March 2009 - Page 7 of 9 - Auction Central News

Doll community rallies after death of Richard Wright

Those who attended the Mar. 7-8 Eastern National Antique Doll Show say the legacy of Richard Wright was evident. Wright, who died on Mar. 1, is shown at left (in denim jacket) at his busy booth at a past Gaithersburg show. Image courtesy Antique Doll Collector magazine.

GAITHERSBURG, Md. (ACNI) – One week after learning the tragic news that antique doll authority Richard Wright had died, the revered dealer’s friends and colleagues in the trade banded together to carry on his legacy at the Eastern National Antique Doll Show in Gaithersburg.

“Of course Richard was on everyone’s minds,” said Wright’s close friend Becky Ourant, who co-owns Village Doll & Toy Shop in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. “People took his death personally; it wasn’t just a loss to the profession. But we all made the decision that we had to heal and move on with the business of dolls because that’s absolutely what Richard would have wanted us to do.”

Becky and her husband and business partner, Andy Ourant, joined Wright’s life partner of 11 years, Glenn Stevens; and two of Wright’s longtime employees in stocking and managing the Gaithersburg show booth that Richard had booked.

“When the booth opened, there was immediate interest,” Becky Ourant said. “People knew we would be selling the last doll collection Richard had bought. Even when he was in the hospital before he passed away, he was calling people to let them know he would be coming to Gaithersburg with fresh merchandise.”

The challenge of vetting the dolls for condition and identifying them from Wright’s 28-page inventory list so they could be priced properly fell squarely on Becky Ourant’s shoulders — a task she said she was happy to do. “It made me feel I was doing something to help my friend,” she said.

Business at the Richard Wright booth was nonstop. “There was always a line of people waiting to buy at Richard’s booth at past editions of Gaithersburg, and that spirit continued. The buyers were two and three deep. We did two unpackings, first filling the tables, then the stands. People were piling up what they wanted and we were writing up the receipts later because we were so busy.”

After a lunch break, the second unpacking took place. It was even more competitive than the first go-round, Ourant said. “As we would pull a doll out of a tubbie, we’d announce ‘Heubach’ or whatever type of doll it was. Immediately we’d hear back, ‘Let me see that!’ ‘Clamoring’ was the word for it.”

Ourant said the remainder of dolls from the last collection purchased by Richard Wright will be offered at select upcoming shows, including the April 4-5 NADDA Show in Los Angeles.

On Wednesday, March 4, a private service for Richard Wright’s close friends was held at the Cattermole-Klotzbach Funeral Home in Royersford, Pennsylvania.

“There was a steady stream of visitors,” Ourant said, “from his fellow Antiques Roadshow appraisers including David Rago, Suzanne Perrault, Noel Barrett, and Wes Cowan – who came all the way from Cincinnati – to his non-business friends and local dealers he had known all his life.”

Wright, who was 62, died at home of natural causes after being hospitalized for four days with a virus. A memorial service will be held this spring, with details to be announced at a later date.

Furniture Specific: Lesser-known lights

This steel fitting, available from Van Dyke's Restorers, is essentially the same as that patented by George Hall in 1888. It is still in use today in Lowentraut glider rockers.

The history of American furniture is filled with the names of people who made tremendous contributions to the art in design, innovation, marketing or original thinking in other areas. Among them are such well-known luminaries as Duncan Phyfe, Charles H. Lannuier, John Henry Belter, the Herter brothers, R.J. Horner, John D. Larkin and Charles L. Eastlake. But there are many lesser-known individuals who made significant contributions to the American furniture art and industry. Here are some examples of these lesser lights and what they did for us. How many of them do you know?

Let’s begin with cabinetmaker Abner Cutler, who started his career in Buffalo, N.Y. in 1829. He formed the Cutler Desk Co. and eventually became fascinated by desks that had moveable tops allowing the working surface to be concealed. The idea of using a flexible, moveable tambour was first used in France in the middle of the 18th century. It is thought to have been invented by Jean-Francois Oeben, a German-born Frenchman. He introduced the use of tambour shutters for secretaries and desks beginning around 1760.

