It’s not easy to sell off a nine-foot-tall, seven-foot-wide 18th-century Dutch cabinet to New Yorkers stingy about square footage, but the antiques dealer Jonathan Burden has a pitch. Weaving between $10,000 chairs, he says the piece comes apart into ten sections — easy for squeezing into an elevator. As for its size, “You’ve just got to have the nerve to do it.” It’s fairly convincing, especially when delivered in Burden’s musical British accent. Even so, the cabinet has been gathering dust for about ten years — leaving Burden to drag it from his last shop in Tribeca to a warehouse in Long Island City where it now sits alongside British daybeds, Scottish sideboards, and Dutch rondelles. “You get to a point where you just have to say, ‘Look. We have to put a sale together,’” he tells me. “I have to clear house.”
