Prized heritage: Canadiana's popularity rises along with the value of our art

John Mackie, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, February 16, 2007

This toy marching band is a 15-piece set, very colourful and probably made in the 1920s. it is selling for $495. Photograph by : Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun

Vancouver antique dealer Scott Landon just sold an antique armoire for $75,000, and all it took was one phone call.

Well, it's a pretty nice armoire.

The item in question is an 18th century "diamond point" armoire from Quebec with its original paint intact, albeit under a couple of layers of overpainting.

"Very few have survived from the 18th century," explains Landon, who deals in Canadiana furniture.

"Moreover there are very, very few that have their original paint on them. Most of them that did surface are either in museums or private collections."

In fact, Landon says there is a diamond point armoire just like it in the Musee du Quebec in Quebec City. Landon's armoire has excellent provenance: It was featured in one of the bibles of Canadiana furniture collecting, Michael Bird's Canadian Furniture, 1675 to 1950.

"Because I could refer to the book, the purchaser didn't even need to see it," says Landon, who "brokered" the sale between collectors in Toronto and Vancouver.

"The person decided to sell it, I made a call and it was bought."

It's called a diamond point armoire because its has diamond point shapes on the doors. On this particular piece, the diamond points are elegantly sculpted on the armoire's doors, like a bas relief sculpture.

Still, the casual observer might not see its charms, because about 60 years ago, someone slapped a lime green paint job on it. A rather loud paint job. You'd have to be pretty knowledgeable about Canadiana furniture to understand the armoire's true value, given the paint.

"The paint would throw a lot of people off," admits Landon.

"It's like finding an untouched Van Gogh [that has] a hole in it, or dirt on it. So what do you do? You have it professionally cleaned and repaired. You don't dare touch it yourself. This has to be viewed in the same way."

Overpainted diamond points like this are impossibly rare: Landon thinks it's the first one that's come to market in at least five years. He guesses there may only be another half-dozen outside museums.

"This example is out of a farmhouse, and was kept in a collection for 40 years the way it was and never touched," he says. He doesn't know for sure how much the Toronto collector paid for it four decades back, but it was probably about $500.

Back in the 1950s or '60s, furniture like this was usually stripped back to the bare wood, which is now a total no-no and can devalue a piece by tens of thousands of dollars.

Collectors today want to keep a piece of furniture as close to original as possible. An armoire like this in good condition which had its original paint and had never been overpainted could be worth up to $200,000.

There are two schools of thought about what to do with an overpainted piece. One is to leave it as is, because that's part of the history of the piece. The other is to carefully strip off the overpainting to the original paint, which is what may happen with this piece.

"There's a couple of layers underneath, and then the bottom layer is quite visible," says Landon.

"It's like a blueberry blue, oxidized a bit to a greyish colour. It would be dynamite [restored], absolute dynamite."

If $75,000 sounds like a lot of money to spend for a piece of furniture, consider the fact that if it was an American armoire and was this rare, it would be far, far more expensive.

"That cupboard in the United States would be worth $2 million or $3 million," says Landon.

"They just sold a weathervane [in the States] for $6 million. One weathervane, at an auction in Boston two months ago. Ralph Lauren's brother bought it."

It isn't quite as expensive as Americana, but Canadiana is definitely becoming more popular with collectors, in much the same way that Canadian art has risen in value. Landon now has two stores full of Canadiana and folk art, at 2227 Granville (at Sixth) in Vancouver and #407, 17768 - 65A Avenue in the Cloverdale area of Surrey.

He doesn't have any $6 million weathervanes in stock, but this week he did have a $15,000 gameboard sitting around. It's another brokered piece from a dealer back east, who had sold it to an "astute" local collector.

"It's a hand-carved 19th century checkerboard, in original paint," says Landon.

"Whoever did it was a master carver. It's over the top, it's great, probably the best one in Canada. I've never seen a better one. I don't know if there's a better one. And I don't know of one that sold for more money."

Another wonderful piece of folk art is a toy marching band that Landon found in Waterloo, Ont. The 15-piece set is very colourful (red uniforms, grey caps with red plume feathers) and comes with a conductor, drummers, horn players and flautists, among others. It was probably made in Germany in the 1920s, and is selling for $495.

The most imposing piece in the Granville store is a massive linen press wardrobe, seven-foot tall and seven-foot wide, from Markham County, Ont. It dates to about 1820, comes in the original "pebbled" finish and is for sale for $13,500.

"You've got to have the space for it, but it's a one-of," he says. "Whoever made it made one, and that was it."

Landon also has a circa 1820 grandfather clock made by the Twiss clock family in Montreal ("they're an icon, very well known in eastern Canada") for sale for $7,500.

If you're looking for something a little more close to home, for $895 you can pick up a beautiful conductor's door from the old B.C. Electric Interurban train. The door retains its original red paint, along with the instructions "Do Not Board Moving Train."

"I got it from an estate in Mission," he says.

"This elderly lady's father apparently was a conductor on the train that went from Chilliwack to New West. It's a nice little piece of B.C. history, for not a lot of dough."

jmackie@png.canwest.com

© The Vancouver Sun 2007