David Bell Antiques

David Bell Antiques at 1655 Wisconsin Avenue NW is an antique furniture and decorative arts dealer in the upper Georgetown commercial corridor, in the gallery and antique block that shares the street with Addison/Ripley Fine Art, Calloway Fine Art, and the other Wisconsin Avenue specialist dealers. The antique dealer in the Georgetown context serves the residential market that the neighborhood’s Federal-period and Victorian-era houses create: the Georgetown homeowner who is furnishing a room of historical architecture with period-appropriate antiques, or who is adding the specific English Georgian piece that the room’s proportions and the owner’s taste require.

English antique furniture in the period categories that a dealer like David Bell specializes in, from the Queen Anne through the Georgian periods and into the Regency, has a specific relationship to the Federal-period American architecture that Georgetown’s townhouses represent. The Federal style in American architecture drew directly from the English Regency tradition through the influence of the Adam brothers and the pattern books that the American builders of the early nineteenth century used, which means English antique furniture of the relevant periods belongs in the Federal-period Georgetown room in a way that the period furniture of other national traditions does not.

The decorative arts component of the antique dealer’s inventory, which includes the silver, the ceramics, the glass, and the smaller objects that the domestic interior has always accommodated alongside the furniture, is as important to the Georgetown residential antique market as the furniture itself. The Georgian silver salver, the Wedgwood creamware, and the Bristol blue glass that appear in the antique dealer’s inventory provide the Georgetown host with the specific objects that make the Federal-period table setting historically coherent.

Hours run Tuesday through Saturday from 11am. The antique furniture dealer’s expertise is in the provenance and dating of the objects in the inventory, which the Georgetown collector who is serious about antiques values as much as the aesthetic quality of the pieces themselves. The provenance record, which traces the ownership history of a specific piece, and the correct attribution to the period and the maker are what distinguish the specialist antique dealer from the generalist who sells old furniture without the historical knowledge that makes the antique market meaningful.

The Wisconsin Avenue antique corridor at the upper end of Georgetown has been the consistent address for the specialist dealer in English and Continental antiques for decades, and the cluster of dealers, galleries, and framing studios at this address creates the specific Georgetown cultural geography that distinguishes the upper commercial strip from the tourist and restaurant district around M Street. David Bell Antiques at 1655 Wisconsin is a part of this cultural geography, and the Georgetown collector who values the English antique tradition knows the address.