Dealers are over-restoring and upgrading furniture with modern additions disguised to make them look older and more valuable, a leading expert has warned.
Yannick Chastang, former furniture conservator of the Wallace Collection, which boasts one of the world’s finest furniture holdings, can no longer turn a blind eye to what some dealers and restorers are doing.
He told the Observer: “I’m being quite generous in saying ‘over-restored’. I would say ‘manufactured’, if I was a bit more blunt.”
He recalled a 19th-century desk that was auctioned for around £2,500, only to surface six months later as an 18th-century desk with a price tag exceeding a million pounds.
He was shocked to discover that a leading antiques dealer had turned it into an object supposedly created by one of France’s most-prized cabinetmakers, André-Charles Boulle, revered by Louis XIV of France as “the most skilled craftsman in his profession”: “I’ve got the photos before and after.
“Very cleverly, they had added bronze and marquetry to make it look more convincing and more desirable. The original did not have those details. That is, unfortunately, a common practice.
“The catalogue entry was how the bronze compared well with objects in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Wallace Collection. Of course it compared well, because the restorer copied them.”
He has also seen a pair of 18th-century bronze wall-lights divided into four, so that each includes an original element. “That’s a common practice for dealers. Buy 18th-century, but then make copies, mixing original and copies. Or buy 19th-century objects and remodify them to make them older.”
Chastang was furniture conservator at the Wallace Collection between 1997 and 2003, before opening a studio specialising in the conservation of fine furniture and decorative arts. He has been called as an external adviser to the Louvre in Paris, and conserved furniture for important collections, including Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, among others.
Chastang’s criticisms relate to museum-quality furniture, most of which is sold through private dealers, “who are not very public about their income”, and auction houses, where the record price is still held by the spectacular 18th-century Badminton Cabinet, which sold in 2004 for £19m to the Liechtenstein museum in Vienna.
Aware that he is making himself unpopular by speaking out, he said: “I’m raising alarm bells for what is on the market. The sad thing is that a lot of objects in the trade may end up in a museum, but they’re going to be over-restored.”
It is all the more depressing that some of the more unfortunate restorations cannot be reversed, he said, recalling a “stunning” 19th-century desk in a country house that was subsequently sold to a dealer.
“That object has been totally ruined by restoration. It’s not reversible and, in 10 to 20 years’ time, it will fall to bits because the chemicals they used makes it impossible to restore again. They over-cleaned it, making it totally new. The varnish and the marquetry were removed and part replaced. I was so appalled by it.
“Quite frankly, if you want something bright and shiny, buy something new.”
Martin Levy, a leading furniture expert in London, echoed Chastang’s criticisms: “Knowingly representing a work of art as something you know to be false is dishonest and brings the market into disrepute.
“The approach to treating genuine old works of art should be that of conservation, nothing more,” he said.
