Dealer profile.(Clinton Howell, art dealer and cabinetmaker)

Blogs, it is sometimes alleged, trace their ancestry back to the early 1700s, to the brawling, gossipy, partisan broadsheet newspapers that spread--virally, you might say--through Britain's newfangled coffeehouses. Anyone trying to prove the link by means of a few strands of common DNA might look into a four-year-old blog by Clinton Howell, the American dealer in English furniture of the broadsheet era. "One should not speak ill of the dead," Howell began a post last spring, before doing just that, blasting the recently departed Thomas Devenish for, among other sins, once outbidding Howell on a tripod table that Howell told him he had put incontrovertible dibs on. In an earlier series of posts, he disparaged a pair of mid-1700s demilune inlaid consoles, sold at auction for a handsome price, so unsparingly that a friend finally called to remind him that the buyer had feelings.

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In his defense Howell points out that in both cases he was only doing his best to tell the truth, a tendency, he seems to recognize, that can be a strong point or a flaw in an antiques dealer. "It doesn't make me much of a salesman," he says. "When I tell clients too much about a piece it can end up chasing them away." On the other hand, Howell's lack of spin has earned him a reputation for purity. "I've developed a certain respect for Clinton over time," says Albert Sack, the ninety-three-old dean of American antiques dealers, who admits he doesn't think much of dealers in English antiques as a breed. "A lot of it is presentation and fancy names--in particular royal names." But with Howell, Sack says, "everything's based on authenticity before provenance."

Howell's commitment to transparency, as truth telling is called in the business world, is his antidote to the vagaries of the antiques trade. Prices fluctuate with the fortunes of the stock market (as he expects them to do now), or with changes in supply and demand. But for Howell, demilune consoles have a worth independent of the perceptions, and certainly the emotions, of willing buyers. "Antiques can be looked at objectively," he insisted in answer to his friend's rebuke about the auctioned consoles. He offers as evidence the years some dealers will keep pieces on their showroom floors, waiting for a buyer who will meet their price. Similarly, his vituperation about the famously difficult Devenish might have offended some readers, but blog numbers don't lie. "I got tremendous response to that post," he says of the obituary.

With his nobly prominent nose and shock of salt-and-pepper hair, Howell, at fifty-nine, is the very picture of a Manhattan antiques dealer. On closer inspection, however, his appearance turns out to be as unvarnished as his opinions. His sober gray suit could benefit from a needle and thread, and he has paired it with tan trail-walking shoes, pink socks, and an unfashionably narrow Liberty of London tie. Howell grew up in Fairfield Country, Connecticut, one of the richest suburban realms in the country. But after graduating in 1971 from Hobart College, where he had built a few pieces of furniture in design class, he decided he wanted to work with his hands. With his brother David, today a prosperous product designer, he floated to England, where the hip and hippie scenes were still thriving side by side. "For something to do," he says, he enrolled in the London College of Furniture. "I was not a great cabinetmaker and I couldn't stand the sound of machines," he remembers, "so I took to finishing." His teachers in the college's restoration department were mostly working-class craftsmen who introduced Howell not only to the properties of shellac, but taught him about what it takes to excel at a methodical task.

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Howell spent his free time visiting Britain's remaining great houses--Holkham Hall, where he steeped himself in interiors by William Kent; Claydon House with the carving of Luke Lightfoot; and Harewood with ceilings by Robert Adam and furniture by Thomas Chippendale. (Adam remains Howell's paragon. His review of the iPhone on his blog compares the upstart technology to the unequaled satisfactions of a gilded Adam settee.) Between his restoration classes and his weekend field study, Howell became an expert on different timbers, their uses in different periods, and when they began showing up from remote parts of the Empire. "I could spot an Anglo-Indian table labeled English and know by the wood that it was produced in India."