Americana at Christie's: Records for New York and Newport Signal Upbeat Start to the Season

NEW YORK CITY

:Christie's had the goods and collectors were willing to pay for them at Rockefeller Center on January 21 and 22. The auction of Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver and Prints grossed $13.3 million, up from $12.5 million a year ago. Instituted January 18, the new 20 percent buyer's premium went straight to the bottom line. The auction was 86 percent sold by dollar, 76 percent sold by lot.

"The sale celebrated the best of New York and demonstrated that the market continues to be vibrant for outstanding objects in original condition," said Christie's American furniture specialist Andrew Brunk, whose favorite piece was a New York Federal giltwood eglomise mirror, $54,000, surmounted by an eagle, urns and sprays of wheat and flowers.

Lord of the Manor

Patience may be the antiques trade's most underrated virtue. It was the early 1970s when Christie's senior director Dean Failey met Robert Gardiner (1911-2004) who liked - no, insisted - on being called the "16th Lord of the Manor." Little did Failey know that Gardiner's estate would one day end up at Christie's, producing the labeled Thomas Townsend chest-on-chest that went to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for $856,000.

A Winterthur fellow at the time, Failey was completing his master's thesis on Southampton, N.Y., silversmith Elias Pelletreau when he first wrote to Robert Gardiner, the dedicated caretaker of his family's history. The Gardiners had owned 3,350 acres at the eastern end of Long Island since 1639, when Lion Gardiner (1599-1663) purchased what is today known as Gardiner's Island from the Algonquins for a gun, gunpowder, cloth and a large, black dog. Descendant David Gardiner built a new house there in 1774, furnishing it with pieces made in East Hampton or across the Sound in Connecticut. The heirlooms descended to Robert Gardiner, who regarded them as props in the colorful tours that he staged for a never-ending stream of guests.

Later, while at the Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, Failey borrowed pieces from the Gardiner collection for his 1976 exhibition, "Long Island Is My Nation." To secure the loan of a highboy, he lent a substitute to Gardiner, who grumbled about not having a place for his socks.

The mens' paths crossed again five or six years ago when Christie's was offered stolen silver that Failey immediately recognized as Gardiner's. Vacationing in Palm Beach, Fla., the elderly collector deputized Failey to work with the police. Christie's participated in a sting and the silver was returned. To his dismay, Failey for a time found himself on the Rolodex of every detective investigating stolen silver. Gardiner had vowed never to part with his cherished family possessions, so it was a surprise when Christie's learned it would get the estate.

The Gardiner family history combined with rare form, beautiful proportions and details, fine condition and the maker's paper label made the documented Thomas Townsend chest-on-chest irresistible to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which acquired it through New York dealer Leigh Keno. The chest-on-chest is the only signed work by the Newport cabinetmaker, the son of Job Townsend.

"It adds so much to our knowledge of Newport furniture and may help scholars attribute other pieces to the shop. Besides the Townsend label, it has the wonderful ink inscription, 'Nicholas Easton 1772,' inside the top of the lower case. Easton was also a cabinetmaker and may have signed the case while working as a journeyman in Townsend's shop. This will certainly inspire more research on the relationship between Townsend and Easton," said Keno.

Two other pieces of Gardiner family furniture were of interest to Dr Thomas and Alice Kugelman, the husband-and-wife Eliphalet Chapin scholars whose decades' long research has just been unveiled in "Connecticut Valley Furniture by Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800," which opened at the Concord (Mass.) Museum on January 29.

"We thought for a time that it was a Revival piece. It seemed to have too many of the elements associated with Chapin: the pierced fretwork on the scrolled pediment, pinwheel rosettes, scalloped dentilling and fan-carving on the central interior drawer," Alice Kugelman said of a cherrywood desk and bookcase cataloged as School of Chapin that sold to a phone bidder for $114,000 ($30/50,000).

"It's a marriage, but it's a great marriage," Tom Kugelman said of the cherrywood bonnet-top high chest of drawers, $9,000, that has what the scholars call a "Norwich notch," a kind of dentilling outlining the shell carving on the lower case.

The previous day, Christie's sold a highlight of Robert Gardiner's silver collection, a 1791 Southampton, N.Y., silver tankard by Elias Pelletreau, $156,000. Also from the estate, an English brass skeleton clock, the dial signed by John Cutbush Maidstone, circa 1690, fetched $26,400.

To absentee paddle #1809 went a slew of other Gardiner family pieces. Portraits of Mr and Mrs John Lion Gardiner fetched $45,600 each. A portrait of David Gardiner brought $20,400. A wool on cotton needlework bed hanging panel, worked by Mary Maria Gardiner about 1798, sold for $38,400; a George III walnut and parcel-gilt pier mirror, $31,200; a Boston block front desk, $19,200; and an English brass-mounted lift-top traveling bottle case, $14,400.

New York On The Block

The Townsend chest-on-chest was not the most costly piece of the day. That distinction went to the catalog's cover lot, a marble-top pier table, both muscular and curvaceous, that sold anonymously for $1,696,000, setting a record at auction for New York furniture and for American marble-topped furniture. Bidding opened at $480,000 and proceeded in increments to the $1.5 million hammer. Leigh Keno dropped out at $1.2 million; Milly McGehee was the underbidder at $1.4 million. The table was last auctioned in 1983, where it sold to New York dealer Albert Sack for $302,500. For nearly two decades it had been on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

"My client had been looking for a wonderful Eighteenth Century marble-top table for years and this one was a ten. We underbid the one at the Nicholson sale in 1995," said McGehee, who may have to wait a while longer.

