Click here to subscribe to M.A.D.

Sollo Rago Modern Auctions, Lambertville, New Jersey

Previously Unknown Esherick Screen Sets New Auction Record

by Lita Solis-Cohen

A walnut screen carved by Wharton Esherick (1887-1970) with ebony birds flying over a stylized landscape with grain fields, unknown until it was offered for auction, sold for $312,000 (includes buyer’s premium) over the phone to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at a Sollo Rago auction on October 21 and 22, 2006, in Lambertville, New Jersey. It was an early piece that John Sollo said he found in a California collection.

Robert Leonard, director of the Wharton Esherick Museum on Valley Forge Mountain, Paoli, Pennsylvania, said that he had been unaware of its existence because Esherick did not document much of his early work. “It was a real discovery,” he said. “That is why it caused such a buzz.”

Kelly L’Ecuyer, assistant curator of decorative arts and sculpture, Arts of the Americas, at the MFA, who is always on the lookout for American studio furniture, said the museum needed an Esherick to anchor the museum’s collection of work by the next generation of studio craftsmen. This one, of exceptional quality and related to Esherick’s woodcuts, fit the bill.

John Sollo and David Rago, who have worked together on modern design sales for nearly a decade, gathered 31 lots of Esherick furniture, woodcuts, and ephemera from three sources for the sale. Descendants of the Fischer family, who commissioned Esherick to make furniture for their Germantown house in the 1930’s, were major consignors. The Fischers’ large oak and pear wood dining table with carved rivets, nails, and hatch marks on its top and legs, the stretchers carved with geometric designs, signed “To Hannah Wharton Esherick + York/MCMXXX,” was offered along with original drawings for it.

In 1930 Hannah and York Fischer traveled to Germany with Esherick to visit woodworkers there. According to Sollo, this table was made by Esherick in Germany. Estimated at $90,000/120,000, it sold to a phone bidder for $156,000. The buyer was New York City dealer Leigh Keno. “I will keep it for awhile,” he said. “I will enjoy living with it.”

Also with Fischer provenance, a padouk wood Victrola cabinet with two pullout counter slabs and two folding doors, signed by Esherick and dated 1930 and with the initials J.S. for John Smith, a cabinetmaker who worked with Esherick on the Fischer commission, sold for $90,000 (est. $60,000/90,000), also to Keno. It had been on the market several years ago through the Wharton Esherick Museum for $45,000 but failed to sell.

Among the other Esherick works of note, a sculpted maple corner shelf, signed “W.E. 1963,” from a Vermont collection, sold to a New York architect in the salesroom for $34,800. One of Esherick’s hammer handle” chairs with a handcrafted undercarriage and leather strap seat, from the same Vermont collection, sold for $19,200 (est. $8000/12,000), and another version of a hammer handle chair, with legs and stretchers closer in form to actual hammer handles and with a solid leather sling seat, fetched $11,400.

Esherick made his first hammer handle chairs for the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania, in 1938, but he continued to make them throughout his life. He created each one of them a bit differently, a unique variation of his theme.

The two Esherick stools in the sale sold for $7200 for one 25" high and $7800 for one 17" high, both to the same absentee bidder. In 1936 Esherick carved stylized stag, a little more than foot high, and signed and dated it. It brought an astonishing $57,000, more than twice its $25,000 high estimate.

This increased interest in Esherick’s work should bring larger crowds to the Esherick museum. Guided tours through Esherick’s house and studio, where many of these works were created and similar pieces remain, are available daily by appointment, except in January and February when the museum is closed. Call (610) 644-5822 for reservations and directions.

The Saturday session began and ended with Nakashima furniture. It performed well. Freeedge furniture brought a premium. Some coffee tables and chairs sold within or below estimates, but generally the Nakashima market seems solid. Most of the buyers were on the phones. (Rago said a record 318 bidders had arranged for phone lines.)

A coffee table with an exotic burl free-edge top on a laurel wood Minguern I base, 15½" high x 42" long, sold for $180,000 (est. $55,000/75,000) to a phone bidder said to be in the trade. At Sotheby’s in June 2001, it sold for $10,200. The buzz in the room was that the top was picked out by a decorator and brought to George Nakashima, who made its base.

The same phone bidder bought many other lots, paying $54,000 for a walnut Conoid bench and $31,200 for a walnut Conoid coffee table. A walnut coffee table on a Minguern II base cost that bidder $30,000, within estimate. Another walnut coffee table, made in 1966 with turned legs, cost just $16,800. The same bidder paid the same price of $16,800 for a walnut credenza with sliding doors. The last two items came with original drawings.

Among other strong prices for Nakashima, a pair of Conoid chairs sold for $24,000 (high estimate $14,000); a walnut high chest with a free-front edge and seven drawers sold for $36,000; and a seven-drawer chest with a straight-front edge on its top sold for $27,600 (est. $15,000/ 25,000).

One lot in the sale, a walnut cabinet with sliding doors, was not by Nakashima, according to John Sollo, who announced that fact from the podium. According to dealers in the salesroom, it had sold at Sotheby’s and then sold again at Christie’s and then was returned because of doubts of authorship. Sollo said he would inform the absentee bidder who had left a bid that he had made the announcement in the salesroom, and he doubted the sale would go through.

