ELLE magazine will commission the photographer selected for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition to shoot a feature story for the magazine. Fair use of low-resolution image of the cover of Elle magazine’s French edition, 10-21-2001.
LONDON – The National Portrait Gallery has announced the call for entries for the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011, a major international photographic award. Entry forms are now available and the closing date for entries is July 7, 2011.
The Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011 is open to all photographers over the age of 18 and provides an important platform for portrait photographers including gifted amateurs, students and professionals of all ages. Those who wish to enter may visit www.npg.org.uk/photoprize and complete the online application form.
Around 60 photographers will be selected for the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the winner of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2011 will receive £12,000. The exhibition will run at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from Nov. 10, 2011 until Feb. 12, 2012.
For the third year running ELLE magazine will commission a photographer selected for the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition to shoot a feature story for the magazine. Clare Shilland won the second ELLE Commission in 2010 for her portrait Merel.
Last year the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize attracted nearly 6,000 entries and was won by David Chancellor, for his portrait Huntress with Buck. Prizes were also awarded to Panayiotis Lamprou, Jeffrey Stockbridge and Abbie Trayler-Smith.
Tim Eyles, Managing Partner of Taylor Wessing says: “We are delighted to continue our sponsorship of the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize and we look forward to further strengthening our relationship with the National Portrait Gallery. As a multi-jurisdictional law firm we are proud to support an international competition that reflects our own firm-wide commitment to developing talent and supporting the arts, and which provides such pleasure and inspiration to those who take part and visit the exhibition. We hope that amateur and professional photographers internationally will be inspired to submit their entries to make this year’s competition the best yet.”
The first prize winner receives £12,000 (approx. $19,640). In addition the judges, at their discretion, will award one or more cash prizes to the shortlisted photographers.
ELLE magazine will choose one photographer selected for the exhibition to shoot a feature story. They will pay standard commissioning rates and expenses to the photographer chosen. ELLE is the world’s biggest-selling fashion magazine with 39 editions worldwide. The British edition of ELLE sells 195,455 copies a month (ABC January-December 2009).
Mariano Andreu (Spanish, 1888-1976), still life, 1956, 14 1/2 inches x 16 3/4 inches, signed and dated, estimate $4,000-$6,000. Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers. SHERMAN OAKS, Calif. – Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers Inc. will present a fine art auction Saturday, May 14, that features an eclectic variety of paintings, prints, sculpture, photography, objects of art and decorative arts. LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding at the 300-lot auction, which begins at noon Pacific.
There are two lots of fine early 20th century porcelain by the highly collected Franz Arthur Bischoff including a Belleek teapot and creamer/sugar set and a Limoges dish, all of which are signed.
There is a large original painting by renowned Mexican artist Leonardo Nierman and artworks by local California artists including a painting by Carlos Almaraz and a monoprint by Charles Arnoldi. There is a strong collection of 19th/ 20th century French sculpture by artists including Antonin-Claire Forestier. Also represented are artists Willem De Kooning, Sam Francis, Neil Leifer and many more.
Previews are May 12 and 13, 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., at 14931 Califa St., Building A, Sherman Oaks, CA 91411.
For details visit Clark’s website at www.estateauctionservice.com or phone 818-783-3052. Clark’s e-mail address is gallery@pacbell.net.
Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers.Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers.Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers.Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers.Image courtesy of Clark’s Fine Art & Auctioneers.
Willa Cather House on the southwest corner of 3rd Avenue and Cedar Street in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Built around 1878, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s home from 1884 to 1890 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. May 31, 2010 photo by Ammodramus.
RED CLOUD, Neb. (AP) – When Guide Rock’s International Order of Odd Fellows Opera House opened in 1905, it was indicative of the optimism spreading across Nebraska at that time.
