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By plane (usually private jet), by train (like me, from Amsterdam’s Centraal Station) and by automobile (surely a deeply deluxe marque), they descend upon Maastricht in The Netherlands for Tefaf, the bluest of blue-chip art and antiques fairs, home of what the organisers tout as ‘7,000 years of art, from ancient to contemporary’. By ‘they’ I mean connoisseurs, collectors, curators and the merely curious, all in search of masterpieces to buy or gaze upon. Tefaf has those in abundance, thanks to nearly 300 dealers from around the world, all of them set up in Maastricht’s cavernous MECC convention centre. The singularly charmless venue has, as usual, been brilliantly upgraded with prodigious truckloads of spring blooms, a Tefaf hallmark, composed into airborne arrangements as well as floor-hugging bouquets that transform the echoing halls into a botanical daydream.
The most delectable blossoms for plucking, though, are the goods, from old-master paintings to contemporary sculptures to royal antiques to glittering jewels. Herewith, are a handful of treasures I wouldn’t mind carrying back to my humble abode.
- Once owned by Truman Capote’s Mexican swan, the glamorous Gloria (Mrs Loel) Guinness, a pair of 18th-century English giltwood armchairs by Matthias Lock are being offered by dealer Dr Christophe de Quénetain. His lavish stand (pictured here), an hôtel particulier in miniature, is styled in homage to Georges Geffroy, Guinness’s legendary decorator, whose high-flying clients also included Christian Dior and Daisy Fellowes.
- The star of Paris Kugel’s treasure-filled stand is the Alberda sundial, a c1700 German splendour that was sculpted by Jan de Rijk and which resembles a gilded rocket ship.
- A large and extraordinarily three-dimensional trompe l’oeil work formerly in the collection of Marie-Hélène and Guy de Rothschild greets visitors to the stand of Haboldt & Co. The work, by François-Xavier Vispré, is mounted on a blue canvas panel (pictured above) for the show.
- At Bottegantica’s stand is a mesmerising landscape, a fantastical 1927 dream painted onto canvas, by Italian artist Gerardo Dottori. Entitled Umbrian Harmonies (pictured below), the grandly scaled picture depicts billowing hills, pinwheel flowers and curlicue branches hosting dozens of perching birds.
- Rendered in white marble by Domenico Rupolo, a radiant 1920s bust of the iconic Romanian-French writer and society beauty Princess Marthe Bibesco surveys the stand of Rome dealer Alessandra Di Castro.
