Some of the more than 500 clocks in the auction. Shelley’s Auction Gallery image.
HENDERSONVILLE, N.C. – Over 500 clocks fill the gallery at Shelley’s Auction Gallery awaiting their sale on Thursday, Jan. 31. LiveAuctioneers.com will provide Internet live bidding.
Nearly every clock is from the estate of the late Fay Heavner of West Virginia. Heavner collected and tinkered for nearly 50 years. After his retirement from the West Virginia Department of Highways, he started a small repair business from his home. These clocks represent a lifetime of passion, and Shelley’s is honored to offer these clocks at auction.
Also included in this sale are items from the estate of the late John C. Smart of Hendersonville, N.C. Smart was from Scotland originally and traveled the world as a buyer for Neiman Marcus. His estate includes a collection of 19th century Staffordshire figurines and 19th century tea caddies along with fine art.
Shelley’s will also offer a signed Art Deco period sapphire and diamond bracelet by Cartier, a Rolex watch, and an assortment of other jewelry and collectibles.
This auction will be conducted online only via LiveAuctioneers.com.
Left: King Henry VIII, unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, c.1520, Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London. Right: Catherine of Aragon, unknown artist, c.1520. By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners.
LONDON – “Henry and Catherine Reunited” places portraits of King Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon together for the first time in nearly 500 years. The pictures will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery beginning Friday, Jan. 25.
The rare early portrait of Catherine of Aragon has been placed on loan from Lambeth Palace and has undergone an extensive program of research and conservation treatment.
During a research visit to Lambeth Palace staff from the National Portrait Gallery’s conservation and curatorial department noticed a portrait hanging in a private sitting room. The portrait depicted a woman in costume that dated from the 1520s to 1530s. The sitter had previously been identified as Henry VIII’s last wife, Catherine Parr. However, the facial features and costume shared more similarities with known works depicting Henry VIII’s first wife Catherine of Aragon. The other striking element of the piece was its rare original engaged frame (a frame that was constructed around the panel support for the portrait before it was painted).
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners allowed the gallery to borrow the portrait for further research, including technical analysis. Examination of the painting in raking light indicated that it originally had a patterned background. Further analysis showed that it would be possible to remove the black over paint from the background to reveal the original green finish, which imitates damask silk. The National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of King Henry VIII circa 1520 shares a similar brocade background. An X-ray indicated a veil attached to Catherine’s headdress and it became evident that a large amount of over painting had altered the characterization of the sitter’s face. This research confirmed the reidentification of the portrait as Catherine of Aragon, and also underpinned the subsequent conservation treatment of the painting.
Examination of the frame revealed that elements of the original decorative finish survived beneath layers of later paint and gilding. The discovery of the original Tudor finish is a rare find. It combines oil gilding with colored bands of blue and red, which were painted with the pigments azurite and vermillion. A large proportion of the original finish was recovered enabling the National Portrait Gallery’s conservation team to reconstruct the areas of loss and damage. The restored color scheme adds to the aesthetic reading of the painting.
The portrait was compared with the National Portrait Gallery’s painting of Henry VIII from the same period, which is a similar composition. While not suggesting the works originally formed a pair, the costume dates them to the same period and the works are of the same scale. It is likely that both are examples of the type of portraits of the king and queen that would have been produced in multiple versions, some of which would have been paired in this way.
This research was undertaken as part of “Making Art in Tudor Britain,” a project that has used scientific techniques to analyze the portraits in the display to increase the understanding of the working practices of Tudor artists.
“It is wonderful to have the opportunity to display this important early portrait of Catherine of Aragon at the Gallery. Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon were married for nearly 24 years and during that time their portraits would have been displayed together in this fashion, as king and queen of England,” Dr. Charlotte Bolland, project curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, said in a statement.
For more information log on to the National Portrait Gallery website: www.npg.org.uk .
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Left: King Henry VIII, unknown Anglo-Netherlandish artist, c.1520, Copyright National Portrait Gallery, London. Right: Catherine of Aragon, unknown artist, c.1520. By permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church Commissioners.