Little is known about who made the carved, mahogany table - which features a serpentine front, shell carved knees, cabriole legs, and ball and claw feet. Immigrant carvers in New York in the 1750s and 1760s, when this table was most likely made, included Henry Hardcastle, his protege Stephen Dwight, John Brinner, James Strachan and John Minshall. Some detect Boston influence in the carving of the knees and the slab top appears to have been quarried in King of Prussia, Penn. Two New Yorkers, Anthony Dodane and Thomas Brown, advertised marble slabs for sale in the 1760s. A handful of similar tables were made in Newport and Philadelphia.

The table's provenance is equally obscure. By tradition, it is said to have descended in the Cortelyou family of New York. Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou immigrated to New York in 1652. The most likely first owner of the table was Jacques' great-grandson, Aaron Cortelyou (1726-1789) of Staten Island.

The Cortelyou table was followed by a handsome New York balloon seat Chippendale side chair with acanthus carved legs, ball and claw front feet, and raking back legs ending in squared back feet. The chair, which retains the Nineteenth Century needlework upholstery common to several other chairs from the set, sold to the buyer of the Cortelyou table for $156,000.

"It's a great chair. Over ten years ago I owned another one from the set. It had the same Nineteenth Century needlework cover. I brought that chair back to the city on Amtrak. It's now in a private New York collection," said underbidder Leigh Keno. Chairs from the set, which by tradition was made for Sir William Johnson of Johnstown, N.Y., and is said to have once been owned by James Fenimore Cooper, are also at Winterthur, Chipstone and Yale. Albert Sack called Yale's chair a "masterpiece" in hisFine Points of Furniture.

A Philadelphia Wing Chair

After missing out on the Cortelyou table, Milly McGehee was successful in her bid for a Philadelphia easy chair of circa 1760. It went to the Maryland dealer for $1,584,000 against an estimate of $600/900,000.

"It's as close to perfection in line and form as a Chippendale easy chair can get. It has a very commanding stance. I was thrilled my client was able to get it. It's obviously a significant addition to any collection. It's been published in a number of places," said McGehee. The chair is related to another at the Philadelphia Museum and one, now in a private collection, that belonged to Luke Vincent Lockwood. The latter was illustrated in the Girl Scouts Loan Exhibition catalog of 1929.

A Herter Brothers Surprise

"I don't do 'get rid of,'" James Lipton told the elderly client who offered him $100 to remove two giltwood and marquetry inlaid side chairs that were obscured by cats and newspapers the first time he saw them. An independent appraiser for 30 years, Lipton, who does business under the name of Appraisers Associates of New York and Connecticut, had been asked to evaluate the personal property of the daughter of a Hungarian government official.

"There were some things she thought were fantastic. They weren't. You know, a relic from King Tut's tomb that wasn't. Violins that were nice-looking but ordinary. And then there were these chairs," said Lipton.

"There were no markings at all. But something about them told me they were Herter Brothers. I felt I'd seen them before," said Lipton, whose father was a Tiffany collector. The appraiser took the chairs to Christie's, which spotted similar or identical chairs in a circa 1883 photograph, reproduced in Artistic Houses, of Mary Stuart's Fifth Avenue drawing room. A nearly identical chair is also illustrated in Masterpieces of American Furniture from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute.

"The Munson-Williams-Proctor catalog was very helpful to us," acknowledged Andrew Brunk, who cataloged the pieces in-house. "We don't see too many of these chairs. They were particularly beautiful, but we needed to do our homework."

Herter Brothers furniture surviving with its gilding intact is extremely rare. No wonder a phone battle erupted when chairs crossed the block, selling for $204,000 to a private collector bidding by phone.

A Folk Art Bargain

It would not be an auction if everything went exactly as anticipated. So it was with one of Christie's cover lots, the "Aurora" watercolor and foil on silk picture by Ruth Downer, still in what appears to be its original frame, and its companion, "Diana, Fair and Chaste."

The pictures are from a group of ten remarkably charming works most likely created at a girls' school somewhere in New England (Connecticut has been suggested) between 1810 and 1819. Five of the pictures depict the Goddess Aurora in her chariot above a stylized land- and seascape. Two of the five "Auroras" are at the Rhode Island School of Design, a third is at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center at Colonial Williamsburg. The best known "Aurora" is the one that Christie's auctioned in 1989 for record $374,000. It is now in the Esmerian Collection at the American Folk Art Museum in New York.

Ruth Downer's "Aurora" was estimated at $250/350,000; her companion "Diana" at $60/90,000. "Aurora" opened at $110,000, selling to Stephen Huber for $192,000. The Old Saybrook, Conn., needlework specialist got "Diana" for $48,000.

"We paid a fraction of what we expected to," Huber said later from the floor of the Winter Antiques Show, where he exhibits with his wife, Carol. "They were highly publicized, there was lots of interest, but it was a case of everyone thinking someone else would buy them."

"The pictures are staying together," added Huber. He was mum on the ultimate destination of these great pieces of American folk art, a super bargain for some lucky client.