John Sollo was the first to introduce Paul Evans to the auction market. The New Hope artist-craftsman, who began making furniture in the 1950’s and died in 1987, is known for his art furniture made of metal. Sollo said he had an epiphany when he saw his first piece of Paul Evans furniture on the field at Brimfield 20 years ago. From that moment, he championed the sculpted bronze furniture of Evans. Sollo and Rago scored the auction record for Evans furniture in 2005 when they got $90,000 for an Evans doublesided metal collage room divider.

The momentum in the Evans market continued at this sale. A painted and perforated steelfront cabinet with four bifold doors, a slate top, and plinth base, made in 1963, sold for $51,000 (est. $15,000/25,000) on the phone. It is the first of three such cabinets made, according to the catalog, and was the floor sample in Evans’s shop. A faceted walnut burl cabinet with black glass over brown fiberglass top sold for $48,000 (est. $40,000/60,000). An Evans cocktail table with an oval plate glass top, its cityscape base signed and dated 1973, sold for $15,600 (est. $12,000/18,000). It looked a lot better in person than it did in the photograph in the catalog. It is important to preview an auction.

Sollo and Rago have taken a long-term lease on a warehouse four blocks from the auction room and fitted it with lights for a two-story showroom, needed for the exhibitions for their big sales. This sale, with a catalog the size of a large metropolitan area phone book, had more than 1500 lots, including contemporary art, sold on Saturday night, and pottery and turned woodenware on Saturday and Sunday, shown in the auction gallery at 333 North Main Street in Lambertville. Phillip Lloyd Powell, another New Hope fine furniture maker, who sold his furniture from his studio in the 1950’s into the 1970’s, attended the sale. He watched when his set of doublepaneled hinged walnut folding doors, carved with curvilinear designs, sold for $36,000, more than seven times the $5000 high estimate. The buyer was dealer Benjamin Stork, an active buyer throughout the sale who said he has a place in Lambertville but has shops in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

There was applause when Powell’s sculpted walnut slatetop hanging cabinet with two hinged folding doors with painted iron decoration sold on the phone for $60,000, a record for Powell’s work.

George Gilpin, in the salesroom, bought Powell’s glass-top coffee table with gilded wood and iron base for $4800, and paid $14,400 for a pair of walnut New Hope chairs with sculpted back and arms, canvas webbed seats, and velvet upholstered cushions.

The work of Michael Coffey, a contemporary studio craftsman in his seventies who works in Massachusetts, often finds its way to Sollo Rago auctions. The same trade buyer who bought so much Nakashima, bidding on the phone as number 1003, bought two Coffey coffee tables: one called Serpent, a biomorphic form made of Bubinga wood with a plate glass top, 1989, for $20,400 (est. $8000/12,000), and Pegasus, a wishbone-shaped table of African Mozambique wood on a Plexiglas base, for $13,200.

Sollo and Rago scored another record when a large (19" tall) vase by Gertrud and Otto Natzler, with blue crystalline glaze over earthenware, sold for $252,000 to a phone bidder. When asked who bought it, Rago said the buyer was a West Coast private collector, underbid on the phone by another West Coast collector. The vase came to auction because of a divorce.

“We sold a Natzler vase consigned by the husband last year for fifty-two thousand dollars, so we got this vase from the wife and estimated it at thirty-two thousand five hundred to thirtyseven thousand five hundred,” said. Rago. “I have known this pot for thirty years and was thrilled to finally get it. It is not only one of Natzler’s largest, but the glaze is astonishingly beautiful.”

Rago began selling 504 lots of contemporary art at 6 p.m. with few people in the salesroom and lots of phone bidders, absentee bidders, and bidders on the Internet. Many pottery lots went unsold in the afternoon because eBay Live had been down for most of the afternoon, but it was up at night.

“Our bottom line might have been one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand higher if eBay had been functioning,” said Rago before the Sunday sale, when the Internet connection was restored and eBay bidders were actively bidding on lower-priced lots.

Two Ruth Duckworth stoneware vessels sold as one lot for $3000 (est.$1500/3500), and a lot of five porcelain pieces by Duckworth sold for $5400 (est. $2000/4000), all to phone bidders but underbid by eBay bidders.

Sunday was a time for bargains. Some lots were knocked down for as little as $12. An eBay buyer paid $540 for a rare Heywood-Wakefield walnut lounge chair and ottoman covered in black vinyl, and another eBay bidder paid $480 for a Florence Knoll walnut dining table. An Eero Saarinen tulip dining table, made in Italy for Knoll, sold for a respectable $7200 (est. $1500/3500) on the phone.

This big sale brought in approximately $6 million for 1102 of the 1260 lots offered, with a record number of phone bidders, 318, and with eBay Live Auctions down most of the day on Saturday. Right after this auction, John Sollo and David Rago hit the trail for consignments for their next big modern design auction weekend, April 21 and 22.

When they do their next catalog, let’s hope the Sollo Rago team takes the time to give the working dates of the artist/craftsmen who made the furniture and, when known, the approximate date of manufacture.

For more information, contact Rago Arts and Auction Center at (609) 397-9374 or see the Web site (www.ragoarts.com).