SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – This nautilus cup was one of the first sculptural works created by German painter and sculptor Franz von Stuck (1863-1928). Related to a calendar illustration for the month of October published in the Fliegende Blatter in 1889, it is thought to predate the Glaspalast exhibition in Munich in 1892, when the artist displayed his more famous work titled Athlet.
Stuck himself owned a bronze version of the model, mounted with a real nautilus shell, that he occasionally used as a prop in his paintings. However, most surviving examples were made in electroplate by WMF (Wurttembergische Metallwarenfabrik).
This one will be offered at Turner Auctions + Appraisals on Saturday, March 9 with an estimate of $3,000-$5,000. It is part of a sale dedicated to the estate of Edward S. Stephenson (1917-2011), a production designer for television who launched the leading prop house Hollywood Studio Gallery. Turner sold his large holdings of Japanese woodblock prints in May 2023.
HATBORO, Penn. – With the news that High Point, North Carolina dealership Randall Tynsigner is closing after almost 35 years in business, auction house Ashcroft and Moore is conducting a retirement sale. The three-day auction, taking place Tuesday, March 12 through Thursday, March 14, numbers almost 900 lots, many of them priced at a fraction of retail levels. This four-poster bed fashioned in wrought iron is a type once common in 17th-century aristocratic Italy. Similar theatrical beds embellished with scrollwork decoration survive in a number of museum collections: this example was previously used as a movie prop in the 1933 film Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert in their fourth and final film together. Although it was priced at an eye-watering $140,000 in the Randall Tynsigner gallery, it has a more approachable auction estimate of $1,000-$10,000.
LOS ANGELES – Star Trek autographs don’t get much better than this one that will appear in Nate D. Sanders’ Thursday, March 14 Memorabilia Auction. Not only is the photo signed by seven leading members of the cast – William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig – but Shatner additionally writes in silver felt-tip the famous opening sequence: ‘Space the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.’ Offered together with an image of Shatner recently adding his words, it has an estimate of $1,700-$2,550.
LINCOLN PARK, N.J. – Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) is best known for his work as a glassmaker and jeweler catering to the Gilded Age elite, but he was also a formally trained artist of some merit. His oils and watercolors are of particular interest for their choice of subject matter. In addition to typical Hudson River School-style landscapes of upstate New York, Tiffany applied the lessons of French realism to paint scenes of industry along the Hudson River and the slums of New York City. His apparently tranquil scenes of Seabright, New Jersey also depict its mixed-race fishing community and the economic strife faced by African Americans who moved north after the Civil War.
This oil on canvas of houses in a river landscape is signed at the lower right and measures 10 by 12in. It has an estimate of $6,000-$8,000 at Willow Auction House on Thursday, March 14.
LARCHMONT, N.Y. – This mid-18th-century Chinese coromandel lacquer 10-panel screen will be part of the Sunday, March 10 estates auction at Clarke Auction Gallery. It has an estimate of $4,000-$6,000 and a provenance that includes former ownership by Marmaduke Furness, 1st Viscount Furness (1883-1940), the British shipping magnate who, during his lifetime, was one of the richest men in the world. The screen, decorated to one side with a continuous pavilion scene in red, green, brown, and gold and to the reverse with calligraphy and precious objects, was later sold by Mallett & Son in London in 1969, at Parke Bernet in New York in 1971 for $5,500, and again in 1993 for just under $10,000. It comes for sale from a Greenwich, Connecticut estate.
