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Connoisseurship: The Pursuit of the Ideal
by Wendell Garrett

Style is centaur, joining what nature, it would seem has decreed must be kept apart. It is form and content, tenor and type, shape and sort, woven into the texture of every art and every craft. It is difficult to disentangle the multiplicity of meanings and to unriddle the thicket of metaphors that have accrued to the word "style," this familiar yet really strange being, style the centaur. Style is the dress of thought, where manner is indissolubly linked to matter; style shapes, and in turn is shaped by substance. There is a beautiful, yet profound, simplicity in Buffon's famous saying that the style is the man (Le style est l'homme meme). He was speaking of the literary style of the accomplished writer - the cultivated manner of the writer which expresses his personal past as well as the culture's ways of thinking, feeling, believing, creating, and working. Style is the pattern in the carpet; style is the marks of the craftsman's chisel in the mahogany - the unmistakably significant signature, to the informed collector, of place and time of origin. It is also the marking on the wings of the butterfly - the unambiguous indication, to the alert lepidopterist of its species. And it is the involuntary gesture of the witness in the dock - the infallible sign, to the observant lawyer, of concealed evidence. Style is not an afterthought, nor an artifice, or a façade. To unriddle the style, therefore, is to unriddle the man - the two halves of Buffron's epigram. There is no rule book, no prepared recipe, setting down in advance for the connoisseur just what the study of style may disclose: it is instructive, not always for the conclusive answers it supplies so much as for the fertile questions it raises.

Informed collectors have taken many different approaches in their efforts to discover what gives value and meaning to antiques; these pluralistic points of view of the decorative arts objects of early America, taken with skepticism, humility, and objectivity, represent the beginning of knowledge and connoisseurship. To determine what these objects are, one should visually examine and inspect them and by comparison and contrast note their certain physical properties - material, construction, techniques and condition. "Anyone who aspires to become a connoisseur must first learn to see, and then he must look and look and look, and remember what he sees," Charles F. Montgomery once said. That is the attribute of a good visual memory. Fortified with the knowledge of what the objects are, the student of furniture can then investigate "how" and "why": how people made and used particular objects, and why certain objects were fashionable; how do the fashionable styles of the past compare with our present-day aesthetic responses, and why regional tastes of that day differed from place to place. By interpreting these patterns of use, objects of the past can be used to explore facets of everyday life and popular culture that frequently are not well articulated in written evidence and recorded history.

Wendell Garrett is an eminent scholar and senior consultant in American Decorative Arts at Sotheby's. He has authored numerous historical works, including "Monticello and the Legacy of Thomas Jefferson" (1995) and "Colonial America" (1995). He received the Henry Francis du Pont Award for distinguished contribution to the Adams Family Papers and the Antiques Dealers Association of America Award. He is a distinguished lecturer, teacher, and appraiser for the Antiques Road Show and serves as editor-at-large for The Magazine Antiques.

"Connoisseurship: The Pursuit of the Ideal" from "The Definitive Appraisal Handbook" published by The Appraisal Institute of America, The Educational Foundation of the Appraisers Association of America.

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