Postcard collection offers snapshot of Va. history

A real photo postcard from the early 1900s advertises the Auto Tire Shop is Roanoke, Va. Photo courtesy Jackson's Auction, Cedar Falls, Iowa, and LiveAuctioneers.com Archive.

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) – “Gee, it’s hot down here, wrote a peevish traveler to Middleburg in 1940.

Warrenton was “quite a nice little town,” according to an Army private in 1944. In 1938 in Leesburg, a group of men went fishing while the women “walked into the town drugstore and bought something.”

These snippets of Virginia history spilled out of a wheeled suitcase on a recent morning – just a few of the hundreds of postcards from around the
state that Josie Ballato, a government employee who lives in Falls Church, has amassed.

“I’m really interested in the life that’s gone,” said Ballato, 50, who has compiled some of the postcards into a book and will give a lecture on them Friday at the Loudoun Museum in Leesburg. Why did they take these pictures? Who was paying for them?”

The postcards – some mailed, some pristine – span from Teddy Roosevelt’s administration to John F. Kennedy’s: chaste black-and-white lithographs of town halls; color photos of futuristic diners; landscapes with hand-painted pink skies; log cabins with families lined up and squinting at the camera.

Traveling salesmen teased their sweethearts, soldiers prepared for war and schoolgirls visited their aunts in rural towns. For some, their brush with Virginia was ephemeral – the minutes it took to jump out at a train station, buy a card and scribble a note before the whistle blew. Postage cost a penny.

They are a precursor to e-mail and Facebook status updates – a quick sentiment or observation, the marking of a moment.

Kovels – Antiques & Collecting: Week of March 9, 2009

This yard-long print pictures the Selz Good Shoes lady. The picture, drawn by Howard Chandler Christy, was a shoe company premium in about 1920. Rich Penn Auctions of Waterloo, Iowa, recently sold it for $358.

Yard-long prints can sometimes be a yard wide, but those who collect these 36-inch-by-8-inch prints prefer the term “yard-long” or the original 19th-century name, “yard picture.” Just before 1900, lithography companies began making these skinny pictures as premiums they gave away for wrappers and 2 cents postage. The first were titled “Yard of Puppies,” or “Yard of Roses,” and pictured a grouping of dogs or flowers on a 36-inch-wide and 8-inch-high print. Later, beautiful women standing in long dresses were pictured on a piece of paper 36 inches long. Many included advertisements for companies or small calendar pads at the bottom. Mandeville & King Seeds, Diamond Crystal Salt Co., Selz Good Shoes and Pabst all gave out yard-longs. Subjects run from flowers to children’s heads to months of the year, but most seem to picture women. Most yard-long prints date from before 1920, although reproductions have been made. Value is determined by rarity and condition. A collector wants a print that has not been trimmed, the original metal band at the bottom and the calendar pad, if there was one.

Russian medley to highlight Aberdeen Auction March 14

Bidding will start at $7,500 for this portrait of Russian czar Peter the Great. Image courtesy Aberdeen Auction Galleries.

LUTZ, Fla. – Aberdeen Auction Galleries will present an excellent selection of fine and decorative art followed by a numismatic session March 14. The auction house’s first quarterly sale of the year will have an Eastern European flavor with Russian paintings, silver and icons.

Expected to lead the bidding will be a portrait of Peter the Great attributed to Fedor Step. Rokotov (1735-1808). Bidding for the oil on canvas portrait, which measures 21 1/2 by 26 inches framed, is expected to reach $15,000-$18,000.

A portrait of a young gypsy woman by Nicholas Basil. Haritonoff (Russian, 1880-1944) is expected to bring at least $5,000. The signed oil on canvas portrait measures 18 by 14 1/2 inches.

British paintings will include a 19th-century village scene by Charles Jr. Wilde. Bidding on the 13 3/4 by 10 1/2-inch signed oil on canvas painting is expected to reach $4,000-$6,000.

As stock market tanks, artworks rise as loan collateral

A fine artwork such as Joan Miro's 1927 oil on canvas titled Blue Star would find many suitors if ever offered as collateral. Privately owned, it sold at auction in Dec. 2007 for $11.8M. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers Archive and European Evaluators LLC.