Steinway Concert Grand D piano. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Red Baron Antiques.
CASPER, Wyo. – Tuning a piano is an act of concentration. Steve Bovie plays a note and hears inside it.
“When I hear that note, I’m hearing something that is about an inch thick. It’s a piece of meat. The wider it gets, the more I can do with it,” Steve said.
Steve, 56, of Casper, has tuned pianos since the late 1970s. He is the tuner who will get the 9-foot Steinway grand concert-ready for Ian Hobson, guest artist for Wyoming Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming concert and a pianist who performs regularly with the world’s major orchestras.
Saturday’s concert will feature Beethoven’s piano concerto No. 4 and Fourth Symphony on the same night, just as the works were debuted together in March 1807, said Matthew Savery, music director and conductor for the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra.
Hobson will play the piano concerto on the Steinway owned by Natrona County High School.
“Concertos show off everything you can do on an instrument and the virtuosity of the person playing it,” Savery said. “This piece is very elegant and exciting, yet it is not a pompous concerto. This is really for a superb musician to play.”
To prepare the Steinway, Steve will tune it at least twice before the concert. He’ll play the piano harder than Hobson to ensure his adjustments hold. He’ll concentrate on each tone individually and each tone as part of the whole, preserving the temperament of the Steinway and its flow from one key to the next.
Like painting a car, you find the color you want and make sure it’s the same from the front to the back, Steve said.
Steve’s father, Robert Bovie, picked the NCHS Steinway personally.
Robert loved pianos. He retired as the NCHS orchestra director so he could tune pianos full time, Steve said.
Robert knew that the Steinway factory in Long Island City, N.Y., plucked choice pianos from its assembly line and kept them in a crowded showroom. In the early ’70s, three Casper arts organizations — the Wyoming Symphony Orchestra, the NCHS music department and a now defunct group that worked to bring in guest performers — pitched in $3,000 each to buy a Steinway piano they could share. Robert flew to the factory and played several Steinways before picking this one.
Steinways are handmade, start to finish. A Yamaha piano will take 2 1/2 weeks to build, a Steinway will take 13 months, said Steve, who is trained to tune both piano brands. Yamaha makes a quarter million pianos a year, Steinways make about 2,500. Craftsmen sign their Steinways like painters sign their canvas.
“No other piano plays like it. It doesn’t play like it, and it doesn’t sound like it,” Steve said.
“Steinways are the heirloom pianos. They are the ones you never sell outside the family.”
In 1979, Steve finished college at North Texas State and started selling pianos for Les Parsons. Casper was in the middle of an oil boom and Parsons had 40 to 50 pianos on his showroom floor.
On Christmas Eve, the store would sell six or seven Steinway grands, and an entire crew of workers would be waiting to take them to the customer’s house and tune them for Christmas morning. Oil men used to come in with wads of cash, some missing two or three fingers. Steve remembers one man counting out 100 $100 bills to pay for his piano.
Tuning was his dad’s thing, but his dad couldn’t keep up with demand.
Steve went to the Yamaha Little Red School House piano technician school in Buena Park, Calif. — an intensive one week program taught by, among others, Richard Davenport, a tuner of pianos for Hollywood movie studios and concert halls.
Steve still tunes by ear. Most others tune by machine. Steve thinks of it like painting-by-numbers, piano-tuning by math. Every piano is different; each has its own sound. Math can’t account for that, Steve said. Machine-tuned pianos sound like machine-tuned pianos.
For Ian Hobson, Steve will tune the Steinway again on Saturday after the last rehearsal. Hobson is a dynamic player, Steve said, and he will play that piano hard. Hobson may choose to give Steve notes, tweaks Steve needs to make to suit Hobson’s preferences.
Steve lives five minutes away from NCHS. Sometimes, he’s called in to fix something at the last minute. Once, a blind soloist didn’t like the sound of the Steinway, but couldn’t explain why. The pianist’s manager was going nuts, Steve said.
