_Gbc

Length: 43min 21sec (2601 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021