NEW YORK (AP) – With stock portfolios plummeting and the economy tanking, owners of expensive art are increasingly using their collections as collateral to obtain a much-needed infusion of cash.

Works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol are among the pieces collectors have leveraged in recent months. The Metropolitan Opera put up two famed Marc Chagall murals in its lobby as collateral, and renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz recently borrowed $15 million against her entire collection of images.

A New York company that issues loans against fine and decorative arts and real estate says it has seen a 40 to 50 percent increase in business over the last six months. Leibovitz obtained her loan from the firm, Art Capital. Other celebrities who reportedly have secured funds with their own works include film director Julian Schnabel.

Art Capital co-owner Ian Peck said the firm has “taken in important modern masters, important old masters and very important decorative arts,” among other valuable pieces. The firm said it expects to make about $120 million in loans in 2009, up from $80 million last year.

Art collections can be lifesavers for people looking for extra cash. The art works are appraised and treated as collateral just like a car or home would be. Art brokers say that people offering up their collections are doing it for a number of reasons, including dealing with financial issues, raising money for businesses or buying more art. Some of the cash-strapped art owners have been burned by Ponzi schemes, Peck said.

Art Capital and Art Finance Partners, another New York lending firm, have also started to hear from small museums and other institutions whose endowments have been deeply cut by a severe drop in private donations.

“With the stock market down 40 to 50 percent, people’s liquidity is really drying up,” said Andrew Rose of Art Finance. “If you’re unfortunate to have a lot of stock at Citibank or Lehman Brothers you may have been wiped out substantially.”

Consignor of auctioned Gandhi items gets cold feet over the deal

NEW YORK (AP) – Mohandas Gandhi’s eyeglasses and other items sold for $1.8 million Thursday at an auction that drew outrage from the Indian government, a last-minute reversal from the consignor and a frenzy of bidding won by an Indian conglomerate that said the pacifist leader’s possessions will be coming home.

The lot included Gandhi’s wire-rim eyeglasses, worn leather sandals, a pocket watch, a plate and the brass bowl from which he ate his final meal.

The Indian government had protested the sale, saying the items should be returned to the nation and not sold to the highest bidder. The seller and the government could not work out a deal, and the auction went forward as planned.

But the self-identified owner, California art collector James Otis, told reporters outside the Antiquorum Auctioneers that he no longer wanted to sell the items. Meanwhile, U.S. Justice Department officials served an Indian court injunction on the auction house, blocking it from releasing the items.

Auctioneer Julien Schaerer announced as the sale began that the Gandhi items would be held for two weeks “pending resolution of third party claims.”

Toni Bedi, an executive of the Indian company UB Group, had the winning bid after a furious four minutes in which the offers raced from $10,000 to $1.8 million. Bids came from the floor and by phone and Internet from overseas; none of the other bidders were identified.

Bedi said he was acting on instructions of Dr. Vijay Mallya, CEO of UB Group, whose firms in India include breweries, airlines, chemical, pharmaceutical and fertilizer firms and information and technology companies. He said that the company wants to donate the items to the Indian government, and plans to return them for public display in New Delhi.

The auctioneer’s premium on the sale would boost the total price to about $2 million.

Indian billionaire pays $2M to repatriate Gandhi items

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Public domain image via Wikipedia.

NEW DELHI (AP) – India’s government rejected a proposal Thursday by the owner of Mohandas Gandhi’s eyeglasses and other personal items that would have halted their auction, and instead vowed to buy the independence leader’s possessions. Later at the auction, which was conducted by the New York company Antiquorum, an Indian business tycoon acting in concert with the Indian government prevailed on the Gandhi items, paying $2,096,000. The price includes a 20 percent buyer’s premium to $1 million; 12 percent on the excess.

A March 6 report filed online by the news agency Xinhua stated that an Indian court order had prohibited the Indian government from bidding on the items, so in a deal organized through the Indian Consulate in New York, they were bid on and purchased for India through a wealthy middle man – Vijay Mallya, chairman of United Breweries Group and Kingfisher Airlines.

