An auction house on the square
Phillips has the most modern manner of the great London auction houses and very nearly as long a history as any of them. It was founded in 1796 by Harry Phillips, who had worked as a clerk to James Christie before setting up on his own, and for most of the two centuries that followed it sold a little of everything, as the old salerooms did. Its modern character is much more particular. It concentrates above all on modern and contemporary art and on design, with photographs, prints, watches and jewellery alongside, and it has made its name in the rooms where contemporary work changes hands for the first time.
Its London house has stood at 30 Berkeley Square since 2014, which puts one of the more serious art rooms in Europe directly under the plane trees. In the weeks before a sale it is one of the most interesting free exhibitions in Mayfair, and most of the people walking past on their way to lunch have no idea.
The viewing week
Before each sale the lots go on public view, usually for several days and often for about a week, and the rooms are open to anybody who walks in. You do not need to be a client, nobody asks whether you mean to buy, and the staff at the door are quite used to people who have simply come to look. The works are hung properly, lit properly and labelled, and for a few days a painting that has spent thirty years in a private house and will spend the next thirty in another is on the wall of a room in Berkeley Square for anybody to stand in front of.
The specialists who put the sale together are usually somewhere in the rooms, and they are generally happy to talk about a work to anybody who asks a sensible question. Catalogues are published for the larger sales, and the house's calendar lists what is on view and when. It is worth checking before you go, since between sales the rooms can be quiet or closed while the next one is hung.
The evening sales, and what makes them different
A few times a year the house holds its most important London sales of modern and contemporary art in the evening, with the largest usually falling in October, when Frieze brings the art world to Regent's Park, and others in the early summer and the spring. An evening sale is a piece of theatre: a rostrum, an auctioneer who can hold a room, banks of telephones along the side, bids arriving from across the world, and a hush that breaks each time the hammer falls.
The saleroom itself is a more crowded and more carefully managed affair than the viewing, and a seat on the night is not something to assume. The major houses now broadcast their evening sales live, so the theatre can be watched from anywhere. For the purposes of this letter, the viewing is the better event in any case. It is where the works can be seen at leisure, before they disappear again, and it is where two people can spend an hour without anybody expecting anything of them at all.
How to spend an hour with neither a paddle nor a plan
Go in the late afternoon, when the lunchtime visitors have gone and the evening ones have not yet arrived. Walk every room once without reading a single label, and let each of you notice what you are drawn back to. Then go round again and read. The printed estimates are part of the pleasure: guess what each work will fetch, compare your guesses, and look up the results after the sale to see which of you understood the market better.
The best game of all is the simplest one. Each of you chooses one work you would genuinely live with, not the one you think is most important, and explains why. It is a surprisingly good way to learn a great deal about somebody in a quarter of an hour. Keep a respectful distance from the works, ask before photographing anything, and leave when the rooms begin to fill for the evening. None of it costs anything but attention.
An afternoon of the long acquaintance
This is exactly the kind of afternoon that the long acquaintance is for: very little planned, nothing staged, and the manner of two people who already know one another rather than two being introduced. Ninety minutes at £400 or two hours at £500 suits it best, with every other length set out on the tariff. Your companion is handed the fee in person when she arrives.
A viewing sits well inside a short walk. Sotheby's and Bonhams both keep their London rooms on New Bond Street, a few minutes away through Bond Street, and in the busiest weeks of the year it is possible to see three sales in a single afternoon. The hour after a viewing also makes an excellent hour before dinner, as the letter on opening an evening early explains, and the restaurants around the square are ready for you by the time the rooms close.
Who enjoys it most
Several women in their late twenties would count an afternoon like this as a pleasure rather than an appointment. Karolina is the obvious first choice: she goes to viewings on her own account, has an eye for objects she has no intention of affording, and speaks a considered English that occasionally turns blunt in front of a painting she dislikes. Samanta dresses with an architect's discipline and is at her best in the design sales, where the chairs and the lamps are as carefully argued as the pictures.
Laura knows less about art than either and asks better questions than both, because she genuinely wants to know why somebody would pay so much for something and will keep asking until she understands. Any of the three can be arranged through the switchboard, and the rest of the circle is in the Salon.
One line of the presentations carries most of the names above, and that line is late twenties.
Alongside it
Tonight
Put it to use
What this letter describes takes one written line to set in motion, and Booking shows how little there is to it.