How to Tell an Imitation from an Antique

Is it Old, or Just a Little Beat Up?

Telling an imitation from an antique requires more than a good eye

Techniques for roughing up a sculpture to make it look older than it actually is have been around ever since an inspired ancient Roman sculptor made a copy of an ancient Greek state. Like art forgeries, subtle restorations in the style of even the finest antiques can challenge the eye of discriminating collectors. Even repairs and replaced parts can substantially reduce a piece’s value.

But how can you tell? An educated eye and a knowledge of history help. George Read, who once oversaw Sotheby’s English furniture department in New York and now leads workshops on buying antique furniture, says he can tell whether a mahogany chair is old from across the room. When Europeans first began gathering mahogany from the forests of the new world, he explains, they harvested the easy-to-reach trees near the shore. Those trees, subjected to harsher weather from the ocean, grew slowly, giving the wood a complex, close grain. Decades later, after the seaside trees were depleted, sailors were forced to collect faster-growing trees from up-river, trees with a wide and less pleasing grain.

Read never leaves home without a postage stamp-sized magnifying glass with its own light to check for the tiny flaws that can give away a forgery. He offers some tips below for fledgling furniture sleuth on how to spot them as well.

Shrinkage: Wood shrinks across the grain. If a round tabletop is actually round when measured in two dimensions, it’s new. If the table is old, there should be a difference of about 1/8 inch per foot. Marqutry, too, tends to contract irregularly, usually sinking below the rest of the surface. If a piece with marquetry has a perfectly smooth surface, the marquetry was probably added much later to add flash or “tar up” the object, as dealers like to say.

Expert quote: “People are not buying a liquid investment when they buy antiques. It’s like good real estate; it takes time to liquidate. You’re not going to call a broker tomorrow and sell the highboy to put a kid through college” (Harold Sack, New York antique dealer). Telling an imitation from an antique. Photo by Elena

Upholstery: Always lift the edge of the fabric underneath upholstered pieces to see whether there are several sets of nail holes – you should figure a change of fabric every 50 years or so. You might have to pry up a nail or two, but in an auction, it’s likely that a previous viewer has already done so for you. If the fabric is in good condition and you don’t see nail holes, be especially wary – you may be looking at a fake.

Surfaces: “A really good patina might account for 50 percent of the value of a piece,” Read says. Though you might be disappointed to find dents or bleached spots on a beautiful piece, however, they do have an upside. Bleaching on one side of an object – indicating that the piece sat for years with a window to one side – is very hard to fake convincingly, and it’s a good sign of age. So are the hairline cracks in the surface and the irregular, slight buckling from underneath that come only from true age.

For pieces of furniture that sell for less than $5,000, Read says, fakers cannot afford to take the time to create a convincing patina. Instead they either simply paint the piece and rub off the paint in sections, or else, before painting, they treat the wood with a chemical that makes a uniform “alligator” crackle over the entire object. As for the surface of a table or chest, when you shine a flashlight over it, it should look like a pond blown by the wind – a perfectly smooth surface means either a replaced top or sloppy, destructive restoration.

Hardware: To tell whether brass handles or keyhole covers have been changed, take them off and look at the fade outline – if the hardware is original, the line will be cookie-cutter sharp. Also look inside to see whether there are extra screw holes from previous hardware.

If the piece is American, good hardware is critical to collectors. American furniture made in the 18th century was valued very highly at the time it was made, and it got little wear and tear compared with European works of the same vintage. Dealers in American furniture value original hardware highly. While replaced hardware might not affect the value of a European antique, it is significant in an American one.

Also look at the screw heads. Screws were not made with a tapered edge before 1840. Parallel edges on the screws of an object aren’t definitive, but they serve as another useful clue about an object’s age. Beware of using old screws and hardware as proof of age, however. Fakers keep large stores of antique hardware to dress up new pieces.

Mirrors and Gilding: Original mirrors are extremely rare, so a replaced mirror won’t hurt the value much, as long as it looks attractive. Likewise, re-guilding was common and shouldn’t reduce a frame’s value much if it was done well. To tell if a mirror is genuinely old, though, there is an easy test: touch a pencil tip or business card to the surface in several places, and note the distance between the tip and its reflected image. In old glass, the distance should vary visibly across the mirror because the glass has become less flat. Also, in old glass you may see a beveled edge, but you will just barely feel it. With glass made in the Victorian era or later, you can feel a very sharp bevel.

Dovetails: Dovetailing is the tongue-ingroove technique carpenters use to join boards at an angle. The grooves used in 18th-century dovetails were particularly wide, as much as three-eighths of an inch. Although they continued to be made by hand through the middle of the 19th century, tools and skills grew finer, and dovetails made in 1830 may be as small as one-eighth of an inch.

Chandeliers: Chandeliers made before about 1860 have solid arms. After that, they began to have hollow arms so as to allow gas to be pumped into them from ducts in the ceiling. As for telling whether those shiny teardrops hanging from the chandelier’s arms are really crystal or are just cut glass, Read says there is a fail-safe test: “If you hold one of the teardrops in your hand and it gets colder as you hold it, you will know it’s crystal. Bu if it’s glass, it will get warmer.”

Fact file: A totally fake antique: Pseud-antiques are especially common among country pine furniture. Furniture makers get that handsome worn look by using old wood, often from 18th century barns or houses. To make a table, for instance, they will take four posts from a banister for legs, the top of the banister for rails, and floorboards or wall paneling for the top. “They’re very nice pieces. I like them myself,” says antique expert George Read. “But they are not antiques.”