Looking Good at the Winter Show

Art is selling at the annual fair at the Armory, but dealers are under duress from tariffs, a spotty market, and the inscrutability of younger buyers.

O ver the past few days I’ve seen hundreds of works of art, most American, and while I’m sniffing for themes befitting America’s 250th, my tastes are catholic. I might as well write now that my favorite object at the Americana auctions and the Winter Show, the work I’ve thought about like a dog thinks of food, is unconnected to revolution, war, a more perfect union, life, liberty, justice, or equality. It’s a John La Farge watercolor at the Winter Show, Entrance to the River of Tautira, Man in Canoe, Pink Cloud, from 1891, a little over 9 by 12 inches. Thomas Colville is offering it for $135,000.

I love La Farge (1835–1910) for his stained glass, but he was a superb painter, draftsman, and designer, and also a visionary. He also was among the first gringo artists to visit the South Seas — he was there when Gauguin was there — and to make art with South Seas landscapes, seascapes, and native life as subjects. His color sense is perfection. Layers of watercolor, some opaque, some transparent, create a world that’s sensual — we can feel the warmth and smell the salt air and feel the sea breeze and water — but mythic and remote. La Farge did lots of church stained glass and murals. This little thing isn’t religious, but spirits arise from it and caress us.

La Farge’s watercolor is also the high-water mark of the best art fairs. Colville bought it last year at a Boston auction. Henry Lee Higginson (1834–1919) bought it before 1895. Higginson fought in the Union Army, made serious money in Boston banking, became a Boston Brahmin, founded the Boston Symphony, and supported Harvard. Nobody’s perfect. His portrait by John Singer Sargent from 1903 is very grand and a beacon light in American Gilded Age portraiture, with a unique American swagger. He also, along with Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Watson, and the execrable Woodrow Wilson, participated in the first transatlantic phone call. I love anecdotes like this. So, distinguished provenance goes with the La Farge. The watercolor stayed in the Higginson family until last year — it’s the freshest of fresh meat, or, given its South Seas style, fresh fish. It’s as close to a perfect gem as I can conceive. When I look at art, I’m moved first and foremost by beauty.

Last week, I didn’t write much about the breadth and depth of the Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory. It runs through Sunday. I focused on art related to America’s 250th birthday, but there’s lots more to see and love. For years it was called the Winter Antiques Show and exhibited, for the most part, American furniture, silver, paintings, folk art, porcelain, and textiles. It has broadened its wares over the past ten years or so because “antiques,” as a term, especially “American antiques,” no longer moves hearts, minds, and wallets.

I went to the press preview, which, for me, means having the fair to myself with some dealers and few shoppers. The mood among the dealers is laced with beleaguerment. The art market isn’t bad, but it’s spotty and soft. Over the past 20 years or so, the market went international, but tariff chaos has made for a turn inward. We’re betwixt and between. I won’t name names since I’m a nice guy, but a lot of the older dealers are turning into geezers. The fair’s marketing function was less than ideal. All the legacy art fairs are desperate to attract young buyers, but finding what attracts them is very different from knowing what attracted older and dying, connoisseurship-oriented collectors. All topics to be explored in more detail.

When it comes to art fairs, though, I try to accentuate the positive, since I admire dealers so much. Colville’s La Farge warms the soul with visions of South Seas breezes and flimsy clothes rather than the acres of insulated flannel we’re wearing in Vermont.

I’ve never written about the Old Print Shop, in business in New York since 1898 and specializing in prints, drawings, watercolors, old maps, and, here and there, paintings. The Newman family has owned it since 1928. Among the Old Print Shop’s many discoveries were Currier & Ives, printmakers who added visuals to American ideals and country values. The Newmans are definitely not geezers. I love their packed walls and easels with prints that one can flip through. That’s one of the best old-time art experiences.

The old Print Shop’s Front View of Yale-College, and the College Chapel, New-Haven, from 1786, is both charming and timely. It’s a colored woodcut that’s an arresting image of the campus, dotted with stick figures of students and bewigged professors. It’s also a precursor of the modern college catalogue, with a history of Yale and a listing of courses — Latin and Greek, the Bible, erudition, grammar, rhetoric, logic, algebra, geometry, astronomy, gravity, ethics, moral philosophy, and “Belles Letters,” all preparing graduates to “go out into the world.” No classes in protest choreography, oppression, the wonders of 57 genders, or tormenting Jews! The broadside, 21 by 18 inches, was once a foldout in eight panels. It’s very rare and $115,000. And it focuses on academics and the library, not gourmet meals, Wall Street internships, and gold-plated climbing walls.

