Americana and Folk Art Prompt Bidding Wars at Sotheby’s and Christie’s

The fireworks over The Woman with Pink Ribbons and Captain John Bourne show collectors’ renewed interest in antebellum American art.  

A mericana Week, for me, is January’s Christmas. The third week of this drab winter month in New York celebrates American decorative arts and folk art. Sotheby’s and Christie’s mount sales of old American furniture and silver, folk painting, duck decoys and weathervanes, samplers embroidered by teenage girls, and Chinese Export porcelain, among other relics of early American life. The art’s high on charm but also on craftsmanship. Design’s simple but very, very good. The old-timers believed that less is more. Spirits are high, too. The collectors and dealers are rarely snoots.

The Winter Antiques Show, now called the Winter Show, happens during Americana Week as well. It’s a colorful, collegial event. The art’s soothing, as nostalgia always is. Some of the dealers there have an Americana sideline but mostly sell American Old Masters such as Homer, Eakins, and the Hudson River crowd or Modernism. Most are American antiques dealers, many in venerable, family-run businesses and from the hinterlands. Americana dealers as well as the most ardent collectors know their stuff.

The Winter Show, alas, was postponed, thanks to the Omicron installment of the Chinese coronavirus mass hysteria and delusion. No one among the organizers seemed concerned about contagion. They looked at the plunge in theater attendance and hotel stays around Christmas in Manhattan and thought it best to postpone the show and catch a slot between variants. After all, no one makes money if there’s no audience, and it was too late to do a virtual show.

If we’re vaccinated, not once, not twice, but triply, and if we deploy a Yankee sense of distance, why in the world are we still ruled by Covid kooks and fear pimps like Dr. Swamp Quack? When will this ever end? Fauci and his ilk are contemplating the end of the Greek alphabet with a feeling of remorse that would make even Euripides cry. Never fear, illnesses like “flucona” are waiting in the wings.

Christie’s Americana sale of Peter and Barbara Goodman’s art had as many fireworks as the Fourth of July. I knew the Goodmans from their time as summer people and weekenders in Berkshire County. Peter’s family business made a fortune starting in dance leotards and fishnet stockings, once a standard for dancers of all ages, the other big with tarts. He sold the company to Playtex. They were astute, assiduous Americana connoisseurs. Peter died at 95 last year, Barbara a few years ago, so their art was on the block.

First, Woman with Pink Ribbons, by Ammi Phillips (1788–1865) went for $3,870,000 on an estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million. It’s by far the highest price ever paid at auction for Phillips’s work, and I think it’s the highest price ever paid for a folk-art portrait, by anyone. Judging from her hair, bonnet, dress, and sofa, it’s dated to the mid 1830s. I’ve seen it a few times over the years, and it’s arresting. Phillips worked mostly in small towns in the Connecticut River Valley, Litchfield County, and along the New York State border. He traveled from town to town, giving the rural haut-bourgeoisie faithful likenesses, bold colors, and hints, never vulgar or grasping, of prosperity.

Phillips and other itinerant painters, most unknown today, might have seen portrait prints by van Dyke, Lely, or Reynolds, but Yankee taste admitted no swagger, and held the dazzle. Our Woman with Pink Ribbons is intelligent, expressive, and inquisitive, down-to-earth rather than highfalutin. She’s serene and dignified, as are the best folk-art portraits.

Color is mostly applied in planes, though her green dress and passages of pastel pink suggest the sheen of velvet. This stab at texture is, for artists like Phillips, a radical move but a pleasing one. The catalogue entry quoted a folk-art curator comparing Phillips’s color sense to Rothko’s, a stretch that challenges the physics of the elastic band. That said, she’s got wall power, and Phillips is the genre’s biggest name. The painting hasn’t been on the market since the Goodmans bought it in 1983. The bidding war, which I followed online, was intense.

Minutes later, Captain John Bourne, by John Brewster Jr. (1766–1854), broke Brewster’s auction record, selling for $2,670,000 on an estimate of $150,000 to $250,000, not as hefty a price as the Phillips but a bigger leap from what Christie’s thought it would get. I suspect that the underbidder on the Phillips, leaving with no woman in pink ribbons in his trunk, went for a manly New Englander and shipbuilder instead. Brewster’s very good, but he was deaf from birth, which adds cachet. Let’s face it, though. His disability made him a highly visual person. While the biography of the sitter in Phillips’s portrait remains a mystery, Captain Bourne’s history is known, since the painting stayed with the Bourne family from around 1800, when Brewster painted it, to 1979. It’s got its original brass frame, too. Bourne was a Revolutionary War veteran, joining the fight as a young teenager, and an early Mainer, born in Wells in 1766, before Maine seceded from Massachusetts and officially became a state, as part of the Missouri Compromise.

Christie’s 19th-century American painting sale wasn’t explosive but satisfying. After the Phillips and Brewster triumphs, all the Champagne bottles in the vicinity of Rockefeller Center had already been popped and drained. Christie’s specialists must have looked at this sale with a warm glow. There were some nice Hudson River School landscapes, and prices were both firm and predictable. The slough in their market evident in the 2010s appears to be over now.

