Antique Picture Frames

A Good Antique Frame

“Tell me a little about a good antique frame please? Are they only wood or can they be metal as well?” Well, a good antique frame can be, and often is, made from both wood and metal. These frames need to be more than one hundred years old to be considered, or classified, as antiques.

What types of wood were used in “the old days” to make an antique wood frame? Mostly Oak, Maple, Cherry, Walnut or Cedar were used; as most of these are hardwoods. What this means is that the grain of the wood is stronger than, let’s say Pine. Furniture and cabinet makers and other woodworkers in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries valued the hardwoods because the products that they were made into had to be very sturdy. The same can be said of the portrait frames that were made back then as well. They need to be very sturdy, needed to outlast the people who made them as well as those who owned them. Heck, some of those antique frames have even outlasted the very picture or portrait that was in them. Does that tell you anything about the wood antique frame?

“Yes, it most certainly does. As a matter of fact I seem to recall seeing a very attractive wood antique frame with an antique silver frame sitting right beside it in an estate sale I was browsing at not long ago. What can you tell me about this… the metal antique frame, I mean. It’s very obvious that they, too, were very popular in the olden days as well.” Yes, they were indeed. If you were really well off (financially) in the olden days… again, the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries… then why not go and have a Silver, Brass, Platinum or Gold frame custom made just for that precious portrait. As the saying goes… “If you got it, flaunt it.” This is exactly what the well-to-do did in historical times. However, many middle class families also had wood frames made for precious items. I don’t know if the middle class would have been able to afford Platinum or Gold antique frame, but Brass or Silver might have been affordable to them.

The market for the antique frame is really booming. No, you don’t need to be an antiques dealer to know that. All you really need to do is watch a program like Antiques Roadshow on PBS and listen carefully to what the appraisers are saying about each antique frame that they see around a picture or painting or personal portrait that is bought in to them by someone who is curious to know the true market value of their heirloom. Another place you’re just as likely to see antique frames is in an Antique Shop, of course. There you might be surprised to see the different sizes and textures and designs that old time woodworkers and carvers used when they would make each antique frame by hand. What I’m really talking about goes beyond the Industrialization of our country.