Antiques

Old colonial furniture and colonial-style copies:

share a word in Guatemalan listings and very little else. Furniture in the colonial manner is still carved by hand here in pine, mahogany and cedar, so a heavy carved wardrobe or a studded chest can be a century old or out of a workshop last month. In between sits a middle generation of colonial-revival chairs, dish cupboards and tables made around the mid-twentieth century, old enough now to carry honest wear, and plenty of inherited pieces belong to it. Furniture from before independence is rare, and a seller who writes colonial without anything to back it up usually means the style. The household antiques are humbler and easier to date: treadle sewing machines, charcoal irons, tube radios, wall clocks. A Singer carries a serial number that places the year it was made, so put it in the listing, and say plainly whether a radio or a clock still works. Old quetzales and centavos are better listed with the coins and the figurines from a family display cabinet with the porcelain.

Dance masks from the highland morerías:

are the antique most particular to Guatemala. Morerías, the family workshops in towns such as Chichicastenango, carve masks in cedar and rent them out with the costumes for fiesta dances like the Conquest or the Toritos. Between fiestas a mask is repaired and repainted, sometimes into a different character, so an old one that was really danced carries layers of paint and often the morería’s initials carved or burned into the back. Most of those have ended up in collections. The masks offered new today are carved for visitors and given an aged finish, which makes them good wall pieces, but not antiques.

The back of a wardrobe and the inside of a mask:

tell you more than the front of either. Pull out a drawer and look at its bottom and at the back panel: on an old piece they are unfinished, darkened by air rather than stain, and the boards vary in thickness where they were planed by hand. Wear should sit where hands and feet meet the wood, on arms, drawer fronts and the rails between the legs, not spread evenly over every surface. Woodworm tunnels opened along the grain are old; neat round holes going straight in can be drilled. Fine sawdust on the floor beneath a leg means the insects are still working, and that piece should be treated before it goes anywhere near your other furniture. Turn a mask over. Years against a dancer’s face leave the inside of old cedar dark and smooth at the edges, and a chip at the rim shows the colours underneath. A raw or evenly stained back, or grime rubbed into every recess in the same shade, points to a new carving. A repair is no fault on either, as long as it is named.

Patina, repairs and provenance in your listing:

are what a buyer of an old piece is weighing, so give all three. Do not strip or varnish a wardrobe before selling; the worn finish is part of what is being paid for, and refinishing takes it away. Photograph the back, the underside, the drawer joints and the hardware, then state what has been replaced: hinges, a door, a leg, a coat of paint. Give height, width and depth and say whether it comes apart, since a tall wardrobe has to get through someone’s door and up a narrow stair. For a mask, name the dance it belongs to if you know it and copy any initials on the back. A line on where the piece comes from, a grandmother’s house in Jalapa or a farm outside Mazatenango, says more than the word antique, and whoever drives in to see it will want to open the drawers in daylight, not in a dim corridor.