Some timely insights about timeless treasures

By Ed Goldman

Oscar Wilde once said, “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” True enough—but what if that person weren’t a man, weren’t a cynic and actually knew both the price and the value of something? She might be Sylvia Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald, who appraises art and antiques for individuals as well to determine the worth of an estate’s contents, says that when she does an appraisal she first wants to understand why she’s being hired to do so. “I want to know if someone is simply trying to insure a piece, is hoping to sell it to an auction house or a secondary market or wants to turn it to salvage,” she says.

At a recent lunch in The Sutter Club, the private downtown Sacramento landmark where she’s a third-generation member (she’s also a fifth-generation Sacramentan), Fitzgerald admits she’s candid “possibly to a fault. I won’t let a client be taken advantage of and I’ll tell them right off the bat if the thing they think has tremendous retail value actually does—or doesn’t. One of my mottoes is, ‘Never let your alligator mouth overcome your hummingbird ass.'”

It is, to me, an expression that’s simultaneously colorful, possibly inexplicable and the sort of thing you’d hear someone say on a loading dock or in a gangster movie.  But her other personal mantra is, “Do right./Sleep at night.” That one I get immediately.

For 25 years, Fitzgerald, whom you can learn more about at her website, www.sylfitz.com, has been an accredited member of the International Society of Appraisers and has been a private collector for 10 years longer than that. She doesn’t pretend to know everything about everything, and says she frequently relies on a worldwide network of peers, colleagues and friends when a piece or project stumps her. “I always offer to pay” for her pals’ help, she says, “especially on an IC basis. That stands for introductory commission, meaning, ‘If you hadn’t referred this client to me, I might never have met this client.’ But a lot of my folks decline my offer—and I always return the favor when they call on me. It’s true professional courtesy.”     

I met Fitzgerald several weeks before this interview when she was curating a show-and-tell art dinner for The Sutter Club, at which collector-members displayed one or two of their acquisitions for an evening. She selected two of my paintings, by Roland Petersen and the late Gary Pruner, for the event. Since then she’s been brokering a few other pieces I’ve bought over my 40+ years as a collector, principally of contemporary Northern California art that comprised the so-called Funk Movement of the 1970s-90s. 

I mention this because in that time I’ve semi-liquidated my collection three or four times—and found Fitzgerald the most cooperative, honest, turn-key broker of them all. How turnkey, you ask? She lifted, crated and wrapped everything I was hoping to unload. She’s a former gymnast and while she did bring along a colleague of hers to help, at 61 years old she was doing work that’s physically demanding. And she wouldn’t let her client (at least, this client) lift a finger to help her.

How honest, you further ask? When she came to my place to look at my artwork, she told me flat-out that things I thought might fetch a respectable price at auction or from a private collector simply wouldn’t—or more to the point, simply wouldn’t right away. “Art has its seasons,” she said at the time. “Things are suddenly in, then suddenly not. You just have to watch the market and be patient.”

Fitzgerald enjoys recounting that she began her appraiser career “with $5,000 in a spare room in my house.” She financed her enterprise when her mom held a garage sale in which “some of my aunt’s bottles didn’t sell for even 25 cents.  I caught them mid-flight to the trash.” They turned out to be made by Lalique—which I’m sure you know, is the posh line of crystal champagne flutes, shot glasses, tumblers and more (on its website it refers to its brand as “the ultimate symbol of French luxury”).

Fitzgerald starting haunting garage and estate sales, discovering riches their sellers viewed as rubbish. Her business, Art, Appraisals & Estate Services (A.A.E.S.) was launched.