Labeled Townsend Chest Goes to the Metropolitan Museum

NEW YORK CITY

:With "John Townsend: Newport Cabinetmaker" opening in its Erving and Joyce Wolf Gallery on May 6, The Metropolitan Museum of Art stepped forward at Christie's on Friday, January 21, to claim a rare Newport bonnet-top chest-on-chest, the only signed piece of furniture by Thomas Townsend (1742-1827), son of Job Townsend.

"This adds so much to our knowledge of Newport furniture. The brasses and finish are original, as are most of the ornaments on the bonnet. I was honored to have represented the Met," said Leigh Keno. With the Met's American Wing chairman Morrison Heckscher at his side, the New York dealer bid the case piece to a winning $856,000 ($500/800,000).

The chest-on-chest descended for generations in the Gardiner Family of Gardiner's Island, Long Island, N.Y. Property from the estate of Robert Gardiner was the centerpiece of Christie's sale of Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver and Prints, which reaped $13.3 million on 696 lots over two days.

The sale also produced record prices for New York furniture and marble-topped furniture when the Cortelyou family Chippendale carved mahogany marble-topped pier table sold to an absentee bidder for $1,696,000.

The underbidder on the pier table, Milly McGehee, was luckier when a Philadelphia Chippendale easy chair came up 24 lots later. The Maryland dealer won the chair on behalf of a client for $1,584,000.

An imposing copper stag made as a rooftop architectural ornament for the James Deere Company by W.H. Mullins & Co., circa 1893-1896, sold to Missouri dealer and collector Dick Lammert for $262,400.

Connecticut dealers Stephen and Carol Huber acquired two eagerly anticipated schoolgirl watercolors on silk, "Aurora," $192,000, and its companion, "Diana," $48,000, for considerably below their presale estimates of $250/350,000 and $60/90,000, respectively. Made by Ruth Downer, the fanciful pictures are the cornerstone documents for a group of watercolors made at a New England school in the early Nineteenth Century. Of the five "Auroras" known, one sold at Christies' for a record $374,000 in 1989 and is now at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Antiques and The Arts Weeklywill bring you complete coverage of Christie's January Americana sales in a later issue.