Trade Winds: Nautical Antiques at Auction
Sotheby’s, New York City, January 29, 1994
AS AUCTIONEER BILL STAHL brought down the gavel for the 432nd time on Saturday, January 29, virtually everyone in the Manhattan salesroom of Sotheby’s knew that they had witnessed history in the making. Sotheby’s sale of paintings, folk art, and other objects from the collection of Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little was a jaw-dropper, bringing in nearly $7.4 million — more than double the high estimate of $3.6 million and more than double the previous record for a collection of Americana.
Collectors, many of whom considered the sale “a first-time, last-time, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” began queueing up at 8 a.m. for bidding paddles and for one of the 800 seats in Sotheby’s salesroom.
The Littles, who died in their nineties last year (within four months of each other), started collecting Americana soon after they were married in 1925. Over a period of more than six decades, they amassed “the most significant collection of American folk art in private hands,” according to Nancy Druckman, the director of Sotheby’s American Folk Art Department.
What’s more, the record may not last for long. In October, Sotheby’s will sell the remaining artworks, furnishings, and other artifacts from the Littles’ pumpkin-colored Federal house in Brookline, Massachusetts, including the only known signed painting by Jonathan Welch Edes — an oil-on-pine overmantel panel, dated 1789 and titled “A View of Boston Lighthouse and Harbor.”
John Little recently told a reporter for The New York Times that his mother wanted to return their collection to the marketplace because “she and Dad had had a great deal of fun collecting and felt strongly others should have the same pleasure.”
Yet as astonishing as it may seem, the Littles still managed to leave much of their collection intact. They already had donated Cogswell’s Grant, the red clapboard farmhouse (ca. 1735) in Essex, Massachusetts, that served as their summer home — along with the 165 acres on which it sits and the 1,200 or so furnishings and artworks with which they’d filled it — to the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, which Bertram Little headed from 1947 to 1970. Next June, the house, which is 35 miles north of Boston, will become an open-by-appointment museum.
Many of the buyers who helped to send prices into the stratosphere at Sotheby’s on January 29 undoubtedly were paying premiums to acquire a piece — or more — of the Little legend. (The presale estimates didn’t take the importance of the owners into account, Druckman points out.) Nina and Bert Little were the nation’s premier collectors of American folk art, establishing that it was worthy of scholarly attention and deserving of serious collecting interest decades before museums deigned to acquire and exhibit it.
Nina Little was one of the nation’s leading folk-art historians; she wrote seven books and more than 100 articles on the genre, illuminating the life histories of anonymous and little-known artists of 19th-century America and pioneering the use of such historical sources as manuscript account books, diaries, family and business papers, court records, family genealogies, and tombstones. She was also the principal consultant for the original art collection at the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia.
Bert Little, who worked in publishing and as a rare-book dealer, was mainly interested period New England architecture and early lighting devices — candleholders and whale lamps. He was introduced to both by his father, a marine architect and silversmith.
The Littles bought their first American painting — a ship picture — in 1931, and over the years they acquired a large number of pieces with nautical or marine motifs. Perhaps the most valuable of them — Edes’s panoramic overmantel painting — is likely to be the star attraction of Sotheby’s October event. Nonetheless, collectors of nautical art and antiques had a lot to savor at the January sa1e.
Peter Sawyer, a New Hampshire dealer paid $211,500 (est. $80,000-120,000) on behalf of an anonymous buyer for “The Schooner Charles Carroll of Portsmouth, New Hampshire,” perhaps the best-known oil painting by Thomas P. Moses (1808-1881). Moses, the son of a ship carpenter and boat builder, was an accomplished musician, published poet, and amateur painter of sailing ships. Painted in the fall of 1875, Nina Little chose it as the cover illustration for the dust jacket of her autobiographical Little by Little: Six Decades of Collecting American Decorative Arts (1984). Carl Crossman, a dealer in Danvers, Massachusetts, reportedly bought the painting at a flea market in Salisbury, Connecticut, 30 years ago and sold it to her for $15,000.
An oil painting of “The Battery and Castle Gardens in New York City” by Thomas Chambers (1808-1866 or later) went for $34,500 (est. $15,000-20,000). It depicts the old Southwest Battery, which was renamed Castle Garden in 1924, leased by P.T. Barnum in 1850, and turned into the U.S. Immigration Bureau in 1855. Born in London, Chambers emigrated to the United States in 1831 and began painting landscapes, harbor views, and marine scenes — many of them along the Hudson River — of subjects he knew firsthand.
