California Painting Leads Shannon's $3.6 Million Fall Sale

Shannon's Fine Art Auctioneers, Old Greenwich, Connecticut

by Jeanne Schinto

Photos courtesy Shannon's

The Samarkand in Santa Barbara, California, is a retirement community now, but when its flower-festooned terrace was painted by Colin Campbell Cooper in the late 1920's, it was the swanky Samarkand Persian Hotel. The large (36" x 46") oil on canvas, widely exhibited and reviewed from 1927 to 1934, went out of sight for decades. Recently rediscovered in a private collection in the Midwest, it sold for $456,000 (including buyer's premium) at Shannon's in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on October 29, 2009.

The price, $156,000 above its high estimate, is an auction price record for a California work by the artist, said Gene Shannon, who identified the successful phone bidder as a California collector.

There were plenty of other good results at this sale, which grossed approximately $3.6 million on an offering of 240 lots. Among them were 19 artworks from a corporate collection. The corporation is deaccessioning works that are "not pertinent to what they are doing now," in Shannon's phrase. The castoffs included Boyhood of Lincoln, an 1867 oil on panel by Eastman Johnson, that went at $90,000 to a buyer on the phone identified by Shannon's as an American museum.

In the same consignment came a good Connecticut winter scene in oil on canvas by Ernest Lawson that made $45,600; an oil on canvas portrait of a nursing mother by Gari Melchers that brought $43,200; and a Robert Lewis Reid pastel of a beautiful woman, her face framed by a parasol, that sold for $46,800, a new price record for a Reid in that medium.

Shannon's sales are semiannual, April and October. At the one on October 30, 2008, Shannon felt the effects of September's crash but considered himself lucky to take in $2.9 million. "We didn't have the buyers, but since the catalog had been closed a couple of months earlier, we did have the goods," he said. On April 30, 2009, however, while the buyers had returned, desirable goods were scarce. "We closed the catalog in February, when people were still paralyzed by fear," he recalled. As a result, sales did not come close to approaching his previous April's $4.2 million tally. This time, there was evidence that the buyers and desirable artworks were starting to get back in sync.

"There is a lot of money out there, and people are hesitant to put it back into Wall Street, so they're buying art," said Shannon. "More than one person has told me, 'I'd rather hang this on my wall for ten years. I don't care if I make money or not. I'm going to enjoy it.'"

Now if only dealers would recover, then Shannon would surely improve his buy-in rate, which in good times, he said, averages 15% but this time was 24%. We did see dealers at the preview but few at the sale itself. Nor were there many represented by absentee or phone bids, said Shannon. "The dealer bidding was not strong. Historically, our auctions have been eighty percent to private clients, ten percent to dealers bidding for a client, and ten percent to the trade. Even in recent years people weren't buying a lot for their racks. Nowadays they definitely want to sell from their inventories."

Shannon was a dealer himself for the 25 years prior to the founding of his Milford, Connecticut, based auction house in 1997. His business partner is his wife, Mary Anne. His daughter, Sandra Germain, is the company's manager.

The dealer experience shows. The sale was obviously well edited, with few clunkers in the bunch; the preview was expertly hung and lit with 300 halogen lamps; and loose-leaf binders of condition reports were available for perusing.

The smooth-running sale belied the magnitude of the behind-the-scenes efforts, made more difficult this time by the condition of the space itself. Always a challenge, it put Shannon this time dangerously close to potential disaster. The gymnasium of a recreation center built in 1950 for employees of a nearby plant (now demolished) for the Electrolux Corporation, it was bought by the town of Greenwich in 1966.

Unfortunately, the building has been allowed to deteriorate, and Shannon said he has had enough of it. The roof was leaking during the preview, and banks of lights had to be shut down for safety's sake. Worse, Shannon came within a hair's breadth of having the auction itself shut down by the town fire marshal. "We will not be auctioning there anymore," he declared on sale day, which, thankfully, was sunny. Instead, he is looking for another space "somewhere in Greenwich with easy access for the public."

The address is high-end, to be sure, but these auctions don't necessarily draw bidders from the 'hood, as it were. "It almost doesn't matter that we're in Greenwich," said Shannon. "We had bidders from forty-one states and ten foreign countries, and they were from all walks of life-people from real estate, in retail, medical people."

It's common at auctions for most of the winning bids on top lots to come by phone. Here the trend seemed even more pronounced. Indeed, the podium of Shannon's debonair London-trained auctioneer, Harmer Johnson, was directly in front of the rows of 20 phone-bid takers, who resembled a series of semaphores as they snapped their white cards in the air to compete against one another. Meanwhile, the live bidders were off to Johnson's far left, and spotters called out their infrequent winning bidder numbers, especially those too far away for him to see clearly.

Still, Greenwich became a bedroom community in the first place because of its location, and many of the 100 or so people in the audience drove to the sale with relative ease from New York and northern New Jersey. Several others took the train, arriving by taxi from the nearby Old Greenwich station.

From the moment the catalog came in the mail, we had struggled—and failed—to come up with a key to the principle behind the sale's organization. It did not follow a chronology or a subject pattern that we could discern. At the preview Shannon enlightened us about it with a smile. He said he believes in laying out an auction "like a piece of music," building to "a crescendo," then to another, until he has created a series of them.

The sale did seem to work that way, with moments of dramatic bidding coming at intervals. The arrangement also gave the phone-bid takers a chance to ready their next group of long-distance competitors.

One of the times the cymbals failed to crash was when a Winslow Homer watercolor was offered. A 3¾" x 5 5/8" view of Ten Pound Island in Gloucester harbor, it had come from a Massachusetts estate and is in the Lloyd Goodrich and Abigail Booth Gerdts catalogue raisonné. But bidders did not respond in any way.

"That there was no interest in it whatsoever was a surprise," said Shannon, whose estimate on it was $200,000/300,000. "It had great history, pedigree"-i.e., it was given by Homer to his friend Samuel T. Preston, and period photographs in the catalogue raisonné show it hanging in Preston's rooms in New York in 1880. Still, it was a tiny thing, not much bigger than a postcard. Shannon was asked if the trouble was that people in these times want a little more to show for their money. He said no. Rather, he had heard the trouble was the watercolor medium, not its size.

Works by Antonio Pietro Martino, William Bradford, and Alfred Thompson Bricher were among the other no-sales. But at least this can be said for all passed lots of the evening: there was no question about their disposition, since the auctioneer clearly announced their failure rather than calling a phantom bidder number. How refreshing!

Besides the corporate collection, another notable consignment came from a Woodstock, New York, estate. Those pieces included 20th-century abstract works by Rolph Scarlett, one of which made a new auction price record for the artist when it sold for $78,000. Another Scarlett from that estate brought $50,400. The previous record for the artist, $50,000, had only recently been made, at Christie's on September 29, 2009.

"Scarlett may be the next hot Modernist," Shannon said. "The scuttlebutt is that there will be a book about him and a major museum show of his works coming soon." Just four and a half years ago, on July 29, 2005, Grace Glueck in the New York Times called Scarlett "little known." The Canadian painter and designer of stage sets, industrial products, and jewelry had once been a favorite of Hilla Rebay, founder of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, which eventually became the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. But, Glueck noted, his "star waned" with Rebay's departure from the Guggenheim in the early 1950's.

Shannon said he hoped to have more works by Scarlett in his next sale, tentatively scheduled for April 29.

For more information, contact Shannon's at (203) 877-1711 or see the Web site (www.shannons.com).

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