This guide covers the history and value of frames from the 19th and 20th Centuries. It includes extensive descriptions, historic information, trade secrets on cleaning and restoration and over 100 black and white and color photographs. The text is by Eli Wilner (with Merv Kaufman).

"When a price guide on the subject has been published, you know for sure a new collectible has been born."
- Anne Gilbert; The Miami Herald, August 6, 1995

"The Antique American Frames Identification and Price Guide is a lively, informative volume that traces the history of the picture frame and gives all sorts of insider tips for buying, restoring and hanging."
- Nancy A. Ruhling; Newsday, August 10, 1995

"No other guide gives you so much up-to-date information from such authoritative sources... The latest and most reliable price information the hottest and most useful insider tips, plus reports on the latest trends fascinating facts and scores of illustrations - all in a convenient, affordable paperback."
- Maine Antique Digest, July 1995

Introduction from Antique American Frames Identification and Price Guide
Avon

At first glance it was a typical New York City gallery opening: men in dark suits, women in silk dresses and expensive jewelry, trays of wine and moist canap�s being passed around by uniformed caterers threading their way through the crowd. All that separated this event from any similar one taking place in an Upper East Side art establishment that evening was the fact that what people had to look at were blanks: naked picture frames hung against white-painted walls. It was not a joke.

For me, it was recognition of the fact that antique, gilded picture frames had finally come into their own. It was a show, "The Art of the Frame," celebrating my own collection of American frames of the Arts and Crafts period, the years from 1870 to 1920, which saw a dramatic renewal of interest in handcraftsmanship in all of the arts. I was gratified by the turnout at the opening and by the strong interest it implied. My guests seemed to enjoy seeing frames on display almost as much as I did. Moreover, they took the collection seriously. Five years earlier, many of those nearest and dearest to me had questioned my judgment - and my sanity - when I announced my intention to become a dealer, but ultimately, buying and selling antique frames became my livelihood. Some of the frames on the walls of this gallery, my gallery, were priced at $20,000 or more: serious numbers for serious collectors, a far cry from what was being charged when I entered the art world in the late l970s. At that time I was among a small minority who cared very deeply about vintage American frames. Most people were happy to give them away. "We've got a bunch of them to get rid of. Want to drop by?" That was a message I heard often during that time, when I was associated with the Shepherd Gallery, a Manhattan firm specializing in nineteenth-century European art. A friend who worked for an art dealer on Madison Avenue would give me a call whenever frames were about to be thrown away. I would hail a cab and retrieve them. Those gallery owners were happy to have me cart the old frames away. Usually they had just purchased art at auction or perhaps had received a shipment from an estate sale. Either way, gallery owners did not want the encumbrance those old frames presented; they knew their clients would much prefer ordering new frames. Most of the discarded items were nineteenth-century American frames that appeared to interest no one.

I acquired two or three frames a week this way. Sometimes I would find them leaning against trash receptacles awaiting the Sanitation Department trucks.

Since childhood, I have loved antique frames. A great-uncle of mine, Michael Zagayski, had been a passionate art collector. When he traveled - as he did quite often, he would purchase old frames as well as oil paintings. Sometimes he would direct a dealer to remove the paintings and just ship the frames. Then he would have them cut downs to fit other paintings he had bought. He also used his purchases to frame family photographs, old letters, even some of the watercolors I did as a youngster. Uncle Michael did not buy paintings simply because the frames interested him, but the frames were important once he got the pieces home.

For my great-uncle, the process of framing a picture was like claiming it as his own. In this he was certainly not alone. One way any collector overtly declares possession of a painting just acquired is by framing it. He or she makes it personal that way - in effect, joining the artist in the creative act. That is why, traditionally, at least, so many collectors buy artworks at auction and immediately reframe their purchases, no matter what the original frames look like or what condition the frames are in. Mounting pictures in new frames is a way to position them, make them part of the collector's environment, which was what motivated the great framers of the past, the artists and craftsmen who fashioned frames for art. Each felt he was making a statement.

According to Charles S. Moffett, an art historian and curator interviewed for a 1988 issue of Connoisseur magazine, "A frame must have enough character to enhance, but not to interfere with, the work's own color, value relationships, and form." My own view is somewhat different. I see a frame more clearly as sculpture, as a handcrafted object that can exist independently of a picture. From the time my earliest artworks were viewed so adoringly by my family, it seemed all but certain that I was going to be a professional artist. After college and master's studies in painting and fine art, I was ready to follow my chosen course. But as I also had to earn a living, I took a job as a restorer with a New York City painting conservator, Gustav Berger. For a year I cleaned paintings and in-painted, filling in where pigment had faded or chipped off the canvas. I focused my energies on the craft of restoration and strived to master it. Then I began to be involved in frame-making decisions and came to see how collectors regarded the way their acquisitions were presented.