“Guide Rock built their opera house in 1905, when the town had 419 people, and they built an opera house that had 400 seats in it,” said Jay Yost, president emeritus of the Willa Cather Foundation board of governors. “To me that was the height of optimism, because it’s not as if you’re going to get the same 400 people in town for four performances, so they thought the town would get much bigger. It just showed you what people thought would happen with their towns.”
That opera house in Guide Rock is just one of 63 from across Nebraska represented by the Yost/Leak collection of postcards and memorabilia displayed in the Red Cloud Opera House. The total collection includes more than 200 opera houses. The collection will return to the Red Cloud Opera House Aug. 15 and remain in the gallery until Sept. 10.
Yost, who grew up in Red Cloud, now is a New York City banker. He discussed the collection and the opera houses in “Social Networking 1890: Nebraska Opera Houses in their Heyday,” a presentation he made as part of the 56th annual Willa Cather Spring Conference.
“Now we have Twitter and Facebook and all those ways for people to connect,” he said during an interview.
“Back in the 1890s and 1910s, one of the major ways people were able to connect with other people was getting together at the opera house. That was for community plays or weddings or dances as well as performances by traveling troops or musical companies or opera companies. Things like that.”
Stephany Thompson, director of foundation programming, said the Yost/Leak collection provides a local context to the overall theme of the annual Willa Cather conference.
“I think it brings a sense of what the state of Nebraska’s history of popular culture was,” she said. “I think many of the topics discussed in the conference will be of an international theme. The fact that we have a collection of Nebraska postcards really brings it to back to this state, to this area.”
Yost began collecting artifacts relating to pre-World War I performance spaces in Nebraska and Kansas around 2000.
“I got on the Cather Board in the late ’90s,” he said. “We were in the process of raising money to do this restoration (of the Red Cloud Opera House), and eBay was just coming out then. I thought it would be cool to start collecting opera house memorabilia thinking someday we would want to do something like this.”
“The Yost/Leak collection includes more than just postcards. In the Opera House gallery now there are souvenirs such as spoons from the Arapahoe Opera House.
“Again, it shows you how important the thing was when they were doing commemorative souvenirs of these places, because it was one of the places in town that somebody would want to remember,” Yost said. He said at one time there were 513 documented opera houses in Nebraska. A study in the late 1980s showed only about 25 percent of those opera houses remained by then and only about 25 percent of those hadn’t been significantly damaged.
“For me it’s just sad that so many small towns don’t have a place to come together now,” Yost said. “You might have a community hall, but there’s really no soul to it. You can’t put on a performance, or we have had the prom dinner here the last couple of years, so people are recreating those memories three generations down the road.”
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Information from: Hastings Tribune, http://www.hastingstribune.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-05-09-11 0505GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Willa Cather House on the southwest corner of 3rd Avenue and Cedar Street in Red Cloud, Nebraska. Built around 1878, it was the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer’s home from 1884 to 1890 and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. May 31, 2010 photo by Ammodramus.
Copyrighted and trademarked corporate logo for Skype Limited. NEW YORK (AP) – Microsoft Corp. said Tuesday that it has agreed to buy the popular Internet telephone service Skype SA for $8.5 billion in the biggest deal in the software maker’s 36-year history.
Buying Skype gives Microsoft access to a user base of about 170 million people who log in to Skype every month, using the Internet and Skype usernames as a complement to the traditional phone network and its phone numbers.
Microsoft said it will marry Skype’s functions to its Xbox game console, Outlook email program and Windows smartphones. All of these platforms already have other options for Internet calling, but the addition of Skype users would expand their reach, making them more useful.
Microsoft said it will continue to support Skype on other software platforms.
The sellers include eBay Inc. and private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz.
Skype users made 207 billion minutes of voice and video calls last year. Most of that usage is free computer-to-computer calls, which has made it difficult for the service to make money since entrepreneurs Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis started the company in 2003. An average of about 8.8 million customers per month, or just over 5 percent of the user base, pay to use Skype to call out to the regular phone network.
