FOR 1-14 RUN PER DAVID

CHRISTIES JANUARY AMERICANA SALE w/6 cuts (scan images from catalog)

tg/lsb set 1/5 #614817

NEW YORK CITY — The only documented piece of furniture by Thomas Townsend and an important marble top pier table from New York will lead Christie’s Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver and Prints sale on January 20–21.

The Townsend bonnet top chest-on-chest comes from the estate of Robert David Lion Gardiner and the New York marble top pier table descends directly from the Cortelyou family.

The Cortelyou family Chippendale carved mahogany marble top pier table, 1750–1770, is estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million. This superb marble top pier table is considered a tour de force of New York craftsmanship with its sweeping form, outstanding execution of carved knees and feet, exquisite proportions, original thick marble top and rich original surface. The small group of serpentine tables that do exist are mainly from Newport, R.I., and Philadelphia while very few have survived from New York.

Though the maker is unknown, the table was executed by one of the sophisticated New York shops during the 1750s and 1760s, a time when the cabinet trade was flourishing. Immigrant carvers from London and elsewhere came to New York following the French and Indian Wars, including Henry Hardcastle, Stephen Dwight, John Brinner, James Strachan and John Minshall.

The table descended through the Cortelyou family, a Dutch family that immigrated to Long Island, N.Y. By 1657, the Huguenot Jacques Cortelyou was the surveyor-general of the colony and in the same year founded a town in memory of his Dutch birthplace called “New Utrecht.” He was respected member of the community also serving Vendue Master, captain of militia, a justice of the peace, a judge in the court of common pleas and sessions, and is believed to have created the first map of New York City. His great-grandson Aaron Cortelyou, 1726–1789, who petitioned for the founding of the first Moravian church of Staten Island, is thought to have ordered the table for his home, the Lakeman-Cortelyou-Tayloe House on Staten Island, in 1761.

The Chippendale mahogany bonnet top chest-on-chest, Newport, R.I., circa 1772, estimated at $500/800,000, is the only known documented piece of furniture made by Thomas Townsend. This piece is the key in attributing other furniture to his shop. Townsend was a prisoner of the French and Indian wars and the American Revolution and little is known of his career. In addition to the label, the chest also bears the ink inscription “Nicholas Easton 1772” on the top of the lower case. Easton was also a cabinetmaker and may have signed the case while working as a journeyman in Townsend’s shop. While little is known about Easton, he did have clear ties to the Gardiner family and the Newport cabinetmaking community.

This rare chest-on-chest, along with a select group of furniture and objects, comes from the collection of a sixteenth generation Gardiner, Robert David Lion Gardiner, who was a custodian of four centuries of collecting. The Gardiner family owns more than 3,000 acres of land called Gardiner’s Island, one of the largest private islands in the world, located on the eastern part of Long Island. Lion Gardiner first purchased the land in 1639 from the Algonquian Indians for a gun, gunpowder, cloth and a large black dog, an agreement later ratified by Charles I.

Gardiner came to America as an engineer and fort builder for the financiers of a small colony, now Connecticut. After helping to defeat the Pequot Indians, he sought permanent residence on Long Island Sound, an area that reminded him of his home in the Isle of Wight, England. He eventually owned nearly 100,000 acres of the island through his friendship with Chief Wyandanch of the Montaukett Indians.

Furniture highlights include a Chippendale carved mahogany easy chair, Philadelphia, 1755–1765, among the most intact surviving Eighteenth Century example that closely compares to three others, one of which is in the collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art ($600/900,000).

Also offered is a 1740–1760 Queen Anne mahogany tray top tea table from Boston, ($400/600,000) and a Federal painted and figured maple worktable, ($120/180,000), a 1800–1810 collaborative work between masterful craftsmen John and Thomas Seymour and superb decorative painter John Ritto Penniman.

American Folk Art will be highlighted by a selection of pictures. A watercolor on silk, “Aurora” by Ruth Downer ($250/350,000), shows the Goddess Aurora riding her chariot. It is one of five surviving examples from an unknown girls’ school that depicts the same subject and overall design of a grassy foreground and a river with a ship sailing towards a town of white clustered buildings. A companion piece by the artist titled “Diana” ($60/90,000) is also beautifully executed and reinforces her high education, knowledge of classicism and sense of fashion.

“A Group of Family Portraits” by William Matthew Prior, circa 1840 ($100/150,000), will be offered. Prior, known better for his academic pictures, advertised that “persons wishing for a flat picture can have a likeness without shade or shadow at quarter the price.” Similar in style is George Hartwell’s handsome “Pair of Portraits of a Gentleman and a Lady,” circa 1840 ($30/50,000).

Carved and painted carousel animals will highlight the sale including an elephant by Charles Looff, circa 1885 ($40/60,000), a stander horse by Daniel C. Muller, circa 1927 ($70/100,000), and a giraffe by Gustave and William Denzel, circa 1910 ($30/50,000).

Other animal figures in the sale are a pair of carved and polychromed wood parrots by the trader Wilhelm Schimmel, southeastern Pennsylvania, 1865–1890 ($12/18,000), that comes from the highly regarded collection of Edith Halpert, a pioneer and advocate of contemporary American art during the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

Also offered will be an allegory of liberty, watercolor, silk and chenille on silk needlework picture, 1805–1810 ($30/50,000), possibly by Sarah Wheeler of the Abby Wright School, South Hadley, Mass. This highly detailed and vibrant textile is one of five known surviving examples that all illustrate Liberty as a young woman with ringlets in her hair, wearing a classical-inspired gown and holding a cornucopia and flagpole topped by a liberty cap. The Abby Wright School, established in 1803, produced a well-documented and distinctive record of needlework until its closing in 1811.

