The Anne and Jeff Miller Sale

April 25th, 2015

Pook & Pook, Downingtown, Pennsylvania

Photos courtesy Pook & Pook

Single-owner sales are always memorable. Pook & Pook’s sale of the collection of J. Jefferson and Anne Weiler Miller on April 25 will be remembered as testimony to the joys of collecting. Anne (d. 2014) and Jeff (d. 2005) loved folk art, ceramics, textiles, paintings, wrought iron, decorated boxes, delft punch bowls, and Liverpool pitchers. They also bought antique furniture for their large, comfortable house and arranged it all with great taste to be enjoyed.

Jeff was the major collector; Anne went along for the ride. They bought what they liked, never for investment. Like English collectors, they chose form and rarity above condition. The Millers were retail buyers.

After practicing law for 12 years, Jeff decided he would rather be a museum curator than a lawyer. Dick Wood, a well-known Baltimore dealer, suggested he apply to the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. He did, was accepted, and even though he was married with five children, he commuted from Baltimore to Wilmington, Delaware, for two years, leaving Anne to hold down the fort. He added a master’s degree from the University of Delaware to his B.A. from Johns Hopkins University and his law degree from University of Maryland and became curator of glass and ceramics at the Smithsonian Institution. He moved his family to Chevy Chase, Maryland, and lived in suburban Washington until he retired from the Smithsonian and moved back to his beloved Baltimore and became director of the Maryland Historical Society for five years. In Baltimore he served on committees at the Baltimore Museum of Art and Homewood, the historic seat of the Carroll family, and was a member of the Folk Art Society of America and the American Ceramic Circle.

Jeff was an avid fisherman and traveled to all parts of the country to fish. He and his family spent summers at their family cottage in Charlevoix, Michigan, and he collected carvings of fish. The Millers hosted family and friends, had weddings for their kids at the Baltimore house, enjoyed their 13 grandchildren, and always found time to collect in a broad range of categories.

In 2001 they donated 333 iron and metal objects from their collection to Winterthur. They said they always collected objects that had a story to tell, but they also had to have aesthetic appeal.

Jeff kept records of every piece he bought, recording on cards who sold it to him, what it cost, mentions of the piece in literature, or anything he learned about it. The family made that information available to Pook & Pook, along with the insurance appraisals done after Jeff’s death. That is why the catalog listed the source of almost every object and many references. The list of dealers reads like a who’s who of the 20th-century Americana trade that created the market that flourished for two generations: Dick Wood, Avis and Rockwell Gardiner, Leonard Balish, George Schoellkopf, Bettie Mintz, W. M. Schwind, Don Walters, the Stradlings, Bihler and Coger, Good and Hutchinson, Ginsburg and Levy, James and Nancy Glazer, William and Connie Hayes, Harry Hartman,
Sidney Gecker, Robert Thayer, Milly McGehee, Stiles Colwill, John Newcomer, Jim Hirsheimer, Ed Weissman, Frank and Barbara Pollack, Chris Machmer, Greg Kramer, Austin Miller, Malcolm Magruder, William and Teresa Kurau, and the list goes on.

The Millers also bought at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Pook & Pook, Northeast Auctions, Skinner, and Garth’s, and they often bought from landmark single-owner sales, including Deyerle, Flack, Shelley, etc.

The Miller sale now enters that history book. Sold at a time when the market is soft, the collection gave a big boost to the middle market. Only seven lots sold for more than $20,000, and only 26 lots topped $10,000. Some things brought less than Jeff paid, and some things brought more. There was something for every pocketbook. Much of the sale went to collectors, but the trade was able to buy. Estimates were ridiculously low.

Of the 535 lots offered, 531 sold; that is a 99% sell-through rate, and the sale brought more than Pook & Pook’s estimates. The total was $1,226,506 (including buyers’ premiums). The estimates figured without buyers’ premiums were $440,200/763,850. Single-owner sales generally bring a third more than various-owners sales, and this one did.

For example, the Millers’ Snow Hill redware bowl, one of the 40 used in the love feasts at the Snow Hill Nunnery in Franklin County, Pennsylvania, probably made by the Bell family pottery in nearby Waynesboro, sold for $10,200; the day before in the various-owners sale at Pook & Pook another similar bowl sold for $4080.

The highest price at the sale was $26,400, more than twice the high estimate, for the cover lot, an oil painting on canvas of St. Joseph’s Academy in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Milly McGehee bought it at Northeast Auctions in August 1998 for $27,600. The buyer at the Miller sale was dealer Pat Garthoeffner of Lititz, Pennsylvania, underbid on the phone by dealer David Wheatcroft of Westborough, Massachusetts.

The same price was paid for a red-painted box decorated with blue and white pinwheel flowers by the Compass Artist. It went to the trade on the phone. The Millers bought it from Chris Machmer in 1984, probably for a lot less. It was once owned by
H.F. du Pont, who kept it at his Long Island house.

A surprising $22,800 was paid for a painted dome-top New England box with green, red, and yellow sponged circles against bold diagonal graining. The estimate was $1000/1500, and two phone bidders wanted it. The same price of $22,800 (est. $10,000/20,000) was paid for a still life painting of fruit, attributed to Severin Roesen, by a private collector on the phone. A primitive still life painting of fruit, possibly by Isaac Nuttman (1816-1872) of Newark, New Jersey, sold for $24,000.

The most expensive piece of furniture was a tiny drop-leaf Massachusetts table that sold to a collector on the phone for $18,000 (est. $2000/4000). It was only 22½" high x 10½" wide x 28½" wide when open. The Millers had owned it since 1961 when they bought it at the Long Ago Shop in York, Pennsylvania, for $725. Four phone bidders competed up to $8500, and then there were two up to $15,000. The buyer’s premium brought the price to $18,000. There are two similar tables of this size at Winterthur.

There was a lot of bidding in the room, on the phones, and on Bidsquare. Bidsquare bidders spent $93,775 and were active underbidders. Friends wanted souvenirs; dealers bought for stock; and collectors competed. The pictures and captions tell a lot more.

For more information, contact Pook & Pook at (610) 269-4040 or check the website (www.pookandpook.com).

Originally published in the July 2015 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2015 Maine Antique Digest