The auction will take place at the firm’s gallery located at 2177 Green Valley Lane. The sale will include outstanding consignments from Virginia, Kentucky and Florida estates; more than 30 private Mid-Atlantic collections; and two Virginia institutions.
The sale will offer a large selection of Virginia and other Southern decorative arts, 18th- and 19th century American furniture, frakturs and folk art, samplers and other textiles, more than 100 pieces of American folk pottery, a collection of silhouettes, antique firearms, 18th- to 20th-century silver, fine art and prints, antique Oriental carpets, Asian porcelain and metal wares, a fine collection of more than 140 pieces of Bennington and related pottery, other 18th- and 19th-century ceramics, antique maps and Civil War material.
The featured highlight of the auction is an important pair of circa 1800 Shenandoah Valley of Virginia watercolor and ink birth records for Joseph Stover Spengler (1790-1876) and his sister Margaret Spengler (1799-1848), of Strasburg, Shenandoah Co., Va. The example for Joseph is signed “H.D. pinxit et scripsit,” which translates to Heinrich Diefenbach painter and writer. The records were executed on laid paper sheets measuring 8 3/4 inches x 6 3/4 inches and 8 7/8 inches x 7 1/8 inches. They have descended uninterrupted through six generations of the Spengler family and carry an estimate of $50,000-$100,000 for the pair.
The artist, Heinrich Diefenbach (1771-1837), was a Reformed minister who worked in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, northern parts of North Carolina, Berks County, Pa., and Ohio from roughly 1799 to 1837. He is recorded as a fraktur artist/scrivener by an entry in his journal noting that while staying at his father’s house in Augusta County, Va., in 1802, he made three baptism certificates for members of the Kirchoff family. The current location of the Kirchoff certificates is unknown. Heinrich Diefenbach was born in 1771 near Hagerstown, Washington County, Md. He moved with his family to Augusta County, Va., just north of Staunton, in 1784. He was a student of theology under the Rev. Bernard Willy (1751-1809), a Reformed minister and scrivener who worked in a wide area of present day West Virginia lying just west of the Shenandoah Valley. Diefenbach also studied and traveled widely with the Rev. Paul Henkel in the Shenandoah Valley and North Carolina. He served his first parish in Augusta County in 1799-1800.
It is likely that Diefenbach produced the Spengler certificates while he was ministering in Augusta County shortly after Margaret Spengler’s birth in 1799; or, he could have drawn them during his 1802 trip through the Shenandoah Valley, contemporaneous with the Kirchoff certificates mentioned in his journal.
The Spengler records represent the only works attributed to Heinrich Diefenbach at this time; their identification establishes a benchmark for future attributions.
Joseph and Margaret Spengler were two of four children born to Col. Johann Philip Spengler (1761-1823) and Regina Stover (1763-1814) near Strasburg, Va. Joseph was married twice, fathering 18 children, the last of whom died in 1923. He was educated as a lawyer but chose an agrarian life, overseeing a farm of more than 1,000 acres in the Eastern District of Shenandoah County near Bentonville, in present-day Warren County. The 1840 census recorded Spengler’s household as totaling 23 residents including 12 slaves. Spengler served the newly formed Warren County as a justice of the court in 1836, sheriff from 1837-1839, and again as a justice from 1840-1846. His real estate holdings were assessed at $266,000 in 1870.
Little is known of the life of Joseph’s sister, Margaret, other than her birth and death dates. She apparently died a spinster.
Additional important Southern material in the auction includes a rare signed “Caleb Davis” Woodstock, Va., inlaid cherry tall-case clock dated 1804 and published on page 66 of The Clocks of Shenandoah by Philip Whitney (estimate $15,000-$25,000); a fine Southside Virginia Chippendale walnut side chair, circa 1775, that is nearly identical to the example in the Colonial Williamsburg collection illustrated in Southern Furniture 1680-1830, p. 108 (estimate $4,000-$6,000); an important Valley of Virginia slip-decorated 12-inch earthenware pitcher, probably made in Wythe or Smyth counties, or possibly Augusta County, around 1810 (estimate $8,000-$12,000); an outstanding Rockingham or Shenandoah County, Va., sampler by Levina Campbell, 1824, the earliest known example from the New Market “Yellow House” group, which was published on page 88 of In the Neatest Manner: The Making of the Virginia Sampler Tradition by Kim Ivey, and exhibited at Colonial Williamsburg in 1997 and the Art Museum of Western Virginia in 1999 (estimate $8,000-$12,000); additional Virginia and Alabama samplers; and a host of other Southern decorative arts.
Other items of special note include a rare circa 1770 American silver dish cross marked for Thomas Shields (1743-1819) of Philadelphia, that descended in the Crenshaw family of Washington, D.C., (estimate $4,000-$6,000); and a circa 1880 large-size (50 inches long) molded full-body copper and cast zinc horse and sulky weather vane attributed to the firm of Cushing & White, Waltham, Mass., which is in need of restoration (estimate $4,000-$6,000).
The complete auction catalog will be posted on the firm’s website (jeffreysevans.com) by mid-June. A free 28-page “highlights” catalog will be mailed upon request; please email info@jeffreysevans.com. Visit the firm’s website or call (540) 434-3939 for additional information including a schedule of their monthly cataloged auctions.
ADDITIONAL LOTS OF NOTE
