How to Build a Serious Private Collection

Most private collections that hold their interest over twenty years were not assembled quickly. They were assembled deliberately, in a defined field, by someone who was willing to wait. What follows is our own working method. It is a position, not a rule, and other dealers would put it differently.

Define the field before the first purchase

A collection is a set of decisions about what to exclude. Collectors who begin with a category, such as antiquities or exploration material, usually find that the category is too broad to give the collection any shape. Narrower is better. A field defined by a period, a place, a maker, a material or a single question gives you a reason to decline nine objects out of ten, and declining is most of the work.

The practical test is whether you can say, in one sentence, what the collection is about, and whether that sentence excludes things you would enjoy owning. If it excludes nothing, it is not yet a field.

Buy the documentation, then the object

The documentary position is the part of an object that cannot be improved later. Condition can be conserved. Mounting and presentation can be redone. Attribution can be revised as scholarship moves. But an object that arrives without a recorded history will still be without one in thirty years, and the gap will matter more then than it does now.

This is the single most consequential habit we try to pass on. It costs money in the short term, because well-documented objects are more expensive than comparable objects without paperwork. It is repaid when the collection is lent, published, insured, divided or sold.

Expect to pay for quality within the field

Within a defined field, the best example available in a given decade is generally worth a substantial premium over the second best. Across fields, the opposite tends to be true: breadth accumulates cost without accumulating coherence. Collectors who spread the same budget across three departments often end up with three collections that are each too thin to be interesting.

Keep records as you go

Purchase invoices, condition reports, correspondence, conservation records, loan agreements, photographs before and after treatment. Keep them together, keep them backed up, and keep them with the object when it moves. The work of reconstructing this later is disproportionate, and some of it cannot be done at all.

We supply a dossier with every object for this reason, and we are glad to review and organise the records of a collection we did not sell.

Pace it

The collections we admire were built at a rate of a few objects a year. That pace allows research between purchases, which is where the judgement comes from. It also means that a collector is rarely in the position of having to buy something in order to have bought something, which is where most expensive mistakes originate.

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If you are beginning, or reconsidering the direction of an existing collection, we are happy to talk it through without any expectation of a transaction. That conversation is part of what we do.