The Starting Point

While undertaking some recent reorganization of my basement workshop in Elderbarndottir’s former house (she got married in November and moved to her husband’s house) I came across this nostalgic and beat-up picture from early 1977, hiding behind one of the shelving units.  This French secretaire was my first really high-profile/high-value furniture restoration project at Schindler & Son of the Palm Beaches, where I started working in late 1974.  Unfortunately I did not take any detailed pictures of projects at this point of my career – had this happened once I was a museum conservator the project would have been documented with hundreds of photographic images to go along with the written reports.  I probably took a picture or two of the interior, it was spectacular.  Bat that was almost 50years ago and cannot recall that detail.

Somewhere I have a picture of a Riesener cabinet from the same client, but that picture has not turned up yet.

Prior to this I did a lot of run-of-the-mill restoration for “ordinary” antiques along with a boatload of custom finishing and refinishing; before Schindler’s I was a “scratch and dent man” at a couple of furniture stores.

This project arrived in pieces in the back of Ambassador So-and-so’s Mercedes station wagon.  The secretaire bore the inventory stamp of the Chateau de Saint Cloud.  It should come as no surprise that the culture from which the word bureaucrat is derived should be punctilious about household inventories, but there you have it.

Over a period of a couple weeks, I reassembled it and made repairs to the rosewood and tulipwood veneers, then finally a couple of days of shellac pad polishing.  “Pop” Schindler came almost every day to watch and guide me, it was on this project that he introduced me to hot hide glue.

This was a seed for my fascination with exquisite European furniture, especially of the French variety (along with our company’s work at the Wrightsman estate in Palm Beach and their furniture collection), and was truly the acorn from which my fascination with Roubo sprouted.  It was also the prompting for me to embark down the career path of conservation; I entered that stream in 1981 at Winterthur Museum while I was a student in college.