Nearby, at Daniel Crouch Rare Books, is William Faden’s very rare 1776 London-made map of New York City detailing the key sites in the Battle of Long Island, the Revolutionary War’s biggest and bloodiest battle and a terrible defeat for the Patriots. As the battle was lost, 9,000 Patriot troops rowed back to Manhattan from Brooklyn, concealed by fog. Washington was the last man to leave. This was our Dunkirk. The map is $27,000. I like the juxtaposition against the Yale broadside. Ten years after the Long Island debacle, peace reigned, America was free, and young people were back to the business of learning.

Whenever I see that Peter Finer’s going to be at a fair, I stop at his booth. Finer, a London dealer in business since 1967, specializes in the rarest and highest quality arms and armor, which, considering the design, materials, and craftsmanship, are art. He’s offering a gilt polychrome wooden panel, probably from 1525, carved in a free, exuberant manner and showing the royal arms of Henry VIII. Not necessarily a token of belligerence, it was used to decorate the entrances of official buildings and homes or businesses whose owners wanted everyone to know they were on Henry’s side. And it’s statement-big, at 38 by 28 inches. It’s very rare and priced in “the substantial six figures,” befitting a king who was substantial in eminence and heft. These plaques are art, handmade, but they were also ephemera to be trashed with every new monarch. They didn’t stick around. The panel is very loosely tied to America’s 250th. Didn’t it all start with the horny, mercurial, decadent, obstinate Henry? I mean England’s imperial ambitions and the Protestant Reformation, at least in England, which gave us the Puritans.

Hirschl & Adler Galleries, in business since 1952, is among the old-school American-art luminaries. It’s offering the splendid Portrait of Captain John Jervis, Later First Earl of St. Vincent, by Gilbert Stuart. Jervis wasn’t American, he was a British Navy hero — but it takes two to tango, and the Brits were anathema circa 1776, and well before and well beyond. Stuart (1755–1828) was American and best known for his portraits of George Washington, but he mastered portraiture in London and Dublin. He painted Jervis’s portrait in the mid-1780s before Jervis became a hero in the Napoleonic Wars, Admiral Nelson’s mentor, an admiral himself, and an earl. Jervis had a minor part as a sailor during the Battle of Quebec on December 31, 1775, the first American disaster in the American Revolution, but he was otherwise uninvolved. He’s a background Neptune in C. S. Forester’s Hornblower novels and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin sea-adventure series. The portrait is in pristine condition, and talk about fresh meat. It stayed with Jervis’s family until Hirschl & Adler got it last year. Priced in the low seven figures, it’s a must-have for a rich old sea dog, or a poor old sea dog to whom rich well-wishers want to bring joy. We’ll overlook the fact that Jervis was English. Special relationship, hands across the sea, God Save the Queen, whom I deeply miss, and all that.

I write a lot about fresh meat — art at an auction or display never before on the market — but here’s fresh meat about fresh meat, and fresh meat on the market. Robert Young Antiques, a London dealer I didn’t know, offered a splendid butcher’s-shop diorama with a butcher, joints, chops, and carcasses, hand-carved and -painted, English and from the mid-1880s. It’s a shop interior with windows, flowerpots, and a royal coat of arms, possibly telling us that it was made in Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee year. It’s fun, beautifully carved, and didactic, too, since the meat provides a tour of the English carnivore’s diet. It sold right away, so the price isn’t to be disclosed.

I wrote about Geoffrey Diner Gallery a couple of years ago when I visited their booth at the TEFAF fair in Maastricht. Geoffrey and his wife, Maureen, are experts in American Arts & Crafts things, especially Greene and Greene, but also first-rate work by Nakashima, Tiffany, Gio Ponti, and Judy McKie, all favorites of mine, all beautifully presented. Their pair of Tiffany Studio turtle-back lantern sconces from around 1902 are very different. They’re iridized into a luminous amber with charcoal bronze mounts. They’re refined, as are all Tiffany products, but fierce and organic, sophisticated but of the wild. They’re in great shape. They’re $165,000 and, my spies tell me, on reserve.