James Bard, a marine artist who painted steamboats traveling the Hudson River and surrounding waters of Manhattan, will be included in the sale with “Brother Jonathan,” circa 1851 ($150/200,000), a ship built in New York to run to Panama in pursuit of gold. This painting once belonged to the Vanderbilt family. Representative of the immigrant artists who painted in Bridgeport is a Connecticut landscape “Barge and Tow Boat in Bridgeport Harby” by J.F. Huge (1809–1878) ($40/80,000).

A grouping of weathervanes includes an copper Indian mermaid version, early Twentieth Century ($18/22,000). Representing an unusual subject, this weathervane is believed to have been from a Krieger family outbuilding in Tuxedo Park, N.Y. Also offered is a copper and zinc peacock weathervane, late Nineteenth Century ($30/50,000), from the collection of Edith Halpert.

The sale features more than 100 examples of mocha ware assembled by devoted collectors Charles and Gloria Mandelstam over the past 35 years. Mocha ware was a utilitarian ware produced from the mid-Nineteenth Century to the early part of the Twentieth Century in Staffordshire and Yorkshire, England, although French potteries Creil and Montreau in northwestern France were also making similarly decorated pieces.

Though used as everyday objects, they were whimsically decorated in colored slip or liquid clay. Mocha ware was sold in huge quantities to the American market at the time of its manufacture but since the wares were not preserved, few examples survive. This collection includes both English and French examples in a variety of shapes, colors and patters, including a rare double jug of 1830–1840, one of only six known examples ($15/25,000) and a selection of blue and green banded tavern mugs and jugs with estimates ranging from $500 to $3,000.

The Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver and Prints occurs January 20 at 2 pm and January 21 at 10 am to 2 pm. Viewing will occur at Christie’s Galleries at Rockefeller Center January 15–19. For information, www.Christies.com. All lots from the sale can be viewed online along with full catalog descriptions on Christie’s Lotfinder®, which also allows clients to leave absentee bids.

For 1/14

Slug: ‘Intimate Visions’ At Wadsworth Atheneum

#614853

TG – 2 cuts

HARTFORD, CONN. — The popular adage “bigger is better” is put to the test by “Intimate Visions: Small-Scale European Paintings of the Fifteenth to Nineteenth Centuries,” on view at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, January 15 through September 11.

The exhibition showcases some 70 paintings in the Atheneum’s permanent collection that have rarely been shown in the museum’s grand galleries due to their petite size.

Grouped chronologically, these works span a variety of subject matter. Religious themes pervade the earliest paintings of the Italian and Northern schools, including the rare, late Fifteenth Century French “Annunciation and Pietà” as well as the “Annunciation” by Caracciolo and the recently restored Francesco Francia “Madonna and Child with St Francis.”

Within the small-scale format, the most popular subject throughout Europe was the still life, with its detailed depictions of insects, birds, flowers and fruit. Chief among the splendid examples on view is “Still Life with Hourglass” by the Seventeenth Century Dutch master Gerrit Dou.

Genre scenes were popular in the Eighteenth Century, and as the form evolved, it encompassed increasingly modern settings and subject matter; Louis Léopold Boilly’s “The Mockery” as well as a pair of paintings by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, a charming boy and girl filled with sexual innuendo. Humor and careful observation of human behavior are evident in Jehan-Georges Vibert’s “The Schism” and in Jean Béraud’s treatment of a typical urban view in “Paris Street Scene.”

Nineteenth Century painting is dominated by landscapes and this exhibition shows fine examples by Camille Corot and other Barbizon masters Henri Julien Rousseau, Diaz de la Peña, and Charles François Daubigny.

The Wadsworth Atheneum is at 600 Main Street. For information, 860-838-4058 or wadsworthatheneum.org.

FOR 1-14

ANTIQUES AT THE PIERS JANUARY 22 AND 23 w/3 cuts

tg/lsb set 1-4 #614687

NEW YORK CITY — Stella Show Mgmt Co. presents Antiques at the Piers, on January 22–23, with more than 300 dealers.

Visitors to Antiques @ the Piers are promised a vast selection of antique riches from the Seventeenth Century through the Twentieth Century modern. One such exhibitor, Rose Fontanella of New York City, will bring historically significant folk art that has neither been on the market nor available for several years.

The highly sought-after early Twentieth Century art pottery being brought to the show by Barbara Gerr of New Jersey would be a striking complement to the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century country cupboards that will be found at Judith and James Milne, Inc of New York. The splendid antique trade signs available at Mary and Joshua Steenburgh from New Hampshire have become an increasingly popular way to decorate and personalize walls.

Jim Hersheimer from Pennsylvania promises to have a booth filled with vibrant American Folk Art. Mountain Thistle Antiques of Virginia is bringing objects for the collector and decorator including a collection of crisply carved Black Forest coat hooks and boxes so rich in detail that they add warmth, character and sophistication to either a country or city home.

Customers can also see the show, contact dealers and buy at an e-preview, objects brought for sale to Antiques @ the Piers online beginning at 5 pm, Friday, January 21, at www.stellashows.com. Clients will then be able to contact dealers through email, stellashows@aol.com or the show office to discuss a purchase.

Antiques at the Piers will be held on January 22 and 23 on Piers 90 and 92, 12th Avenue and 55th Street. Show hours are Saturday and Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm. Admission is $15. For information, 212-255-0020 or www.stellashows.com.