The vast majority of paying Skype users is in Europe, where high country-to-country rates for traditional phone calls make Skype more popular than in the U.S., where state-to-state calling is cheap.
Skype lost $7 million on revenue of $860 million last year, according to papers that the company has filed since announcing its intentions last summer to launch an initial public offering of stock. The IPO was later put on hold. Skype’s long-term debt, net of cash, was $543,883 at the end of 2010.
The Skype takeover tops Microsoft’s biggest previous acquisition – a $6 billion purchase of the online ad service aQuantive in 2007.
Microsoft said Skype will become a new business division headed by Skype CEO Tony Bates, who will report directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Although it makes billions from its computer software, Microsoft has been accustomed to losing money on the Internet in a mostly futile attempt to catch up to Google Inc. in the lucrative online search market. Microsoft got so desperate that it made a $47.5 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc. three years ago, but withdrew the offer after Yahoo balked. Yahoo is now worth about half of what Microsoft offered.
Microsoft can well afford to buy Skype: on March 31, it had a cash hoard of $50.2 billion.
Microsoft would be Skype’s second large-company owner. EBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005, but its attempt to unite the phone service with its online shopping bazaar never worked out. It wound up selling a 70 percent stake in Skype to a group of investors led by private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz for $2 billion 18 months ago.
Besides eBay, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, Skype’s other major shareholders are Joltid and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Peter Svensson can be reached at http://twitter.com/petersvensson
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
CLARENCE, New York (AP) – A 250-year-old Chinese vase owned by a suburban Buffalo couple for decades has sold at auction for more than $1.5 million.
The Buffalo News reports that Tang Tao, a Chinese antiques dealer from Shanghai, outbid a British dealer for the vase, known as a Chinese moon flask. The large, bulbous porcelain vase dates to China’s Qinlong dynasty, between 1736 and 1795.
Tao was among several bidders at Saturday’s auction held at Antique World in Clarence, outside Buffalo. Several others entered bids over the phone from Hong Kong, London and the United States.
The vase was owned by a Clarence couple for at least 50 years. It was recently brought to Antique World’s owner, who didn’t know the vase’s value until the auction notice was posted online and received global interest.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Howard Thurston’s three-sheet color lithograph poster from the late 1920s has a $4,000-$5,000 estimate. Image courtesy of Potter & Potter Auctions Inc.
CHICAGO – Tom Mullica is one of the most unusual entertainers in the world. In the 1970s and ’80s, The Tom-Foolery Magic Bar Theatre was a haven for celebrities, magicians and fun-seekers of every description. Mullica performed there nightly, and developed a legendary reputation as a world-class clown, comic, and magician.
Among Mullica’s most famous routines were his “Nicotine Nincompoop” act, in which he ate an entire pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes – while they were still lit. The routine put Mullica on dozens of international TV shows, among them Late Night with David Letterman, and drew thousands of patrons to the bar in its decade long existence. Now memorabilia from the Tom-Foolery will go up for sale on May 22 at Potter & Potter Auctions in Chicago.
LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.
The auction will include the cigarette cases and tricks Mullica used at the bar and on stage, as well as many of the framed photos, posters, and souvenirs from the walls of the bar, and his personal library of books on magic tricks. Among these is his own copy of The Encyclopedia of Cigarette Tricks (est. $400/$600), the book from which he learned many of his greatest tricks.
The auction will also feature vintage magic tricks, illusions and apparatus from other consignors. Among them are antique trunks and illusions from the Will Rock/Thurston illusion show, which toured America in the 1930s and ’40s. One such item is the “Glass Lined Trunk” used by Rock. After showing the trunk empty and lining its interior with sheets of glass, a girl appeared inside. The trunk – which carries an estimate of $700-$1,000) – is still in the bright orange packing crate Rock used, its lid emblazoned with the words “Will Rock/Thurston Show.” Another highlight is a pair of handcuffs owned by the best-known magician of all time, Harry Houdini. The set of “Bean Cobb” cuffs carries an estimate of $3,000-$4,000.
