Occasionally the situation will be reversed and a genuine piece will be treated with as little respect as would a sheet of plywood. I was once in a Manhattan antique shop when a decorator came in with his client. (I knew he was a decorator by the effortless way in which he spent thousands of dollars in the first ten minutes.) He paused in front of a magnificent fifteenth-century oak dining table— absolutely authentic, in wonderful condition, a piece of great rarity. He heard the price without flinching.“We’ll take it,”he said,“but you’ll have to cut two feet off the end so that it will fit in the breakfast alcove.”
The dealer was in shock. I don’t like to see a man wrestle with his conscience, so I didn’t wait to see whether he sold the table or whether his principles got the better of him. Personally, I like antiques to be used rather than worshiped, but I did wonder how the table’s maker would have felt about his work being chopped up and put in a breakfast nook.