Lost & Found

"Her Majesty Queen Mary," said the exhibition catalogue, "may be regarded by collectors as their Patron Saint and the Great Hall at Grosvenor House as their temple." The Queen Mother was sponsoring Britain's first Antique Dealers' Fair since 1938. And Queen Elizabeth had sent along four fine old tureens--in the form of a cabbage, a melon, a lemon, and a bunch of asparagus--to crown the show.

In England's new age of plain, distressingly modern "austerity" furniture and china, Grosvenor-goers crowded long and lovingly around the polished fruits of Britain's gayer days. All of the exhibits were made prior to 1830 (the official criterion of antiques), and most were British-made, although there were also spoils of the age when Britons were the world's wealthiest, most avid and widely traveled souvenir-hunters.

But the highlights of the show were not the souvenirs nor the Queen's tureens. Poking about an auctioneer's office in Chelsea, Art Dealer Sidney Sabin had found a dusty, amazingly expert canvas of Christ crowned with thorns. He cleaned it up, found it to be a genuine Van Dyck, and happily toted it to the Fair.

A white-haired road mender from Birmingham, Alfred Stannard, had been lucky too. His tiny cottage is crammed with 20 paintings that he has been collecting for 34 years. In a junk shop one day last summer, Stannard had noticed an unimpressive little oil, a landscape set in a fine Gothic frame. He took it home, started scraping away the landscape with his penknife, and came face to face with Henry VIII (see cut). He had rescued from oblivion Henry's earliest known portrait.

"When I found the green background," said Stannard, "I realized it was pre-Holbein. And then of course when I discovered it was Henry painted at the age of 20, I knew it was too valuable a picture to hang in the house." Stannard had already sold his anonymously painted Henry for "something over a hundred pounds," when it went on show. The stubborn little mouth and wide, shrewd eyes in the portrait were history as well as art; they proved that even at 20, the marrying monarch had looked right for his part: kingly, cruel, and courageous.

In the U.S. too, an old master came accidentally to light. Mrs. Frank Brunner, of Rockaway Beach, N.Y., who "always liked having original paintings and water-colors in our house," made a habit of dropping in at local auctions every now & then, to pick up a fresh one. Six years ago she had spent $6 on a little watercolor of a farmer trailing home with his scythe at dusk, because she "liked the coloring." It looked very nice in the living room, until a friend of the family happened to suggest she look under the edge of the frame to see if the picture had a signature. It had: Winslow Homer's.

Manhattan dealers began ringing Housewife Brunner's bell last week. Offers climbed from $1,000 to $2,000. Hastily Mrs. Brunner transferred her prize to a bank vault, and moved her china cabinet over a few feet to hide the bare spot where her Homer had been.

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