Eric Maffei, the editor of Microsoft Systems Journal, paid $32,200 (est. $12,000-$18,000) for a set of three large paintings of the private signals of the merchants and underwriters of New York, Boston, and Baltimore, each depicting a harbor scene and dated 1834.
Two marine paintings by George Ropes (1788-1819), executed in gouache on paper, in the original brass die-stamped frames, sold within Sotheby’s presale estimates ($4,000-6,000 each). (A large pair of identical brass frames, which were popular in early 19th-century Boston, are on a pair of Ropes’s seascapes at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.) Both paintings depict dramatic episodes of peril at sea: “A Ship Foundering in a Hard Gale,” dated 1809, brought $5,175; “Ship under the Lee of the Land, riding out a Hard Gale,” also dated 1809, brought $4,600.
A series of drawings executed in ink and watercolor on paper and attributed to H.A. Tuttle, depicting the Bark Lagrange in three different positions during a severe gale on May 31, 1849, sold for $2,875 (est. $800-1,200). Tuttle was a passenger on the ship, which was carrying gold-seekers from Salem, Massachusetts, to San Francisco, California, when it ran into a violent storm. Lagrange safely rounded Cape Horn five weeks later.
A New England painted fireboard showing two views of a 32-gun frigate on open seas, executed in oil on pine in the first quarter of the 19th century, brought $37,375 (est. $25,000-35,000). This fireboard covered the dining-room fireplace of the Little home in Brookline.
A portrait of a ship’s captain attributed to Jacob Baily Moore (1815-1893), executed in oil on panel, brought $3,220, below Sotheby’s presale estimate of $5,000-7,000. Moore was an artist, phrenologist, journalist, and historian.
A whaling scene by John Orne Johnson Frost (1852-1928) of Marblehead, Massachusetts, executed in oil on composition board, brought $11,500 (est. $10,000-15,000). Frost went to sea when he was sixteen years old, but in 1870 he married and went into the restaurant business. After the death of his wife in 1919, Frost, a self-taught artist, began to paint brilliant, colorful scenes from memory and imagination. His efforts on wall board, however, apparently went unappreciated: During renovations of his house in 1951, they were discovered reverse-nailed to the walls. In 1954, they were exhibited at Childs Gallery in Boston.
One of the auction’s few unsold paintings was of the “Clipper Ship Adelaide,” executed in watercolor on paper by J.F. Huge (1809-1878) in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1853. Sotheby’s presale estimate was $15,000-25,000. Nina Little’s grandfather sailed on this ship from Liverpool to New York City on his first trip to America in 1863.
A 17-inch painted stone statuette of Captain James H. Dawes of Kingston, Massachusetts, made in Malta in 1858, brought $7,475 (est. $1,500-2,500). In August of that year, Dawes (1826-1905), the youngest of three seafaring brothers, took Barque Sicilian from New York City to Constantinople with a cargo of rum
A pine ship’s figurehead of a dark-haired woman with blue eyes, carved and painted in mid-19th century New England, brought $23,000 (est. $7,000-9000). A pair of cherrywood miniature ship’s figureheads — “possibly models for full-size figureheads,” Nina Little once wrote, “or perhaps just examples of expert whittling” — brought $14,950 (est. $4,000-6,000). The figureheads, the first of a classical maiden blowing a trumpet and the second of a mermaid, were carved in Salem, Massachusetts, in the first quarter of the 19th century.
A pair of billetheads carved in pine by Simeon Skillin III (1789-1830), probably intended as models for full-size carvings, sold for $8,625 (est. $3,000-5,000). The first is of a cluster of anthemia leafage within a scroll and the second a fruit-filled cornucopia within a scroll. Skillin was one of a noted family of ship carvers whose work spanned a 75-year period starting in the mid-18th century and who elevated wood-carving to a fine art; in 1817, his going rate for carving a billethead and trailboard was $16.66.
A miniature whalebone ditty box, circa 1840, brought $6,900 (est. $700-1,000). The sides of the oval box were delicately engraved with a two-masted sailing ship, a trumpeting angel, and a seven-bay clapboard house; the fitted lid’s pine top was painted black.
