EXHIBITION
The Antique Dealer's Fair. (Grosvenor House, until June 26th.) A FAIR is not a museum display, and it is unjust to the exhibitors to blame them for not conforming to Victoria and Albert standards of display. Yet too many fine pieces, from the strolling visitor's point of view, are cramped ; one just cannot get a fair sight of them. This year all the furniture dealers seem to have brought their finest piece of Regency ; and one has an excellent opportunity of seeing that style at its best and worst : at-its best in a kingwood writing table on Stuart and Turner's stand, marred for my taste by a star-shaped knob of modern manufacture, which appears on several other pieces in the show ; and also in a mahogany secretaire bookcase, shown by de Haan & Son : at its worst in several complicated little occasional tables that remind us too much of the designer's pencil ; pieces that were never conceived to be made in wood, but rather to be cast in iron. The finest exhibits in the show are probably the Chinese and the Indian. A rectangular Chinese casket, of about 1,200 B.C., with formalised dragons on each face and of a magnificent grey-green colour, by Bluett & Sons, and a fifteenth-century bronze of the goddess Parvati from the Madras district, shown by Splines, are museum pieces. Like these, various early Chinese animals—Tang and pre- Tang—including horses, camels, pigs and one delightful dog, shown by Bluett, Spinks and Sparks are on a more pleasantly domestic scale. So many pieces are now out of proportion to the middle-class man's living accommodation as well as to his pocket. Those were spacious times in more senses of the word than one. But the smallest of flats would be graced by a set of twelve gilt on silver plates, dated 1702 and displaying the arms of the fourth Earl of Lindsay, shown by S. J. Philips. One too readily thinks of gold as a vulgar, blatant material. These plates by John Bache should be missed by no one who is tempted to despise that unattainable metal. J. M. COHEN.
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