Other magic props in the auction include an elaborate Vanishing and Appearing Lamp set similar to props used by Houdini (est. $4,000/$6,000), stainless steel and Lucite props manufactured by Merv Taylor (who also operated one of the first concessions at Disneyland), an unusual poster advertising Chung Ling Soo (est. $4,000/$5,000), several elaborate automatons, and other “devices of wonder” built by many well-known American craftsmen.
An illustrated catalog will be available from the auction house.
For details contact Potter & Potter Auctions Inc., 3729 N. Ravenswood Ave., Suite 116, Chicago, IL 60613 or visit www.potterauctions.com.
Tiffany Studios bronze crab inkwell with exceptional patina (est. $10,000-$15,000). Image courtesy of Fontaine’s Auction Gallery. PITTSFIELD, Mass. – What is being appropriately billed as an Exceptional Antique Auction has been planned for Saturday, May 21, by Fontaine’s Auction Gallery, in the firm’s spacious showroom at 1485 W. Housatonic St. Offered will be over 500 lots of antique furniture, vintage lighting, fine art, decorative accessories, period furniture, clocks, estate jewelry, watches and more. LiveAuctioneers will provide Internet live bidding.
“We’re calling it an exceptional auction because the merchandise truly is exceptional,” said John Fontaine of Fontaine’s Auction Gallery. “These lots have been culled from better estates and collections in Massachusetts and beyond, resulting in a tremendous opportunity for people looking to redecorate, purchase investment-grade antiques or add to their collections.”
Prospective buyers unable to attend the event may bid online through LiveAuctioneers.com (which they can access by logging on to the Fontaine’s website, www.FontainesAuction.net). Phone and absentee bids will also be accepted. Previews will be held on Thursday, May 19, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Friday, May 20, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Saturday, May 21, from 9 a.m. until the start of sale, at 11 a.m. Eastern
Period furniture pieces are certain to excite the crowd, beginning with a 12-piece R.J. Horner figural carved dining set, the best such set Fontaine’s has offered in its 40-year history. The set is complete and has the excellent original finish. Next is a Wooten extra grade three-hinge cabinet secretary, 76 inches tall, 44 inches wide. The piece boasts a highly carved gallery with burled panels, ebonized trim and incising. Also sold will be a large figural umbrella stand depicting an almost life-size carved dog seated beside a rustic carved tree stump, 33 inches tall.
Several other pieces by the renowned craftsman R.J. Horner will be sold, to include a winged griffin oak corner china cabinet with a mirrored back and triple curved glass front; an oak three-door Atlas bookcase with large figural carvings of muscular men on the sides; and a figural carved mahogany two-part hall tree with an open carved cherub crest over a beveled mirror.
The name Tiffany will be chanted frequently throughout the day. Tiffany lamps will include a dichroic swirling lemon leaf table lamp with 18-inch geometric shade and heavily mottled background glass; a turtleback desk lamp with a fine bronze base and leafy platform; and a nice student lamp with a fine bronze base and beaded and coiled rope twist embellishment.
Other Tiffany pieces will include a great bronze inkwell with the fine figure of a crab, its claws reaching forward, pinching the coiled handles of the inkwell pot mounted with an oyster shell; a six-arm chandelier with 88 Tiffany iridescent glass prisms hanging from the bronze fixture; a cypriote glass vase, 7 inches tall, with a textured surface; and a Favrile quilted green and opalescent bowl with 12-inch rim.
From the vintage clocks category comes two examples of note: an E. Howard No. 81 oak grandfather clock boasting a silvered chapter ring with black movement and Graham’s dead-beat escapement; and a Gilbert No. 12 oak standing regulator with black open moon hands.