Mallya, whose wealth is estimated at $1.2 billion, has a history of successful bidding at auction to repatriate items of great cultural value to India. At a 2004 auction in London, he placed the winning bid of $249,000 for a sword that had belonged to Sultan Fateh Ali Tipu (1750-1799). Mallya returned the important historical relic to India.

The planned auction of Gandhi items, which were consigned by collector and peace activist James Otis, raised an outcry in India, prompting the government to attempt to bring the pacifist icon’s belongings back to his homeland.

Otis said he planned to sell the Gandhi items to raise money to promote pacifism. According to Britain’s BBC News, Otis has pledged to give “every penny” of the auction proceeds to nonviolent causes, particularly in developing countries.
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Decoy collectors aiming for family fun

A future collector shows off a carved and painted mallard. Image courtesy MDCA.

CHICAGO – The Midwest Decoy Collectors Association annual convention will be April 20-25 at the Pheasant Run Resort in Saint Charles, Ill. Members from the United States, Canada, Mexico, Europe and Asia, will be in attendance at what many collectors refer to as the premier world event for antique decoy enthusiasts.

With the world’s growing interest in decoy collecting, organizations such as the MDCA and their annual convention play a key role in the growth and advocacy of this fascinating and rewarding hobby.

For 44 years, the MDCA’s annual convention has continued to offer a fun and entertaining experience for the entire family. Each year the annual event features educational seminars, auctions, buying and selling, and networking opportunities for decoy collectors. This year promises to offer even more chances to mingle and meet with some of the world’s leading authorities on decoy collecting during the Friday evening annual networking and dinner buffet.

As always, there will be plenty of opportunities for collectors to buy, sell and trade. From Monday, April 20, through Saturday, April 25, the ever-popular room trading and displays will be open to attendees. There will also be more than 386 tables with more than 20,000 items on display at the Pheasant Run Resort Mega Center.

Exhibit includes letter from Poe, apologizing for drinking

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – Edgar Allan Poe apologizes to his publishers for drinking too much and asks them to buy an article because he’s “desperately pushed for money” in an 1842 letter acquired by the University of Virginia for an exhibition marking the author’s 200th birthday.

Writing from Philadelphia, Poe blames his friend William Ross Wallace, a poet and lawyer, for making him drink too many “juleps” and for misbehaving on a visit to New York.

The university bought the July 18, 1842, letter in a Sotheby’s auction after the document spent years in private hands. University officials declined to disclose the price, but said it was purchased with endowment funds.

“Will you be so kind enough to put the best possible interpretation upon my behaviour while in N-York?,” Poe asks New York publishers J. and Henry G. Langley. “You must have conceived a queer idea of me – but the simple truth is that Wallace would insist upon the juleps, and I knew not what I was either doing or saying.”

He closes the letter expressing his hopes that he’ll see the Langleys again “under better auspices.” The enclosed article was rejected, but published elsewhere later that year.

The letter was first disclosed in an American literary magazine in 1957, according to the 2008 edition of The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe. It was formerly in a private collection and, before the university’s acquisition, most recently purchased at auction by an undisclosed buyer for $26,000 in May 1988, according to Chris Sentner, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond.

The University of Virginia Library released the letter this week ahead of an exhibit opening Saturday that highlights Poe’s enduring literary works, brief life and mysterious death at the age of 40. Poe attended the Charlottesville university, but had to drop out after less than a year in part because of financial difficulties, which plagued him the rest of his life.

From Out That Shadow: the Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe is being held in honor of the 200th anniversary of the author’s birth on Jan. 19, 1809. It features more than 100 items related to Poe, including manuscripts of his iconic works such as The Raven, original artwork and personal belongings including his writing desk and portraits of Poe and his mother.

The exhibit runs through Aug. 1, then will open at the University of Texas.

Poe is credited with writing the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which appeared in 1841 in Graham’s Magazine, where Poe worked an editor. It became the template for subsequent mystery stories, including the Sherlock Holmes works.

The writer’s other macabre works include The Black Cat, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Pit and the Pendulum, which have frightened generations of readers and reflected Poe’s struggles with depression, difficulties with drinking, and the loss of key figures in his life.

AP-CS-03-04-09 1222EST

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