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  • About Auctions:The Art of Not Forgetting
  • John Ellison Davies (bio)

About fifteen years ago, no doubt inspired by Bargain Hunt, Antiques Roadshow, and the charming Lovejoy novels and TV series, I began going around to auction houses. Not the high-end houses—my budget would not go that far. I mean those out in the suburbs, in the light-industry zones, barns full of furniture and bric-a-brac where the auction of a single item can pass in the blink of an eye.

It really is the world of Lovejoy. There are the browsing novices like me, and then there are the professionals bidding on hundreds of items that will later appear on internet bidding sites or in bricks-and-mortar antique shops. In between are the more discriminating specialists, only interested in select pieces. You soon begin to recognize the same people wherever you go. I was not competing with them. I discovered that I could buy something old, decorative, and interesting that suited my taste for not very much money—because it does not matter how old or rare or beautiful an object is. The key factor is how much you desire it. Bidding does not get lively until at least two people want something very much. And then it can get completely out of hand. The most I ever paid was $1,200 for a Lalique glass vase. I was annoyed with myself for getting caught up in the excitement. I later sold it for $1,250. I learned my lesson. Stay calm. Be patient. Bid low. Be ready to walk away. Something else will come along. The artworks on offer in this milieu are generally of low quality, the melancholy detritus of deceased estates, works that may have been treasured by someone but have little interest or value unless desired by someone else.


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© Louis Raemaekers Foundation

One day I noticed a colored lithograph in a plain wood frame. It was signed "Louis Raemaekers." I was astounded. I remembered that Raemaekers was the most famous propagandist of the First World War. After he fled his native Holland to settle in London, his popular cartoons depicting the Germans as monsters, ghouls, brutes, murderers, and rapists helped to maintain British rage and were later widely published in the United States. The lithograph in front of me was [End Page 435] no cartoon. It showed three exhausted soldiers behind barbed wire. Two of them stare blankly in different directions. The one in the middle seems to look upward at the viewer. It was his face that transfixed me. It was the face of a man in the depths of grief and anguish, a man who has lost his country and his liberty. He has probably seen friends die. He has no hope for his own future. For a moment, as if to console him, I thought that at least he had survived, that his war was over. Then looking at his face again, I knew that grief and anguish do not come in relative degrees or small doses. It is always a big dose. There was no consolation for him.

An old browned fragment of paper was taped to the back of the frame. It read, "The Prisoners Louis Raemaekers (Original Proof) Bought in London in 1916 at an Exhibition of Louis Raemaekers Pictures in aid of a Belgian War Relief Fund." Here, across time and space, in an unglamorous auction room in Sydney, an original proof by a renowned artist was speaking to me from 1916 and breaking my heart in the way that hearts should be broken.

I wanted it. I feared the bidding would go far beyond what I could afford. I waited without hope for the lot number to be called. At least I had been close to it for a little while. The bidding was over in seconds. I won it for $150. On the day nobody else wanted it enough. It is, to me, the most precious thing I own. The face of that soldier, that prisoner long ago, is to me the face of that war and the Depression and the next world war...

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