How have you managed to keep collecting during the various lockdowns? Car Boot Sales gone for months along with non-essential (antiques shops, charity shops etc.) and most salerooms only offering online viewing and bidding. It's a generally accepted rule in collecting circles that it's a bad idea to purchase something without inspecting it in the flesh but that has generally not been possible and in my case has led to the purchase of a couple of real lemons.
I have been lucky in that the bulk of my purchases have been paintings and for the most part salerooms put up reasonable images and descriptions. My worst experience was the the purchase of two watercolours/prints - the images were poor and the auctioneers couldn't make up their minds what they were selling - often the case with a saleroom not normally selling fine art. I won the two 'items' and when the courier dropped them off immediately saw my mistake - they were prints and not proper prints but some awful 1960s photographic jobby that I've haven't come across before.
However, worse was to come as within a few days the poorer quality of the two prints developed some sort of mold infestation! Upstairs to what passes for my workshop and out of the frame with it. What to do - I resorted to the method patented by Mr.Bean in "Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie" when he attempted to clean "Whistler's Mother" - with the same result! The remains are dumped in the workshop.
The second of the pair - the better one - shows no sign of infestation and is now for sale on Adverts for just €60. It's from an original by the late Gerrit Van Gelderen and if it was an original would be quite a valuable item. A lesson learned but it was outside my control as physical viewing was not available and the catalogue description was incorrect. Very much a case of buying a pig in a poke!
Anybody else have any similar experiences?
https://www.adverts.ie/pictures-paintin ... n/23975567