Art glass vases will be served up in abundance, to include a Legras onion-form cameo vase, signed, 12 1/2 inches tall, cut with deep green leaves and branches; a Moser hand-decorated smoke glass vase with a bulbous body, 8 1/2 inches tall; a Galle cameo cut vase with a fiery red and orange pattern, 7 inches tall; a Webb enameled bulbous glass vase with butterfly and satin glass finish, 5 1/4 inches tall; and a Charles Schneider cameo glass vase with nice teardrop body.
Also sold will be a Steuben calcite and jadeite 15-inch round centerpiece with beautiful glass platform.
Bronzes are surefire crowd-pleasers, and this sale’s got several worth mentioning: a fine figural bronze of a hoop dancer by Georges Morin (German, 1874-1928); a monumental bronze of a Kabyle hunter returning from his hunt, by Arthur Waagen, executed circa 1883-1898; and a 58-inch bronze after Giovanni Bologna of a flying Mercury figure with his helmet, staff and winged feet.
Returning to furniture, the name John Henry Belter in synonymous with fine American furniture, and this auction has several Belter examples. These include a Henry Clay pattern sofa, rosewood triple arched back with scroll carvings on the crest rail; and a cornucopia laminated rosewood side chair boasting a pierce carved scrolling back and a good, clean original finish.
Need a table? This sale’s got over a dozen to choose from, including a mahogany 60-inch round acanthus carved dining table with split pedestal base and four oversize legs; and an inlaid rosewood game table with octagonal rosewood top and checkerboard inlay. The table can be illuminated by an Anthony Hart 16-inch cherry blossom table lamp. The shade has an irregular bumpy form with clusters of flowers and berries. The lamp has a great matching light-up base.
Audiophiles will be intrigued by the Reginaphone Style 246 floor model disc player (including 50 discs), with mahogany case and two doors in front; and an oak Victor Model “V” phonograph, with an oak case and paneled horn, in excellent working condition. Again, for lighting purposes, a perfect complement would be an Andre Hunebelle art glass fish lamp with a deep amber glass shade with a nouveau border (13 inches by 9 inches).
For more information log on to www.FontainesAuction.net or call Bob Burke or John Fontaine at (413) 448-8922.
Marvin Gaye and Melba Moore headlined the 1977 Unity Day concert in Oakland, Calif. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Clars Auction Gallery. DETROIT (AP) – The Motown Historical Museum is celebrating the life and times, as well as the moves and grooves, of Marvin Gaye.
The Detroit museum, located in the original home of Motown Records Corp., has unveiled an exhibit chronicling the legendary artist’s two decades at Motown, from 1960 to 1982. The exhibit in the second-floor gallery opened Friday and runs through at least September.
It’s the first time the museum has produced a major exhibit on Gaye, and follows a successful installation on the Jackson 5 last year that marked the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson.
The largely chronological exhibit features Gaye’s album covers, sheet music, costumes from concerts and even a Marvin Gaye Way street sign from Washington, D.C., the hometown of the man born Marvin Pentz Gay Jr. in 1939 and fatally shot by his father in 1984 after a violent argument.
Chief curator Lina Stephens said the museum had been planning a Gaye exhibit for a while but Jackson’s death “shifted a lot of things” around. One thing is clear: Gaye’s exhibit has many more items and artifacts because of his lengthy tenure with the label.
“He was a good artist to focus on because he was here since just about the beginning,” Stephens said. “It’s easy to incorporate his story line.”
The display spans the career of a man who helped create, refine and redefine the sound of the label and popular music itself, including playing piano and drums on “Please Mister Postman,” singing the chart-topping smash I Heard it Through the Grapevine, and tackling political and environmental concerns with What’s Going On and Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).
“He started out singing songs he thought he wanted to sing,” Janis Gaye, Gaye’s ex-wife, told The Associated Press by phone from her home in Providence, R.I. “When he hit ‘What’s Going On’ and started having his own voice in every way – arrangements, lyrically and spiritually – that opened a whole new door for him.”
