By the time Antiques and Art at the Armory opened Thursday, December 4, at the Seventh Regiment Armory, its promotional banners had been billowing atop light poles outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for several weeks. Positioned as “Defined by Quality and Design,” the debut show from Avenue-Wendy Shows promised †and delivered †a quality crowd, much to the delight of dealers who showed everything from American and European furniture to mechanical and scientific wonders to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century paintings.
According to Meg Wendy Geslin, the formula worked well. “We had great attendance and there were some big sales of $100,000 or more,” she said. The opening night preview, as with past Wendy shows, was “for clients.” Thursday night saw a benefit gala honoring the Yale Center of Dyslexia & Creativity.
At the clients’ opening, shopping began almost as soon as the doors opened. Nicolaus Boston Antiques of Ireland was among the first to break out the bubble wrap and tape for a prized offering by Christopher Dresser. The rare Aesthetic Movement piece of pottery, a matte finish brown bird descending into a turquoise vase, was bought by a local collector. With that on the wing, other collectors still had plenty more to enjoy, including Boston’s centerpiece, “The Mermaid,” an 1878 majolica sculpture by Albert Carrier Belleuse featuring a shell and mermaids.
Nearby, Cincinnati Art Galleries, specializing in paintings by fine artists who are from or have connections to the Midwest, mitigated the frosty weather outside with images of high summer. The centerpiece was Walter’s Clark’s Impressionist landscape “Gloucester Harbor,” circa 1902. An oil on canvas, it captured the bittersweet beauty of the harbor at low tide, its industrialized wharves and forested mountains in the background. Edward Henry Potthast’s typically colorful and impressionistic scenes “Harbor and the Dock” and “Manhattan Beach,” each an oil on canvas on board, embodied all of the flavor for which the National Academician is known. Henry Mosler’s oil on canvas titled “Arabian Sheik,” dated 1901 and painted in Paris, added a touch of the exotic to the lineup.
Lawrence J. Cantor and Company warmed up the season with Jean McLane’s “Beach Life, Devon,” 1926, which was purchased early on by a private collector. Cantor then sold “Spanish Town, Jamaica” by De Scott Evans and Lilian MacKendrick’s “Dining Room” to a South Carolina museum.
Schillay Fine Art, Inc showed an “eclectic group of paintings” across a range of prices. Perhaps one of the most commanding images in the entire show was Ernest Fiene’s frenetic “Nocturne, 34th Street.” The 1948 composition was strong of color and image, mixing depictions of a man reading a newspaper with a woman ascending a stairway, a corner bar emerged as the backdrop for both of their implied stories. Another cityscape, though from a different, more genteel time, was William Louis Sonntag Jr’s “View of Broadway and Fifth Avenue,” circa 1895, which cast the then-epicenter of glamorous New York in a romantic light. Johann Berthelsen’s “Brooklyn Bridge,” captured the famed crossing in snow. Rounding out the offerings was Tom Wesselmann’s “Maquette for Tulip and Smoking Cigarette,” a tabletop assemblage of cardboard and wood, housed in a Plexiglas box.
Contemporary portraits made their impact at Wendt Gallery, where Casey Baugh’s “Shade,” a portrait of a girl sitting with her legs crossed, sported a red sticker early in the evening. Baugh’s work has catapulted him to the cover of at least two recent art magazines. His “Scarlet Gown,” also on view, won the Award of Exceptional Merit at the 2008 Portrait Society of America’s International Portrait Composition.
At M.S. Rau Antiques of New Orleans, Norman Rockwell’s 1973 “In Safe Hands,” the visual tale of a young girl taking that first step toward responsibility by preparing to deposit the contents of her piggy bank in a real bank, was among the shop’s outstanding sales. According to Bill Rau, president, the booth saw sales every day and made “three sales of over $100,000 each.”
Meanwhile, the art of visual representation was reduced to micromosaics with macro impact at Toulouse Antique Gallery’s exhibition. Here a circular table, circa 1850, featured a view of St Peter’s Square at its center. Around the edges, four Roman ruins interconnected by floral festoons were inset into black Belgium marble.