An engraved sperm whale’s tooth, probably carved in America in the mid-19th century, brought $4,888 (est. $1,200-1,500). One side depicts an American whaling ship in heavy seas above crossed American flags and a dove, the other an American whaling ship in calm seas. The lot included a carved and turned whalebone fid that had been chipped.
An American eagle figurehead attributed to John Haley Bellamy (1836-1914), which the Little family nicknamed “Snooty” because it had “its nose in the air,” sold for $90,500 (est. $35,000-50,000) to a telephone bidder. Bellamy, who studied art in Boston and New York and was apprenticed to a Boston woodcarver, worked at both the Boston and Portsmouth Navy Yards, carving figureheads, ornamental work for sterns, panels for gangways, and sundry decorations for other parts of naval and mercantile craft. (Bellamy’s business card read, “Figure and Ornamental Carver, particular attention paid to House, Ship, Furniture, Sign & Frame Carving, Garden Figures.”) Bellamy’s eagles were so popular that numerous imitators along the coast of Maine and New Hampshire were turning out imitations of his originals even in his own lifetime.
“Here’s the Lorena Bobbitt of American folk art,” auctioneer Bill Stahl joked as a carved and painted pine masthead figure from the “bug-eye” schooner Lottie L. Thomas came on the block. The colorfully painted carving, attributed to a West Indian black man named Cook who worked in St. Britton’s Bay, Maryland, depicts a black-haired woman brandishing a metal knife in her right hand. The square-sterned Chesapeake bug-eye was built by J.W. Brooks in Madison, Maryland, in 1883, and converted to a yacht by Edward G. Fay of Mansfield, Massachusetts, in 1932. The carving was offered along with a scale model of Lottie L. Thomas (with masthead figure in piace) that was made for Jay; the list indicator from the original schooner; and the membership directory of the Boston Yacht Club for 1932 (Jay was its commodore), which has as its frontispiece a black-and-white photograph of the ship in Boston Harbor (also with masthead figure in place. The four-piece lot went to the Maryland Historical Society for $28,750 (est. $8,000-12,000).
Weschler’s, Washington, D.C., December 11, 1994
FURTHER EVIDENCE THAT MARINE paintings have been drawing formidable premiums came at the December 11 auction of Adam A. Weschler & Son, Inc., in Washington, D.C., which featured more than 150 lots of American and European paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures. On the American side, the star of the day was “Ships at Sea,” an oil painted by Antonio Jacobsen (1850-1921) in 1886. “Serious interest in the Jacobsen was received from the moment our advertisements hit — more than four weeks before the auction,” according to Eda Martin Joyce, Weschler’s director of fine art. The sale of the oil was eagerly anticipated by the crowd in the gallery, many of whom deemed it especially desirable because of its subject matter — the scene of a race , rather than the typical ship portrait, The painting was also fresh to the market, which added to its appeal. Bidding on the piece opened at $10,000, and was quickly pushed skyward by seven telephone bidders as we1l as absentee bidders and clients in the salesroom. The Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia, held the winning bid of $17,600, more than double the high presale estimate ($4,000-$8,000).
Skinner’s, Boston, February 4, 1994
Skinner’s February 6 sale of Americana featured a selection of quality marine art and artifacts.
The oil on canvas “The Schooner Commander” by William Pierce Stubbs (1842-1909) sold for $5,750. “Portrait of the Top-Sail Schooner Wanderer” by William G. Yorke (1817-1883) fetched $9,775, while his “Portrait of the British Bark Austria,” dated 1890, sold for $13,800.
A Fitz Hugh Lane lithograph, “View of Newburyport from Salisbury” (circa 1848), in a period style frame, realized $2,070.
Antonio Jacobsen’s “Portrait of the Steam Yacht Winchester” went for $5,750, while another of his paintings, “Portrait of the American Steamer Aransas,” received a high bid of $4,887.
Other lots included a 19th-century engraved whalebone and baleen busk decorated with a three-masted ship and wreaths, birds, and Cupid’s bow, which sold for $3,450; a carved whalebone snuff box, which sold for $258.75; a carved and painted wooden shadow-box model of a tugboat, which also sold for $258.75; and Eldridge’s Coast Pilot (1880), in two volumes, which sold for $86.25.
This article originally appeared in the April 1994 issue of Nautical Collector.
Bill Hogan