Janis Gaye, who was with Marvin Gaye for 11 years and married to him from 1977 to 1981, said she has been talking to museum officials about the exhibit and hopes to loan a few signature items, such as his Grammy awards and silver platform boots she designed for him.
She said she took his “everyday boots” and had rhinestones and platforms put on them. They later became synonymous with Gaye, appearing on album covers and a magazine spread.
The boots were “one staple he really did love,” Janis Gaye said, and they will be difficult to part with – even temporarily.
“I told (museum officials) I may have to sleep there for the next nine months,” she said.
The exhibit includes an early single by Gaye on Motown’s subsidiary label, Anna, named for Motown founder Berry Gordy’s sister – the woman who became Gaye’s first wife. He was still married to Anna Gordy Gaye in 1973 when he met Janis Gaye, who was 17 at the time and is now 55.
Janis Gaye said she is writing a book about her life with the man she describes as her “dear, sweet ex-husband” that’s expected to be released later this year.
“We must have broken up and gotten back together at least 20 or 30 times,” she said. “It was a magical time, at times. … There are many, many memories to look back on – some fond, some not so fond.”
She said she hopes museum visitors see the depth of his creativity and recognize his enduring legacy, which includes a performance next May of the What’s Going On album by John Legend and The Roots with the National Symphony Orchestra. It marks the 40th anniversary of Gaye performing the album at the same venue.
“I would just like for people to see his whole body of work,” Janis Gaye said. “Socially conscious, sexually conscious, whatever it happens to be. It’s all Marvin. It all came from that one mind.”
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-05-08-11 1654GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Marvin Gaye and Melba Moore headlined the 1977 Unity Day concert in Oakland, Calif. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Clars Auction Gallery.
Ownership of the printing plate used to print this 1775 New Hampshire currency is in dispute. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Early American History Auctions Inc.
SPRING VALLEY, Minn. (AP) – It was a plate among plates. At a viewing for an estate auction in Spring Valley, Minn., an aging copper printing plate sat next to dishes and saucers.
Many people were there to look at the coins of a man whose estate was about to be divvied up.
One collector, southeast Minnesota resident Gary Lea, stopped and picked up the plate, about the size of a sheet of paper.
Under decades of grime, he could still see the engraving and could make out that it must have been used to make money.
He thought the date said 177- – seventeen-seventy something.
Back home after the viewing, he combed through a book, Early American Currency. In a section about New Hampshire he found what he was looking for: A black-and-white photograph of currency that matched the plate he’d seen.
The description of the currency stated, without fanfare, that money created from the plate had been used to finance the “Live Free or Die” state’s part in the Revolutionary War.
Also, it said, most historians agreed the plate was likely engraved by Paul Revere.
The next week at the estate auction, the same plate rested near the same dishes.
Chances were, Lea thought, the plate wasn’t real.
Most printing plates hadn’t survived because they were usually reused and re-engraved.
A replica could still fetch a respectable price, but wouldn’t be as coveted. A forgery could bring less.
Also, there were plenty of coin collectors at the auction. Surely they knew what a copper plate etched by Paul Revere looked like.
Lea would have to devise his strategy on the fly.
The bidding for coins began. It was heavy.
“They were going for a lot more than what some of them were worth in my estimation,” Lea said.
That meant the plate would probably go high.
The plate came to auction.
Lea and just two other bidders raised hands.
One bidder – a scrap iron collector – quickly dropped out.
The second continued for a while against Lea, then dropped, too.
Lea owned the plate, for a price he declined to name for this story.
He would soon discover the battle to own it was nothing compared to the battle to sell it.
Most collectors, garage-sale junkies and auction hounds live to find that one document squirreled away in a painting of dogs playing poker.
Antiques Roadshow has sent an entire generation of snoops and treasure hunters to the attic.
Amid that fervor, Lea did the impossible: He found a plate that may have been handled by Paul Revere.
