Auction Highlights
On April 8, Antique Place held its Spectacular Easter Sunday Antique Auction, with $180,180 in goods purchased through LiveAuctioneers. A signed 17½-inch A. Gori cold-patinated bronze and ivory Art Deco figure of a woman holding a basket of flowers was a high flier at $22,800 against an estimate of $11,000-$13,500.
Noel Barrett conducted a March 31-April 1 auction of the last of the dolls, automata, dollhouses and miniatures from the Mary Merritt Doll & Toy Museum, with 159 lots selling through LiveAuctioneers. A rare and gracefully formed 9-inch Dressel & Kister pincushion half-doll with brown-painted hair soared past its $2,000-$3,000 estimate to sell online for $10,030.
A red-hot entry in Scottsdale Art Auction’s Annual Spring Sale held March 31 was Frederic Remington’s (American, 1861-1909) 22¾-inch bronze titled The Bronco Buster. It attracted 600 catalog hits prior to crossing the auction block and finished online just a few dollars short of the $100,000 mark.
The French company Aguttes Auctions, in association with cabinet d'expertise Dan Coissard, astutely zeroed in on current tastes with a March 30 specialty event featuring Russian, Impressionist and Modern paintings. An Alexandre-Nilolaevich Benois (Russian, 1870-1960) oil-on-canvas landscape measuring 21 2/3 inches by 36¼ inches was claimed by a LiveAuctioneers bidder who paid $25,615 against an estimate of $6,100-$8,600.
Bruce Kodner Galleries struck paydirt in a March 21-22 sale of antiques, fine art and decorative arts with $246,930 in online transactions. Among the 108 items purchased through LiveAuctioneers was an 1890 oil-on-canvas painting attributed to Grigori Miasoyedov (Russian, 1834-1911), titled Russian Landscape. The 29½ inch by 36 inch artwork, signed at lower right, sold for $98,400 – almost four times its high estimate.
In Alderfer’s March 9-10 auction of fine and decorative arts, a 20 inch by 30 inch Andrew Wyeth (American, b. 1917) pencil-signed print of a snoozing dog, titled Night Sleeper, was purchased through LiveAuctioneers for $6,000 against an estimate of $800-$1,200.
A phenomenal $354,508 was spent online at Craftsman Auction’s March 10-11 sale featuring such great names in decorative art as George Ohr, Stickley and Newcomb. A 9¾ inch Weller Fru Russet vase in purple and blue-gray glaze, with a dragon wrapped around the vessel’s body, stirred a bidding frenzy, eventually tripling its estimate to sell for $6,737.50.
