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In its prime, Partridge Fine Art sold to museums and to royalty, to sheikhs and Texan oil tycoons, to old and new money. But by the time I started working there in 2006, the Texans and sheikhs were few and far between. Occasionally I felt like I was working at that department store in Are You Being Served? and I was Mr Humphries. It wasn't where I'd imagined myself being at 26. I left a year ago. This week it went into administration.
Its Bond Street gallery looks largely the same today as it did in the Forties. For Partridge this was both a strength and a weakness. It is a gallery that sells mostly 18th and 19th-century pictures and furniture — a monument to the past. It resisted trends and change so the work it sold was seen as “timeless, classic, and dependable”.
But as good as some of the pieces it sold were, whether a Louis XV desk or a Chippendale commode, they were made for the kind of houses people are no longer building, for a lifestyle that few people are now living, and for older collectors who — increasingly — are either no longer buying or are buying more modern things.
In the winter of 2006 I was invited to lunch at the gallery. Partridge had its own chef, ex-Annabel's. Lunch was three courses, served in a private dining room lined with 17th-century oak salvaged from a country house. It was a seductive glimpse of the kind of lifestyle Partridge had been selling for decades. Servants. Good silver. Porcelain figures decorating the rich mahogany table, glossy with two hundred years of polishing. For much of the 20th century — if you made some money — this was how you wanted to live. Like English aristocrats.
This appealed particularly to American collectors, who remain the largest market for English furniture. The irony is that most of my aristocratic friends live like Americans and eat in the kitchen. I wanted to try and get younger collectors interested in this field. It is vital to this industry that they attract a new generation of enthusiasts — something that Partridge's chief competitor, Mallett, realised early on. Mallett sells 18th-century furniture as well as design classics from the 20th. This is the future of the business: the best things, regardless of when they were made.
Today's great collectors can source from the past, the near past, and the present. They can buy Tang horses and beautiful ebonised 18th-century console tables above which they can hang a Jeff Koons or a Cy Twombly. I left Partridge because I was working for someone who didn't appear to know who Koons was, let alone that our potential clients were collecting him. To sell antique furniture in today's market — a difficult one even before the financial crisis — you have to understand contemporary taste and recognise that modern design can't be dismissed as fashion, just as in the modern market the antique can't be dismissed as obsolete and dead.
History alone can't sustain a business. I remember sending out the invitations for the last exhibition I was involved with. It prompted a call from a lady asking us to remove her father from our mailing list. “He's not really collecting any more,” she said. I asked why. “He's been dead for some years.” I left a week later.
The administrators say they hope to sell the business as a going concern. Partridge Fine Art has a lot going for it and with better management could succeed. The listed building is unique in London and in a great location.
But its most valuable asset is its history. With Bond Street's shop fronts dominated by super-brands, it looks like any other high-end shopping street, from Via Montenapoleone in Milan to Madison Avenue in New York. The disappearance of Partridge would leave Bond Street and the London antiques trade a poorer place for its absence.
Reader views (1)
I received a phone call this AM in Tucson, AZ where my office is located. My London friend (late afternoon his time) was full of the current news about Partridge's closing. He forwarded this news article as well. As I was in Partridge's in June to pick up a porcelain piece from an English Porcelain dealer who shows during June at Partridge's, it is with sadness that I hear of its closing and with concern for the Porcelain dealer. I hope that his inventory was absent when the closing took place.
- Larry N. Deutsch, Tucson