Within a year I realized that restoration was of limited interest and that frames themselves fascinated me deeply. So when I learned that a job was open in the frame department of the Shepherd Gallery, I knew I had to try for it. Not that I wanted to become a framer. I had decided by then to have a career as an art dealer; becoming a framer was simply putting a foot in the door. I told the gallery owner that I was knowledgeable about frames, and amazingly, I was hired. I had little real experience, but I knew proportion, I knew color, and I was aware of scale. My arrangement with Shepherd was a fifty-fifty partnership. I suspect they did not grasp the frame department's potential but felt that growth might be possible if someone would invest enormous energy in it - which I was prepared to do.

When I started acquiring antique American frames, I brought them into the gallery and sold them for $50 to $75 per piece. These were frames I had picked up off the street, of course. At that time a new reproduction frame for a painting would have cost about $200, but some people opted to spend a lesser amount if I could show them an old frame they liked and it fit. These were unrestored frames, by the way. When I brought them in, I cleaned the dust and grime off with cotton swabs. I never used dust cloths that might rub off some of the patina, but sometimes I would do a little touching up with watercolors to tone down the flaws. Basically I loved old frames the way I found them. One day a dealer I knew came into Shepherd's and bought several old frames from me. This was a man who had been giving away such frames a year or so earlier. Some of the pieces he bought that day were the very ones he had discarded. He knew that; he recognized them. But he was obviously glad to have them back. I sensed that change was in the wind. So I began devoting time to visiting frame shops around the city, those dealing in antiques, to find out which ones were selling what. I soon realized that, although sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century frames were highly regarded in the marketplace, there was little interest in pieces dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I could also see American paintings of that vintage beginning to build interest among collectors. I had a feeling that the frames themselves would ultimately be important. It simply did not follow that an old painting could have value and a frame the same age would continue to be practically worthless. I was certain there had to be a positive connection. I was also eager to test my wings, so nearly everything I did was focused toward breaking out on my own. I began making trips to the Catskill Mountain region, about a three-hour drive north of Manhattan. There I visited antiques dealers in towns like Kingston and Phoenicia, New York. Every shop seemed to have something I wanted. There were always old frames gathering dust in the back, in the basement, in the shed outside, or in the attic upstairs. I paid $5 apiece, sometimes as much as $10. I knew they could be resold in the city for considerably more.

I remember when a member of foreign royalty came into the Shepherd Gallery with his son and paid $800 for an old frame, it was the most I had ever charged! I cannot recall if it was signed, dated, or numbered, but I know it was a twentieth-century example - and a beauty; $800 was a fair price in 1982. Such a frame might be worth as much as $10,000 in the mid-1990s.

At that time only European frames were selling for five figures in New York, seventeenth and eighteenth century frames, of course. As it is extremely rare for a frame of either vintage to be found in mint condition today. Such examples are usually restored before being put up for sale. My impulse was not to do that. I preferred to dust off my acquisitions and hang them as they were. That way, I knew what was real and what was not. I could tell from the workmanship and detailing of most examples what their potential value might be. I hung as many as I could in the gallery and priced most of them no higher than $400. At the time none of us realized that period frames might be worth much more than reproductions; the prices we set were always well below those of comparable reproduction frames.

Soon I was collecting old frames faster than I could sell them, and my inventory was growing. Since I didn't have room in Shepherd's framing department to display them all, I rented warehouse space on New York's West Side, where I stored about fifty of my finest examples. I refused to touch any of them until I could establish my own business, which I became more and more determined to do. When I finally decided to leave the Shepherd Gallery and gave notice, I moved my infant collection out of the warehouse and into my apartment, a fifth-floor walk-up in the East Seventies. It was a so-called railroad flat, no more than 350 square feet. I took all my furniture out of the living room so I would have space to see clients, and began hanging and selling my frames there. At that time people buying period frames were interested only in framing pictures. They shopped for frames to go with the art they owned. I worked with a talented frame restorer who had the skill and finesse to cut the frames down, or expand them, to make them fit. We did as much as we could to satisfy each client, considering our relatively modest prices. When I finally sold a frame. for $1,000, I felt I had reached a turning point.

At that same time I continued to add to my own collection. My living room was filled with frames; I had more hanging in the kitchen and. eventually in the bedroom as well. I replaced my conventional bed with one that folded up into a large wall cabinet, and hung frames in front of that! By the end of my first year in business, galleries that once tossed out old frames were coveting them and buying them from me for $1,000 or more. I remember each transaction as a special landmark. It was hard to believe that anyone who had gladly given a frame away would pay such a sum to get it back.

Nineteenth-century frames are molded rather than carved, their wood bases covered with a layer of composition material that was then either gilded or painted. Because they are prone to decay or can crumble, restoration of these frames has always been difficult, often impossible. Until the 1980s, commercial framers were interested only in selling a product that was prime; thus nineteenth-century frames with their flawed surfaces were considered junk, and that idea persisted until their value ultimately came to be recognized. Nobody seemed to care about frames made after 1900, however, so I had no trouble, acquiring them. An ad in a local Connecticut newspaper would bring several additions to my collection. People were happy to empty their attics. They did not simply give away these "junky" old frames, of course. Sometimes I had to pay as much as fifty dollars for a particularly good one, but I bought almost everything that was offered to me.

