Date: Fri 22-Jan-1999

Publication: Ant

Author: LAURAB

Quick Words:

Chait-Winter

Full Text:

Winter Antiques Show Warms Up

(with 2 cuts)

NEW YORK CITY -- Ask Allen Chait, the unofficial historian of the Winter

Antiques Show. Snow on opening night is no where near as rare as a Kang Xi

vase. The 40-year veteran of the fair recalls days of numb toes and nights

frigid enough to shatter glass, but never weather so foul that it turned away

top collectors and ardent supporters of the sponsoring East Side House

Settlement.

Both came in droves for the 45th Winter Antiques Show, which opened its doors

at 5 pm on January 14. "Despite the supremely rotten weather we were only a

few hundred people down in attendance over the course of the weekend, and we

were up in revenue on opening night," said fair director Catherine Sweeney

Singer. By the close of business on Sunday, about 8,000 had visited the Winter

Antiques Show, which continues through Sunday, January 24. Preview ticket

sales increased by more than $100,000.

Preliminary sales reports from exhibitors were equally affirmative. Canadian

dealer Donald Ellis sold a Sioux war shirt and leggings, circa 1830, $450,000;

a pair of wood and pigment dance masks from Kodiak Island, Alaska, $225,000;

and a Second Phase Navajo chief's blanket, circa 1850, $185,000.

"It's been a wonderful show for us," reported Leigh Keno. By Monday, the New

York dealer in American furniture had sold a sideboard, $145,000, and the

girandole mirror above it, $135,000; both turret-top Boston card tables in his

stand, $425,000 and $65,000; a gateleg table, $115,000; and a painted

fireboard, $45,800.

Arts and Crafts specialists Cathers & Dembrosky of New York sold their three

rarest items: a Greene and Greene walnut desk, commissioned for Charles

Greene, circa 1903; and two light fixtures, one from the Roycroft Inn dining

room, the other from the Greene and Greene-designed Blacker House.

A scrimshaw tooth, one of only two known to have been carved aboard H.M.S.

Beagle during Charles Darwin's expedition around Cape Horn, sold for what is

believed to be a record price by Hyannis Port, Mass., dealers Alan Granby and

Janice Hyland.

Folk art dealers Frank and Barbara Pollack of Highland Park, Ill., parted with

a bull weathervane of circa 1865, possibly by A.L. Jewell & Company; a superb

tramp art mirror, and a Rhode Island Chippendale side table.

Other sales included a 1944 letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower to his wife,

Mamie, $250,000, at Kenneth Rendell. "It is such an impassioned letter, a love

note and an anguished reflection on the soldiers he knows he is sending to

certain death," reported one reader, clearly moved.

And yes, Ralph M. Chait Galleries sold that rare Kang Xi vase. It is

ex-collection of the great dealer Otto Fukashima, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.,

and Nelson Rockefeller.

The Winter Antiques Show, at the Seventh Regiment Armory at 67th Street and

Park Avenue, is open noon to 8:30 pm daily; Thursday and Sunday, noon to 6 pm.

Admission is $16.