In the Yosemite, painted by Albert Bierstadt around 1873, is a small, sparkling gem. He spent most of 1872 and 1873 exploring Yosemite’s pristine canyons, valleys, and peaks. The picture is fresh as can be. It hasn’t been on the market since 1973. On an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000, it sold for $786,000.

Sotheby’s also has great things with distinctive strength in furniture. Its Important Americana sale on January 24 offered idiosyncratic stars like a Classical-style fancy yellow, green, and gold klismos side chair made in Baltimore around 1810 by premier makers John and Hugh Finlay. Baltimore furniture tends to have pizzazz. The city is far away from austere, Puritan-acculturated New England.

Cavalier culture was taken seriously. The city had great wealth, too, and liked its ostentation. A klismos is a chair used in ancient Greek funerary sculpture and pottery and characterized by a trapezoidal seat and inwardly sweeping rear legs. The look was revived in Paris Empire style around 1800. The Baltimore chair, one of two in the sale, has painted decoration showing a wolf, columns, and Greek patterns. Estimated at $150,000 to $250,000, it went for $528,000. Its companion, sold as the next lot, went for $478,000.

They’re playful, sassy chairs, part of a set of twelve originally used for dining in what was a cultured home and now scattered in museums. A Chippendale-style block-and-shell-carved and figured mahogany chest of drawers from Rhode Island, made in 1765, is more reserved but no less vibrant. The original brasses are big, flirting with flashy. The shell carving is plump. It has never been at auction before and was consigned by owners in Paris. It went for $1,100,000 on an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000. Chippendale-style in America is animated like any piece of Rococo furniture but never giddy. It’s a touch grave. French and even English Rococo furniture sometimes looks as if it’s about to prance, if not run like a gazelle. American Rococo things never look as though they’re going to do anything crazy.

Christie’s had them from the Goodman collection, but Sotheby’s scored William du Pont’s. His money came from inheritance, not tutus, and the du Pont family has a long history of advancing scholarship in American decorative arts. Winterthur, the great decorative-arts museum in Delaware, is a du Pont enterprise. Like the Goodmans, du Pont collected the best of its kind, but he looked at material culture more broadly. He was attracted to objects that defined many aspects of early American life. There weren’t any spittoons or commodes, but an exceptionally rare copper still did well, estimated at $3,000 to $5,000 but selling for $32,000. In this time of supply-chain crisis, best to be able to make your own. The best of every variation of the ubiquitous Windsor chair style also sold well.

Though the Covid mass delusion canceled the Winter Show, Fauci himself might have made a purchase or two at the du Pont auction, online or by phone, of course. A group of three 19th-century wrought-iron tools, two hammers and a buttonhole cutter, would upgrade his medical bag. It’s too heavy in leeches, pectoral plasters, worm syrup, and electrified corsets. Poleaxe tomahawks, too, would suit a doctor who, aside from “lockdown” and “mask,” knows only to prescribe “amputate” for most illnesses.

Du Pont died in 2020. He focused on objects made in the Delaware River Valley and was a presence at every auction, large and small, art fair, antiques shop, and promising tag sale. I liked his sale because the objects expressed how early, more-or-less bourgeois Americans lived. A fraktur birth announcement from 1781 commemorating the birth in Burlington County in New Jersey of Mary Jones was estimated at $4,000 to $8,000 but sold for $100,000. It’s a sweet, fresh thing illustrating a passage from Aesop’s Fables. Frakturs are the ultimate niche art. They’re ephemera so they’re often lost, and they appear among early German families in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Du Pont was attracted to both quality and rarity. He described a modest mantel made in 1732 for the Coppock House, one of Delaware’s earliest houses, as “the rarest item I’ve ever purchased.”

The house, built around 1700, was a large, handsome, two-and-a-half-story masonry structure. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia bought it and the land surrounding it in 1903. In 1964, the archdiocese, with no warning to local historic-preservation enthusiasts, bulldozed it to expand a cemetery it owned on adjacent property. Du Pont eventually bought the three salvaged mantels. No Pennsylvania or Delaware mantels, he said, existed from this period, anywhere. It sold for only $10,000, five times its high estimate, and when it was built it had only one pilaster, but it’s unique.

Du Pont’s expansiveness and feel for everyday life made the Sotheby’s sale a treat. Looking at the catalogue felt like a master class in material culture. The sale was a lot of work, since there were hundreds of objects to be catalogued, and many sold for four figures. Good for Sotheby’s to do the connoisseurship. The catalogue itself is an important, illustrated reference book.

The market for Americana has reversed the slide in antebellum American art prices that started around 2010. While younger collectors might find Hudson River School painting predictable, Americana, especially folk-art painting, is idiosyncratic and often charming. Americana benefits, too, from intense market interest in artists outside the mainstream. Of course, the Christie’s and Sotheby’s sales, and there were seven of them, offered the best. There’s always a market for quality.