WOLCOTTVILLE, IN — Property lawyer Edward Flower (1929-2022) and his wife Marilyn (1930-2017) were inveterate collectors: first it was American impressionism, then artist-signed prints and British art pottery, and lastly, majolica. Beginning their collection of 19th-century tin-glazed earthenwares in the 1990s, and buying heavily after retirement in the early 2000s, their holdings ultimately included more than 600 pieces.
Following sales in Kulpsville, Pennsylvania in August 2023 and March 2024, the third and final auction of the Flower collection will be held by majolica specialists Strawser Auction Group on Tuesday, August 20. All 235 lots, cataloged by the London-based dealer Nicolaus Boston, have been posted online at LiveAuctioneers.
Few collections of 19th-century majolica are as large or as varied in scope as this. It embraces all members of the majolica family, from academic exercises in historicism and revivalism to the best of Victorian whimsy.
A strong candidate for the star lot of the auction is a Minton majolica vulture and snake teapot and cover, a famous but very hard-to-find model designed by the Victorian soldier, artist, and writer Colonel Henry Hope Crealock circa 1874. This is considered the most coveted of all majolica teapot designs. However, perhaps because of the complexity of the design, few were made. At the height of the market, the restored example in the Marilyn Karmason collection sold in 2005 for a whopping $62,500. The Flowers’ model is estimated at $20,000-$25,000.
Some of the best-known Minton and George Jones models have decreased in value in recent years — an opportunity for collectors to rejoin a once-overheated market. Classic George Jones pieces offered in the August 20 sale at relatively accessible numbers include an example of the ‘full nest’ game pie tureen and a giraffe and stag centerpiece, both estimated at $12,000-$15,000 each. The latter, only one of two known, is part of a group of animal comports emblematic of the continents. There are half a dozen different examples in the sale, each provenanced to the collection of Ann and Robert Fromer, prescient collectors who began acquiring decorative arts spanning the late 19th through early 20th centuries more than 50 years ago.
It is an indication of collecting fashion that a Palissy-style basin, inscribed and dated ‘Avisseau, Tours, 1856’ for Charles-Jean Avisseau, has shared the top price of the sales so far. It sold well above its $2,000-$3,000 estimate, achieving $40,000. Another good example of the ‘art of the earth’ type of majolica, a 19in dish profusely covered in fauna, leaves, lizards, snails, a frog, fish, and crayfish is also thought to be by Avisseau. It carries an estimate of $8,000-$12,000.
Continental European wares, once the slightly poorer relation to pieces by the best Staffordshire factories, have been a strength of the auctions so far. Particularly well-received has been a menagerie of large naturalistic models by the Massier Brothers, Choisy Le Roi, and Hugo Lonitz factories. All had lived together in the Flowers’ Bay Shore, New York residence. The Part III sale at Strawser includes a 16in model of a hawk perched on a rocky ground with its prey in a talon, dating to circa 1875 and estimated at $6,000-$9,000.
Several pieces in the Flower collection were recently featured in the exhibition Majolica Mania: Transatlantic Pottery in England and the United States, 1850-1915, which was launched at the Bard Graduate Center in New York in the fall of 2021 and traveled to the Walters Museum in Baltimore in early 2022 before ending at the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent, England in January 2023. These examples include a hard-to-find 10in George Jones cuspidor and cover formed as a tortoise estimated at $3,000-$4,000.
