Washington Memorial Embroidery Leads Potomack Auction
April 9th, 2016
The Potomack Company, Alexandria, Virginia
Photos courtesy The Potomack Company
The Potomack Company held its spring catalog auction on April 9 at its gallery in Alexandria, Virginia, and offered a mix of categories of Americana, Asian, and Continental antiques and fine art. For a second consecutive sale, old masters paintings were among the featured lots.
The auction’s highest-priced lot came from among the large selection of American folk art. The early 19th-century embroidered and painted silk memorial picture for George and Martha Washington “wrought by Eliza Gould,” estimated at $15,000/30,000, was purchased by George Washington’s Mount Vernon for $44,062.50 (including buyer’s premium).
The high lot of the Potomack auction was this 19th-century silk embroidered and painted mourning picture that depicts a personification of Columbia standing beside a memorial plinth with oval portraits of George and Martha Washington and two urns, one marked “GW” and the other “MW.” The landscape features a church and a house in the distance, with a weeping willow tree behind the memorial. The 15 15/16" x 18" (sight size) needlework was mounted in a giltwood frame with a verre églomisé surround that includes the inscription “Wrought by Eliza Gould,” and the backboard was inscribed “Mary A. Callender / from / Aunt Eliza Gould.” Estimated at $15,000/30,000, it sold for $44,062.50 to George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
This particular embroidery is well known and well traveled. In 1911 it was shown at the Copley Society Exhibition in Boston, on loan from Dwight M. Prouty; in August 1918 it was among the featured examples of needlecraft in an article in House and Garden magazine; and four years later it was noted in the “List of Accessions and Loans” in the November 1922 Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Vol. 17, No. 11). That notation indicated that the picture was “Lent by R.T. Hanes Halsey.” More recently, the needlework was out of the public eye as part of a New York private collection. With its purchase by Mount Vernon, the embroidery may now have reached its final destination.
Speaking by telephone following the sale, Susan Schoelwer, senior curator at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, described the acquisition as not simply a “great piece.” She explained, “Memorial tributes [such as this] are the least studied genre of Washington imagery. This one is unique because it shows both George and Martha.”
This embroidery will certainly add to the body of knowledge surrounding such posthumous remembrances. It is not scheduled for immediate public display, but soon it will be available for viewing through Mount Vernon’s searchable database.
One of the more highly anticipated lots came from Potomack’s newly formed books, manuscripts, and memorabilia department. It consisted of a group of 15 handwritten letters and note cards from To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee. All of the correspondence was dated between 1999 and 2004 and was written to Lee’s longtime friend Waverly Barbe, a department head at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Although all the letters were signed “Nelle” and came with their original envelopes, the archive, estimated at $10,000/15,000, did not receive an opening bid.
Recently, the sale of Harper Lee material has been somewhat problematic. The Potomack offering was the second archival lot of Lee’s correspondence that has failed to sell within the past year. In June 2015 a group of six Lee letters offered at Christie’s New York was also passed. However, on March 31 of this year a group of 29 Lee letters was offered at Nate D. Sanders Auctions in Los Angeles, but unlike Christie’s and Potomack, Sanders Auctions offered the letters individually. Twenty-five of those letters sold at the auction, and, according to Sanders’s office, they were purchased by multiple bidders.
Other noteworthy items from among the books and manuscripts were three first editions of classic American novels. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, one of 2500 first-edition copies, brought $2115; Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, a signed first-edition, first-issue copy, made $2350; and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, a first-edition, early-issue copy, sold for $1880.
For additional information, contact The Potomack Company at (703) 684-4550; website (www.potomackcompany.com).
This bright oil on canvas by Sigmund Joseph Menkes (Ukrainian, 1896-1986), Still Life with Tulips and Mandolin, signed lower right, 32½" x 26¼", sold to an Internet bidder for $12,925 (est. $6000/9000).
This 59½" high marble sculpture (est. $10,000/15,000) enjoyed intense bidding and ultimately sold for $35,250 to a persistent telephone bidder. The statue depicts a four-winged water nymph emerging from amid cresting waves and with a dragonfly on her finger. The base is inscribed “LIBELLULE” (Italian for dragonfly) and is signed “Prof Petrilli Firenze” (Professore Aristide Petrilli of Florence, who was born in 1868).
This group of 12 miniature jade and hardstone vessels that range from ¾" to 2" high and, with one exception, rest on wooden stands produced perhaps the greatest surprise of the sale. Estimated at $600/800, the lot brought $14,100.
This 3¾" diameter portrait depicts a young woman with an Elizabethan hairstyle who is wearing a fine dress with a high lace collar and a long knotted necklace. Cataloged as being by a member of the circle of Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt (Dutch, 1567-1641), it is painted in oil on a solid fruitwood disc that has been turned as a shallow molded-edge frame. Inscribed on back (in French) is “painted by Mirevelt [sic].” The portrait miniature sold to a telephone bidder for $4700 (est. $1000/1500).
This 32" x 36" x 17½" Federa mahogany and mahogany veneer console table has a shaped top with a single drawer below. The edge of the top, the apron, and the tapered square-section legs display decorative inlay, and the apron also features a band of vertical grain veneer. The hotly contested table ultimately sold to a telephone bidder for $5581.25 (est. $300/600).
The rectangular top of this circa 1820 Classical mahogany table is constructed with small squares of marble specimens inset into the mahogany frame, the center portion in a grid configuration, and the outer surround of double bands with black-veined marble between. The base has a heavy spiral-turned column supported by four legs that terminate in paw-feet casters. Measuring 30" x 29½" x 23½", the table sold for $10,575 (est. $1500/2500).
This 11½" x 12¼" ink and color on paper by Ren Yi (Chinese, 1840-1896), also known as Ren Bonian, depicts a man in peasant dress who is apparently herding several goats. Although the paper has some foxing, the painting went at $10,575 (est. $5000/7000) to a phone bidder.
Originally published in the June 2016 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2016 Maine Antique Digest
