The pitfalls of auction buying online

I admit I do have a bit of a problem with buying stuff from my local auction. Everything in the above image, except for my books, was purchased from the local auction. I can’t help it, I could blame it on my Parkinson’s medication, but deep down I know it’s me. I get a buzz out of finding beautiful and unusual, possibly unique items. I adore researching and learning about things and it fascinates me to think that objects made by our ancestors hundreds of years ago are still on the planet and still being used. One little point to make here, how much of what we produce nowadays is still going to be in good working order in the years 2125 and beyond?

Now this week I fell in love with a chinoiserie four panelled screen, hand painted with flowers and a slightly angry looking blue sparrow. It wasn’t a big one, just a little one maybe 50cm high. No idea where I was going to put it, didn’t need it, had no use for it but I had to have it. It came with a carved oak plank which I sold on the next day for £20 which made me feel better about bidding £55 to win it. There is something special about that little screen, I think it’s Victorian, maybe Edwardian, the lacquer is cracked, it’s filthy but in the most part it is still n good working order. I began researching it.

Taking a photo on google isn’t quite as reliable as it used to be thanks to the recent arrival of AI, you do need to keep your’sensible head on and not get carried away with some of the suggestions that come up. In this case, lots of similar black lacquered screens were showing but all full length of room divider screens or the kind you stand behind to change your clothes. Zero good matches.

Next stop eBay. Search for ‘chinoiserie panelled screen’ gives me lots of similar screens but none identical to mine, which is frustrating from the point of view that I gain no new information but pleasing at the same time. If it’s not on eBay, it’s rare. For me that’s the joy of buying at the auction, finding something that no one else has.

Now sometimes I see something at the auction and think, ‘I will have that for a tenner if no one else wants it.’ Just for the pleasure of trying to flip something and make a profit. It very rarely works but I still like to try. For example last week there were two heads, catalogue listed as ‘ceramic head on base and one other’. The ‘one other’ looked quite attractive, the ceramic one was a young boy with a hat on playing a whistle. On collection the ceramic one was unglazed and the rough texture was marked with dirt, the other more attractive one was plastic. I have to admit I was disappointed but then i remembered the marvellous jar of gilders wax. Half an hour later both heads were now go.d and looking 100% better. They didn’t sell at the Twilight market but they made my display much more interesting.

Anyway I digress. Back to my purchases this week, I had seen in the catalogue two rather nice framed prints of children, one child lying on its back with a chicken, the other was a child with what could have been a duck or a goose. The captions underneath were in French, which added to my interest so I did a quick google image search and came up with several positive matches to an artist from the late 1800’s to 1930’s by the name of Georges Redon.

He seemed to specialise in drawings of children with comedy captions. A quick eBay search with the sold, completed and ‘uk only’ filters on revealed that there were only a few in the uk and they had sold for around the £50 mark. So the prints were rare enough to be interesting and well worth picking up for a tenner. I also discovered that the prints with the hen and the goose were captioned ‘The hen eats the snail’ and ’The goose eats the slug’ which I did think was a bit strange but then I discovered that Georges Redon had designed posters and artwork for restaurants and these had been used as menu covers. I put a ten pound bid on them and let fate decide.

A couple of hours later and the prints were mine, I was thrilled. They were perfect to take to the Twilight fair and at £6 each I could put a very reasonable price on them and still make a good profit. On closer inspection they were both pretty dirty, the glass needed a good clean but the frames were still good. Checking the backs there was evidence that someone had taken the prints out of the frames, probably to check if they were originals, but the nails had been replaced and laziness beat curiosity so I left the backs on this time.

Staring at the pictures for any other clues, such as print numbers, it suddenly hit me.

The children, innocently chuckling from their supine positions with their avian companions, had no knickers on. I had been so busy checking the signatures and the captions on the catalogue photo that I had completely missed the fact that both children were in fact naked from the waste down. The caption ‘The goose eats the slug’ suddenly taking on a whole new meaning.

Now I had a problem. Is it ok to continue with my original thoughts that these are lovely, well drawn images of happy children enjoying a summers day or do I chuck them in the bin, never to be displayed again because they are essentially indecent images of children? I thought about it long and hard and decided I couldn’t bear to throw them away. The drawings are so charming and innocent, that’s why I bought them. They reminded me of the earliest of my own childhood memories. The smell of hot grass and earth whilst paddling in a washing up bowl in the garden, the sound of bees buzzing whilst lying on my back watching wisps of cloud in the sky above, picking daisies and gathering ladybirds in a coffee jar. All the wonderful, little moments you have as a small child, but forget as an adult and I decided not to throw them away.

Instead I got out a felt pen and drew a pair of knickers for each child on the glass. Now there may be some people who think that I was wrong to do that, was I? What do you think? What would you have done?