One or two good American-art auctions don’t matter. Five or six says, “Methinks I see a trend.” Last week I wrote about Christie’s and Sotheby’s Americana Week auctions — colonial and Federal paintings but also silver, furniture, porcelain, and Founding-era documents. Results were strong, but lots of big-ticket items sold after my deadline. What’s the news? At Christie’s “We the People” auction on January 23, rare, early copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence soared past high estimates, as did portraits of George Washington, and the only official copy of the Emancipation Proclamation signed by Lincoln. Sotheby’s was softer, but its manuscript auction wasn’t as meaty. A letter from George Washington introducing Lafayette to Benjamin Franklin sold for $1 million, short of the low estimate.

American art continued to do well, too. At Sotheby’s, a valuables cabinet — a strong box — made in Salem, Mass., in 1677 sold for $1.6 million, double its high estimates. It’s made from red oak, black walnut, and ebonized maple in colonial Baroque style. American colonial silver hasn’t found its footing since the dozen or so rich, stubborn, covetous old men who made the market died a few years ago. If they wanted something, they went mano a mano for it. On their deaths, their collections flooded a market with few buyers younger than 80. Among painters, Grandma Moses did well at Sotheby’s as did a Martin Johnson Heade hummingbird scene, which sold for more than triple its high estimates. At Christie’s, Sanford Gifford’s Sunset over the Palisades on the Hudson, a Luminist dream from 1879, went for $2.8 million on a $1.8 million high estimate. Tossed into Christie’s American Collector sale, an online auction ending on January 27, were things from Jimmy Carter’s estate, among them his boring ties as well as a painting of a church by Carter, like the artist the essence of mediocrity. On a $6,000–8,000 estimate, it sold for $203,000.

These auctions are important since they show a lively market at the start of the festivities for America’s 250th. Left-wingers cry over the Constitution, the Declaration, and the Founding Fathers. They’d love to trash them all. May their dreams end in . . . what did Trotsky call it? The ash heap of history, I believe.

The auction houses are businesses and move on nimbly, like a dog with a good nose, to the next thing. With Americana week nearing its end, Christie’s and Sotheby’s head to Classics Week, which touts Old Masters. Speaking of dogs, Michele Pace del Campidoglio’s Portrait of a Dalmatian in a Courtyard, from the 1660s, is a handsome, well-endowed devil painted by Rome’s dog specialist. Dalmatians are hunting dogs but, having stamina, they escorted the horse-drawn carriages of rich people. Sounds like they’re good at spotting a deal. Christie’s estimates it to go at $60,000–70,000 at its Old Masters sale on February 4.

Topping the sale is Canaletto’s Venice, the Bucintoro at the Moro on Ascension Day, from 1754. Canaletto (1697–1768) is the master of the grand Venetian procession scene. Ascension Day was Venice’s top festival, with boats and grandees galore, all presented with Canaletto’s unique sparkle. The Bucintoro was the doge’s ceremonial barge and rarely seen. The Christie’s picture isn’t well-known, in part because, for 200 years, it stayed with the English family that commissioned it from Canaletto and has been in a Portuguese private collection for the past 20 years. Last year, an Ascension Day Bucintoro from 1732 sold for $43.9 million at Christie’s, a record for Canaletto. That triumph smoked the Portuguese picture out. Christie’s won’t give an estimate for the picture on the block on February 4, but “gigante” sums it up.

I’d love a Canaletto. Stretching the imagination taut and tense, and testing the laws of physics, his Venice scene evokes our branch of the Battenkill, running through my land, with beavers believing they’re doges.

Going from fantasy to realist, and in the news, you can own a piece of Venice, and a bit of Impressionism, via Ca’ Dario (Palazzo Dario), the polychrome Gothic palace on the Grand Canal. Monet painted it multiple times on his one visit to Venice in 1908. Last year, I wrote about Monet and Venice, an iffy show at the Brooklyn Museum, and was surprised to see that the palazzo is for sale, via Christie’s international real estate division, for, my spies tell me, €20 million, or a tad under $24 million. A palazzo in Venice? Who wouldn’t love it? It’s 10,000 square feet, lush, plush, renovated — the plumbing works — and a beauty. I’m told it’s cursed, but I’ll go mano a mano with my Yankee spooks, a bundle of nerves if there ever was one. “Basta,” the dead Italians will say, and scurry.