Towering atop columns, a pair of monumental Sevres urns commanded the awe of shoppers and Toulouse Gallery proprietor John Dugan himself. Of many colors and, therefore, many firings, the urns featured glorious fairies and their attendant putti amid a woodland scene of flowers and delicately defined insects. Signed LaBaree and Breton in several places, the Sevres urns were, according to Dugan, among “the best he had ever seen.”
Francis Lord of Milord Antiques of Montreal put the “wow factor” to work with an eclectic mix of Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century European and American antiques that included a gilded wood shell chair from the Hearst estate and an important marble top console. Among his buyers was Carlton Varney, president of Dorothy Draper & Company, Inc, the venerable interior design firm.
For Eastern treasures, shoppers had several choices. Asiantiques of Winter Park, Fla., showed snuff bottles from the Linda Crawley Collection. A case nearby held a lovely collection of Peking (Beijing) glass, while another displayed antique and archaic jade carvings. The outstanding credenza in the booth was an example of Tibetan painted furniture, early Nineteenth Century. It featured scenes from Buddhist parades, dotted with longevity symbols such as rocks, deer, mountains and pine trees. On the wall, on either side of the case piece, hung two rare late Seventeenth or early Eighteenth Century child-sized chairs made of huanghuali wood.
Midori Gallery, Coconut Grove, Fla., brought a fine collection of netsuke that proprietor Sachi Wagner calls “narratives of Japanese culture.”
If there was a corresponding narrative in Western culture, it would have to be the Steuben glass offerings at Jeffrey F. Purtell, where copper-wheel engraved gazelles leaped across a rare bowl designed by Sidney Waugh in 1935. The 1985 Swan Bowl, designed by Peter Aldridge and Jane Osborn-Smith, was a contemporary virtuoso example of Steuben’s blowing, cutting, polishing and copper-wheel engraving.
Making the leap from the art of articulation to varieties of animation was easy given the clocks displayed at Larry Dalton Antiques, which led with a French industry clock inspired by a large steam engine. Created circa 1885, the clock had its own flywheel, governor and piston. On its face there was a barometer to the left, the clock in the center and a thermostat on the right. In the display case beneath this mechanical marvel lay the first 1933 Ingersoll Mickey Mouse watch with run-around Mickeys. There was also a fine collection of Austrian animated clocks, typically of animals with wagging red tongues, all offset by a Le Coultre atmospheric clock that works off temperature changes.
Just around the corner, Derek & Tina Rayment Antiques filled the walls with antique barometers. Among the most interesting was the World Barometer Weather Indicator by Wilson Son and Walter. Numbered 187, the device incorporated a minimum/maximum thermometer, sympiesometer (part regulatory mercury thermometer, and part barometer) and stick barometer tube. The 1870 device, 34 inches tall, was purportedly accurate for two decades worth of weather forecasting.
Marion Harris played up the scientific theme, too, or at least the pseudoscientific, mixing a collection of phrenology items with wooden artist’s models. A life-sized articulated artist’s model, French, circa 1860, was among the first items scooped up by collectors. Commenting on her marketing strategy, Harris said, “People came having given themselves permission not to buy. I gave them permission to buy.” Once that was granted, mannequins and Scottish jewelry went off to new owners.
The 19th Century Shop captivated the technologically savvy with Charles Babbage’s 1843 work, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine.” It is the first work to describe programming for calculations. It was matched in rarity by Cerf and Kahn’s IEEE Journal article “A Protocol for Package Networks,” presented in 1974. This highly detailed treatise was the first that demonstrated how to gain access to more than one network. Today we call this network the Internet.
The gaming center of the show was at Daniels Antiques, where early slots and betting machines were displayed. Rarities included the Caille Centaur Double Eclipse, a 1906 slot machine with colored tin dials and nickel plated ornamentation. It worked well with the Black Forest carvings, also specialties of the house. And for a collector who bought zealously at the show, Daniels provided a Regency painted cabinet of Egyptian Revival taste.
Antiques and Art at the Armory ran through Sunday, December 7. The next Avenue-Wendy show is slated for April at the 26th Street Armory.
