The humble punter who drops in at some auction hoping to find a dazzling antique Continental dinner service going for a song has little chance. Remember a few tips, however, and you might narrow those odds.
Leave aside English wares. Leave aside Japanese and Chinese. Think of Continentals, as I was having to do for this lunatic. And remember these snippets: There are three biggies. (Correction: there's two whales and one tiddler.) If a dealer makes a mistake and passes up one of these mainstreamers, he might as well give up, because he'll be a laughing stock.
First and most splendidly, there's Meissen. Its story's pretty horrible, but if I tell it quick it'll help to fix it in the mind.
Once upon a time, all European porcelain was duff stuff. Compared to Chinese, it was crud. Why? Because it was soft paste, that's why. Oriental porcelain was hard paste.
Simple as that. The Continentals and the English kept trying to copy the Chinese. Year after endless year, they failed.
Enter a clever youth called Johann F. Bottger, alchemist of Prussia. He was obsessed with changing base metal into gold. The King of Prussia, Frederick the First, was a greedy swine. He heard about Bottger. Cunning, he decided to hire young Bottger, which he did by simply locking the alchemist up. The trick of turning dross into gold would make King Fred the one true world power. That's politicians for you.
Young John Bottger got out and fled sharpish. The poor deluded bloke hurtled to Saxony, where Augustus the Strong offered him sanctuary. The young alchemist believed him! And simply finished up in a different dungeon. King Augustus was another greedy swine, you see, and thought, tomorrow the whole world will be mine when Bottger pulls off the gold trick.
The enslaved John F. Bottger laboured away in clink. No gold, but he discovered how to make hard-paste porcelain. The world of European ceramics was born. Meissen china made Augustus the Strong a fortune. (Poor Bottger died young, of course, from hardship and booze, the way genuises do.)
At first, Dresden and Meissen were interchangeable names in England, seeing there's only a dozen miles between the two places, both in Saxony anyway. In January 1710
the factory started up. The first pieces look like they're trying hard to be pure white but never quite make it. They're unbelievably rare. But that doesn't mean they're not out there waiting for you. A faint fawnish hue is said to be most typical.
Look for the crossed-swords mark. It doesn't prove Meissen, but it's one clue. Some pieces, like the (genuine!) over-decorated 'Snowball type' flowery bottle-shaped vases, look ghastly and foolish though they still cost a king's ransom. Still, Meissen rules Continental hard-paste porcelain, whether or not pieces have the crossed-swords mark, with or without the dot, star, or pommel. In the figurines, I always look at the stripes on the maiden's skirt, which you've got to be a real cracker to fake right. Tip: a numbering system was brought in about 1763. The numbers were incised, like when you write on wet clay with a toothpick, so an overly neat stamped number suggests forgery.
Then there was the piece this killer American hadn't yet smashed to smithereens. It was a Sevres plate. These French pieces were soft paste, but so what? Their gilding is superb, and the enamel looks somehow about to sink into the glaze. The two crossed-letter L marks look like they're trying to make a bell shape. That's all, but they're beautiful. The flower decorations are unequalled.
Those are the two whales. The single tiddler is Vienna. Good stuff, to be sure, and worth a fortune now, but still a minnow in comparison to the two giants.
Odd how rascals and rogues abound in the story of porcelain. They thrived, especially in Vienna, where in 1717 folk began to hear of the wonderful events in Meissen. By bribery, Vienna procured a Meissen worker to nick all the manufacturing secrets. (Didn't pay him, of course.) The outcome was Vienna hard-paste porcelain and multo bad feeling. There are supposed to be lots of clues to its authenticity – the greenish tint to the thin glaze, the perspective of the painting and so on. Here's my only tip, unless you're an expert: every single feature of early Vienna porcelain looks copied from some other style. The square handles are phoney Oriental; the rims are Japanese ideas; the masked feet are copied from silverware of the period. It's a giveaway.
Beware, for the tiddler costs a fortune too.
'So it isn't all vibes,' the killer said in his best senatorial voice. 'It's knowledge as well?'
'No. It's the chimes.' I was torn between the Vienna piece and the Sevres. The French porcelain is always higher regarded in London's auction rooms, because the decoration is bonnier. They sat there amid the modern garbage – I meant us, not just the crockery. 'What bits you pick up – dates, names, tricks to tell other dealers – are just gilt on the gingerbread.'
'What dealers?' He barked the question so loudly I jumped.
'Whatever dealers will stump up for a meal.'
He ran his eyes over me slowly, like I was for sale. My frayed cuffs, my battered shoes worn down to the welts, my shredding collar.
'Broke, huh?' He seemed pleased. He shot Susanne a glance of approval. She almost purred. 'I'm glad he's a bum, Suse.'
'I've had a bad streak lately.' Pathetic to sound so defensive. Maybe when I got as fat as him I'd feel the same scorn for the impoverished. Until then I'd no choice.
'How about a retainer, Lovejoy? To divvy.'
Money, now? I must have looked astonished because he barked a laugh, a seal coughing offshore in a salmon glut.
'Suse, you picked a moron here.' He fixed me, finger pointing. 'Listen up, Lovejoy.
When the Antwerp High Council gets flak from do-gooders who whine that crooked African politicians are selling blood diamonds to finance some peanut war, you think it ends there? Hell, no. Somebody like me picks up the tab when the diamond market goes through De Beers' floor.
'And if Sotheby's and Christie's come unglued, everybody turns to me. When smuggled
'economic migrants' die in container lorries, or some ship gets impounded –you think the owners just smile and pay up? Shit, no. They turn to the insurers with their hands out. You know what they want? They want money. Every fucker insures against their own sins. The Church against their own perverts, inept footballers against