It was not long before I had outgrown my apartment. My walls were covered; there were frames placed within frames, double and triple hung. I had frames stored in racks. Everything was orderly, though; everything had its appropriate place. Except me. One night a frame fell off the wall and struck me on the shoulder as I slept. "That's enough," I said to myself. "That's really enough." I would have to find larger quarters. My landlord had begun to have similar feelings - not about my space but about the fact that I was conducting business in a residential building, that limousines were double-parked in front of the door much of the time, and clients were crowding my fellow tenants on each flight of the narrow stairs. It was either quit the business or find another place to conduct it.

The first day of my search, I found loft space in a building on York Avenue near Eightieth Street. I rented it and moved my frames in. I vowed that the business would not grow anymore; I loved the fact that it was small. I wanted just a few loyal clients and no headaches, but growth came in spite of my good intentions. My staff has remained fairly small, but many more than a few clients have climbed the stairs to my second-floor gallery. What began as a hobby, at best a sideline, has turned into a million-dollar enterprise!

One of my first visitors to the new space was my great-aunt Doris, widow of Michael Zagayski, who had been a role model for me. She took one look at the frames on my walls and said, "Put some mirrors in them - you've got to have mirrors." How misguided, I thought. It would never work. People would laugh. I was not about to put mirrors in any of my frames.

After debating with myself, however, I decided to put a mirror in one frame, so that if Aunt Doris ever came back, I could show her that I had taken her suggestion. I hung the framed mirror and liked it immediately, so I framed others. Clients liked them, too. Soon the entire gallery was dotted with mirrors set into my antique frames. Aunt Doris was right, of course, but the mirror idea did not originate with her. Nor did the notion of frames as objects begin or reside exclusively with Uncle Michael. European collectors had been dealing with frames this way for years: treating smaller ones as important objects in curio cabinets, larger ones as wall sculpture. And, of course, they had been using period frames for some time to surround mirrors.

Eventually I concluded that there are three ways to regard period frames: one, to set off paintings dating from comparable periods, two, to surround mirrors for room enhancement and three, as objects unto themselves. As frames possess many of the attributes of sculptural reliefs, it is important to be able to walk around them in order to view every aspect. That is how I like to enjoy them - without mirrors, without anything. To me they look beautiful against any surface: brick, stone, fabric, plaster, wallpaper, even flat white paint.

Despite the promise I made to myself not to expand the business beyond my present gallery, I eventually bad no choice but to open a restoration studio in Long Island City, just over the Queensboro Bridge from midtown Manhattan. It was a way for me to maintain control of any restoration work being done on the frames I collected and sold.

Today, unique and important frames are increasingly rare. Art dealers feel possessive about their frame acquisitions, and auction houses no longer dispose of old frames routinely. Now that so many of my traditional sources have evaporated, about 90 percent of my stock comes from people's attics: frames that have been abandoned and perhaps forgotten for years, often for generations. Sometimes these frames find their way into country auctions and tag sales. I find I have to look harder than ever to find superior examples, but I have succeeded by developing a connoisseur's eye. It may take me longer nowadays, but I still manage to find what I am looking for.

In the current art market there is a direct correlation between the value of a painting and that of its frame, and as the worth of a painting increases, so does the value of its frame. People who buy a painting in its original frame, or find an important frame to surround a significant purchase, want to look at that painting on the wall in that frame. They want that special experience, and it is not a question of subordinating the frame to the painting. When the right frame is put on a painting and the two are harmonious, a resonance occurs. The two become one; there is no separation.

James McNeill Whistler knew this; so did a great many other artists who designed their own frames. For them, painting and frame merged in the senses to form a single object, as in the early Renaissance when magnificent altarpieces were crafted so that specific paintings could be mounted within them. I am confident that the frames of most altarpieces were more costly than the pictures they enclosed. One of my favorites from that era was a wonderful circular painting by Michelangelo, The Holy Family. The equally wonderful tondo, or round, frame created for it was probably more expensive at the time than the work itself.

We study The Holy Family in art history classes, but see only the work itself, not the frame. But when we see the painting on display in the Uffizi Gallery, a frame surrounds it, and the two objects cannot be visually separated. I don't think the painting's extraordinary visual impact could be duplicated if another frame were used. When the combination is right, a frame honors a painting. Every Renaissance artist painted a Madonna and Child, and, every example was framed exquisitely, but art historians rarely consider the frame, though it invariably enhances the beauty of the painting and enriches the viewing experience.

Today, that notion has been advanced a step further, for the antique frame has become so valuable that it can be separated from the painting it surrounds, or even the mirror, and it can be appreciated for its own independent aesthetic. Frames are rarely shown when slides are projected in art history classes, but I know many young curators and curators-to-be who have vowed that every museum slide, and every slide shown to scholars and students, should include the original frame, whenever possible. As the frame has ennobled the experience of perceiving two-dimensional art, why shouldn't it be studied, appreciated, and collected?

Eli Wilner

Introduction from Antique American Frames, Identification and Price Guide
Published by Avon Trade Paperbacks U.S. © 1995