Auction Highlights
A total of 239 lots sold through LiveAuctioneers during DuMouchelles’ Aug. 10, 11 and 12 auction, including an Antoine Blanchard 12-inch-square, signed oil-on-canvas depiction of a Paris street, which garnered $7,320.
The top Internet result in PBA Galleries’ Aug. 9 Natural History, Travel & Exploration auction was achieved by a group lot comprised of three volumes from Audubon’s The Quadrupeds of North America. This famed collaboration between Audubon, his sons and three other parties who traveled through newly explored North American territories in the mid-19th century resulted in octavo editions containing illustrations of many species now endangered or extinct. The trio of volumes shown here soared to $7,800.
The gavel came down in the Internet’s favor on 150 lots in John McInnis Auctions’ Important July 3-Day Sale, held July 26-28. Thirty bids were lodged on an 1851 daguerrotype of a woman identified as Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia. The 5-inch diameter image of the noted Quaker minister, abolitionist and early women’s rights advocate had been estimated at $300-$500 but flew to a final online selling price of $22,800.
Fine art was the target for many online bidders in Neal Auction’s Major Estates sale held Aug. 4 and 5, with 99 lots changing hands through LiveAuctioneers. Topping the Internet list was a late 17th/early 18th-century Continental oil-on-canvas work titled A Woman in Court Dress Displaying Her Pearls. The 21½ inch by 16¾ inch painting ignored its $800-$1,200 estimate to close at $14,700.
On Aug. 4-5, Northgate Galleries held its Important Two-Day Estate auction, with 42 items selling through LiveAuctioneers. An elegant French-style fruitwood and quilted-silk sofa, 79 inches long, with cabriole legs and scroll-carved feet attracted many suitors, with an online bidder destined to settle into the comfortable furnishing after paying $5,175.
In McMasters Harris’ July 28 auction, a Francie doll dressed in a velvet gown and jacket, with jet-black bubble-cut hair, and purported to be a Mattel prototype, attracted 83 bids before rocketing to $5,880 – almost 20 times the high estimate.
At John Moran’s July 24 auction of antiques and fine furniture, an online participant paid seven times the high estimate to own a Jugendstil cast-aluminum figure of the devil character Teufel, after Thomas Theodore Heine’s original that was exhibited in 2000 at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Made in the first half of the 20th century, the curiously shaped figure, cast with arms in a free-swinging mode, sold online for $8,400 (estimate $800-$1,200).
