It’s now fashionable in retail to use “curate” to suggest superior pre-selection of goods to lay before languid customers, but Gretchen Andersen was an actual curator – she knew about and very much cared for things, and shared her enthusiasm with anybody. So her unsmart small shop, the Lacquer Chest in Kensington Church Street, London, which she kept for 66 years, influenced the taste of tastemakers.
Andersen, who has died aged 94, and her husband Vivian, took the business over in 1957 from his mother, Esme, who had opened it early in the 1950s. They turned it away from formal antiques. Since the 20s, artists had collected not drawing-room-mantlepiece contents, but vernacular and folk arts and crafts, purposeful items from kitchens and garden sheds, ethnic textiles, popular prints, and all that the industrial Potteries could mould and paint. The second world war’s disruptions, and its impoverished aftermath, then caused a domestic downsizing in the UK that released hoards of such treasures from town houses split into flats, country houses sold, a middle class no longer with servants to cook and clean. Two centuries’ worth of it submerged suburban junk shops, local auctioneers, and depositories’ sales yards.