His euphoria over buying the plate was immediately followed by the urge to get rid of it – so to speak.
“I knew I couldn’t afford to keep it,” Lea said. “I was happy just to have known that I was the owner of it at one time, and part of its rediscovery.”
Lea did some research and placed a few calls. Soon, Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas agreed to sell the plate.
Most items in the house’s auction catalogs were described by several sentences, maybe a paragraph.
The copper plate had four pages.
The description included a discovery by New Hampshire’s head archivist Frank Mevers that the plate was likely not engraved by Revere, but by one of New Hampshire’s native sons.
Lea had also discovered other information about the plate.
The last time it was documented in New Hampshire was 1775, when the state was still a colony.
The last time it was documented outside the state was 10 years before the Civil War, when Dr. Joshua Cohen, a prominent Baltimore physician, owned it. From 1828 to 1865, Cohen collected more than 2,700 “specimens” of Colonial currency.
In 1930, Cohen’s estate sold for less than $9,000. Most coins and currency went to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan.
But the plate wasn’t recorded there, either by error or because it had fallen out of the collection sometime previously.
However, in the 1850s, Cohen had made an unauthorized reprinting of the New Hampshire currency, using the original plate.
He slightly modified the plate. For example, “the vignette within the 40 shilling engraving has several extra branches added to the tree trunks,” one expert said. “It is apparent that the re-engravings on all four vignettes were cut with a heavier touch than the hand that created the original engravings.”
The reprintings Cohen made helped Lea determine, more than a century later, that he’d found the original plate at an estate sale in southern Minnesota – 1,324 miles from Concord.
When Lea compared his plate with the 1850s reprints, it matched.
Perfectly.
“Even the scratches lined up,” Lea said.
The auction was set for Boston on Aug. 11, 2010. The plate’s starting bid was $50,000, though some thought it could easily fetch six digits.
Then New Hampshire called.
It wanted its plate back.
The New Hampshire State Attorney General’s Office intervened the morning of the sale, requesting that Heritage Auctions withdraw the plate or immediately face a court order blocking its sale.
New Hampshire’s attorney argued that since there was no record of the plate every being declared excess property, it must have been taken at “some unknown time” by some “unknown persons.”
Concerned that a legal threat would scare away potential buyers, Lea canceled the sale.
His decision surprised the auction house.
“He had good title as we saw it and nothing was wrong,” said Richard Brainerd, general counsel for Heritage Auctions. “No due diligence would have suggested he didn’t have a right to hold it.”
Attorneys from New Hampshire disagreed, saying that “a presumption should arise that the plate remains State property.”
Lea knew a threat now hung over the plate. If he tried to auction it again in the future, anyone who bought it was likely also buying a lawsuit.
He knew he could hold onto the plate – even will it to family members.
But New Hampshire wasn’t going to forget about a plate it hadn’t remembered for 236 years.
It wasn’t a matter of if, but when.
Lea decided the only way to be declared the plate’s rightful owner was to use the same legal system that blocked him from selling.
He hired an attorney and took the state of New Hampshire to court – in Fillmore County, Minn.
Lea’s move created several intriguing legal questions.
For example: Can you sue one state in a different state? Can a state demand the return of items it claims are part of its heritage and treasury?
And which court gets the final say about a plate that was created in New Hampshire, traveled to Maryland, was found in Minnesota – possibly by way of Michigan – and then shipped to Boston for auction?
Attorneys for New Hampshire argue that since their state inventoried books and other common furniture before selling them, it made no sense that a plate, which played an integral part in the Revolutionary War, was tossed out without so much as a note.
But the attorneys have also admitted that the last time the state knew it had the plate in its possession was 1775.
New Hampshire “was unable to find legislative action” that shows the plate was properly sold, said Assistant Attorney General Peter Roth, but so far, it has stopped short of saying the plate was stolen.
“Those aren’t allegations I’m prepared to make,” Roth said. “That’s the kind of evidence that if we go to trial would be developed and investigated in the process of discovery.”