Steve noticed that the Steinway still had its music rack, the place where players set their sheet music. The blind pianist never used a music rack and was used to the strings’ vibrations blasting unobstructed from the piano to his face. Steve removed the rack and solved the problem.
Steve still tunes pianos, but his dad was the tuner of the family, he says. While Steve learned functional piano in college, people gathered to listen to Steve’s father play. His dad tuned pianos, including the NCHS Steinway, up until the last week he was alive.
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Information from: Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune, http://www.trib.com
Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
Steinway Concert Grand D piano. Image courtesy LiveAuctioneers.com Archive and Red Baron Antiques.
‘Self-Portrait’ by Meijer de Haan (circa 1889-’91). Rotterdam Police image.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) – Dutch detectives and a prosecutor will travel to Romania to investigate the possible involvement of three men in a multimillion-dollar art heist in the Netherlands, a police spokesman said Wednesday.
The Dutch team will travel to Bucharest in coming days to share with Romanian authorities details of their investigation into the Oct. 16 theft from Rotterdam’s Kunsthal gallery of seven extremely valuable paintings by artists including Picasso, Monet and Matisse, said Roland Ekkers of Rotterdam Police.
Romanian police arrested the suspects Monday night “in another art-related investigation in Romania, but there are indications they also have something to do with the art heist in Rotterdam,” Ekkers told The Associated Press.
The arrests marked the first breakthrough for police since the late-night raid at the Kunsthal, the biggest art theft in more than a decade in the Netherlands.
Ekkers said reports that some of the paintings were recovered were wrong.
Romanian police “checked, double checked and checked again and it is not true,” he said.
Romanian police declined to comment on the case Wednesday.
The stolen paintings came from the private Triton Foundation, a collection of avant-garde art put together by multimillionaire Willem Cordia, an investor and businessman, and his wife, Marijke Cordia-Van der Laan. Willem Cordia died in 2011.
The stolen paintings were: Pablo Picasso’s 1971 Harlequin Head; Claude Monet’s 1901 Waterloo Bridge, London and Charing Cross Bridge, London; Henri Matisse’s 1919 Reading Girl in White and Yellow; Paul Gauguin’s 1898 Girl in Front of Open Window; Meyer de Haan’s Self-Portrait, around 1890; and Lucian Freud’s 2002 work Woman with Eyes Closed.
The apparent ease with which a pair of thieves managed to grab such a valuable haul of art was stunning.
The thieves broke in through an emergency exit at the rear of the Rem Koolhaas-designed building, grabbed the paintings off the wall and fled, all within two minutes.
Police who arrived less than five minutes after the break-in triggered an alarm found nothing but empty spaces on the walls, broken hanging wires and tire tracks in grass behind the gallery.
The gallery said after the theft that it had a “state of the art” alarm system. Willem van Hassel, the museum’s chairman, said its security systems are automated and do not use guards on site.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-01-23-13 1512GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
‘Self-Portrait’ by Meijer de Haan (circa 1889-’91). Rotterdam Police image.
President Abraham Lincoln, his stovepipe hat by his side, and Gen. George B. McClellan at Antietam, Md., Oct. 3, 1862. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) – A stovepipe hat worn by Abraham Lincoln is going on display at the Springfield library and museum that bear his name.
The hat will be displayed along with a scrap of paper on which Lincoln wrote his idea of democracy, which included the words: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.”
Museum officials say it’s possible that Lincoln stored the scrap of paper inside the band of his beaver-fur hat.
Lincoln was known to tuck letters inside his hatband, but officials say they’ll leave it to museum visitors to judge whether they believe the note’s folds suggest it once was carried there.
The items, which went on display Wednesday, will continue to be shown at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum for about six months.
Copyright 2013 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-01-23-13 1443GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGE OF NOTE
President Abraham Lincoln, his stovepipe hat by his side, and Gen. George B. McClellan at Antietam, Md., Oct. 3, 1862. Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
