Aesop's Mirror: A Love Story

Antiques restorer Huggins delivers a knowledgeable, however overstuffed and ultimately frustrating, frolic through the high-end world of the buying and selling of early American decorative arts. Well experienced in spotting potential masterpieces from her longtime work as a furniture and mirror restorer for antiques dealer Israel Sack Inc. and the big New York auction houses, Huggins by chance found a large, exquisite rococo mirror at an auction in Clayville, R.I., and for the next 10 years allowed it to follow her around “like a beloved pet elephant.” Obsessed by tracking down its provenance, she knew only that the fanciful carving of the gilded frame, modeled on the Aesop's fable she calls Fox and Grapes, must have been from a Thomas Johnson design, while the wood was North American white pine and the primitive craftsmanship probably American. As an early Block Islander, Huggins was familiar with the old families of Rhode Island, and delves into the probable original owners, the Browns of Providence, specifically, Anne Brown Francis Woods and her daughter, whose first (rejected) suitor was the future Irish statesman Charles Parnell. The Irish question takes Huggins into a valid, unfashionable consideration of the mirror's manufacture in Dublin, although her long digression into the imagined lives of these families strains reader patience. Nonetheless, so-called experts (all male) are deliciously proved fallible in this informative, creative exegesis on how antiques attain their value. (Nov.)