Roth said he believes the plate ended up in the hands of Cohen – who was known to pay people for Colonial currency – through any number of contacts or methods.
New Hampshire has also argued that Minnesota is the wrong court to decide the plate’s ownership. But Fillmore County Judge Robert Benson ruled March 23 that Minnesota had jurisdiction to decide the rightful owner of the plate.
Lea’s attorney, Bennett Myers, has asked the court to make Lea the “sole and proper” owner of the plate and “extinguish” any ownership claim by a third party.
The court has almost 90 days left to make a decision that will determine who rightfully owns the plate.
There’s that old cliche that possession is nine-tenths of the law.
Brainerd, Heritage Auctions’ general counsel, chuckled when recounting it.
As the third-largest auction company in the United States, Heritage has sold lots of old things – including currency – that originally came from states but through sale or abandonment fell into the hands of private collectors.
Brainerd said that for years local, state and even federal officials have found little use for yellowing documents. When storage becomes problematic, or when governments no longer need to legally keep them, they throw them or give them away.
This provides a large market for the auction houses, antiquarian dealers, booksellers and history buffs who literally buy up America’s discarded history.
But new legislation proposed or passed in a number of states threatens private ownership of those items.
Texas recently passed a law that gives it ownership to any state item it didn’t voluntarily discard or sell.
And a number of East Coast states have adopted or considered language that “reclaims” government artifacts from the Colonial period.
Unfortunately, the laws are so new that virtually no cases have tested them, Brainerd said. That means there’s no case law, advising attorneys or judges to assist Lea’s – or anyone else’s – claim to goods once owned by the state.
If those laws stand, Brainerd said, every rare treasure discovered at an auction or garage sale could be susceptible to a lawsuit.
But that, he said, isn’t the most important point.
“Depriving a citizen of personal property without process, well, that’s something that is reprehensible to Americans,” he said.
Gary Lea’s only hope is to win the legal battle he began.
For now, the state of New Hampshire enjoys an advantage he doesn’t – a taxpayer-provided bankroll that will fund the fight as long as the attorney general wants.
Lea has lawyers and bills to pay.
Without a ruling from the court, the ownership issue won’t be settled and the market value of the plate would be damaged, Lea’s attorney Myers said.
“Doing nothing is a win for New Hampshire by default,” he said.
Experts disagree about who engraved the plate.
They can’t say for sure when it was even in New Hampshire last.
Who knows how it found its way to Cohen.
Heaven only knows how it wound up on an auction table in Fillmore County, lying among sets of dishes.
There appears to be only one thing everyone agrees about.
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-05-06-11 1706GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Ownership of the printing plate used to print this 1775 New Hampshire currency is in dispute. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Early American History Auctions Inc.
CANTERBURY, N.H. – Established in 2009, the Canterbury Shaker Village Antiques Show will be held once again on the beautiful open fields of the preserved Shaker community just north of Concord, New Hampshire. The 3rd annual edition of the show, which will take place on Sunday, Sept. 18, 2011, is sponsored by the New Hampshire Antiques Dealers Association (NHADA) and is managed by Maine-based promoter Nan Gurley.
The event will feature 90 or so NHADA members as exhibitors. All booths are under tents, and the $15 admission includes access to the antiques show as well as the Shaker Village buildings and exhibits. Show hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Canterbury Shaker Village is a national historic landmark and museum with 25 restored and four reconstructed Shaker buildings. Its 694-acre site includes gardens, fields, ponds and forests, which will be at their most beautiful during New England’s foliage season.
Bountiful and delicious food will be provided by chefs from the Shaker Table Restaurant, the village’s extraordinary eatery.
For more information, contact Nan Gurley at 207-625-3577 or e-mail nangurley@roadrunner.com.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Image on circa-1920 postcard published by the Canterbury Shaker Village and showing a view of some of the compound’s buildings.
