Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  We loved the piece right away because it was so old. At some point in the early nineteenth century, a previous owner had converted the chair into a rocker, and we thought that gave it a real Wallace Nutting-type charm. We particularly enjoyed the way the chair showcased the art of the turner, the craftsman who supplied the many lathe-turned parts, including the legs, arms, and signature banister back. A lathe is a large machine, still in use today, in which a piece of wood can be clamped on a horizontal axis and then spun rapidly while a cutting tool is simultaneously used to whittle away at the surface.

  With Professor French looking on, we admired all the permutations of the turner’s craft as they appeared on that chair. There were the well-articulated rear posts, which included the legs and the vertical side supports of the chair (called the stiles), ending in a pair of small decorative finials. The bulbous swells of the decorative turnings narrowed slightly as they rose along the legs into the stiles, thrusting the viewer’s eye upward. The same occurred with the front posts, where the line of each leg grew more slender as it rose and gradually transformed into an arm support. At the back the chair featured four reeded slats of wood suspended between two cross rails. More ornate versions of these banisters or balusters required the chairmaker to take a piece of wood sized for the lathe, split it, and then lightly glue it back together. He then lathe-turned the entire glued piece and resplit the spindle when he was through. That left him with a flat surface to face the front of the chair (against which the user’s body would presumably rest) and a decorative curved half baluster in the back. It was an ingenious process.

  Left: A page from our diary documenting, among other prized possessions, Myrtle Dicker’s ginger jar. Above: Highly prized animal-decorated stoneware.

  Various treasures, including (lower left) our first furniture purchase, an eighteenth-century New England banister-back armchair.

  As with so many of the things my brother and I owned and enjoyed, we followed our dealer’s instinct and eventually sold the chair a few years later for around four hundred dollars. I always think it fortunate that Leigh and I were never rivals in our search for antiques. We always worked and bought objects as a team. Honestly, I don’t think it even occurred to us to go it alone. We just took so much pleasure in our partnership and dialogue, it would have been unnatural, if not boring, to have competed for things. At shows, however, we would very often split up in order to cover more ground. And until dealers got to know us, it was all but inevitable that some mix-ups would occur because we were twins. For example, I might notice something in a booth, ask the dealer some pointed questions, and then move on. A few moments later, my brother would pass through the same booth, spot the same item, follow up with the same line of questioning, and then get lambasted by the dealer for wasting his time once again.

  But such run-ins were rare, and they certainly never slowed us down. We continued to collect objects and information wherever and however we could, always pushing the scope of our expanding interests. We also combed the countryside for antiques at shops, shows, and auctions, and to nurture our particular passion for rare stoneware. After high school, Leigh and I both enrolled at Herkimer County Community College. But we resolved to apply ourselves diligently in order to get the good grades we would need to transfer out after our sophomore year and switch to a school better equipped to propel our interest in antiques to a new level. To finance the switch to a private college, we knew we would have to sell off most of our beloved stoneware collection, which we gradually began to do, most often privately to other collectors.

  My calling came from Williams College, which I first visited in the fall of 1976. To my mind, the school and its setting in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is one of the most beautiful spots in the country (it was used as a backdrop for the early college scenes in The Way We Were). The college itself, one of the oldest in New England, was chartered in 1793, so a good percentage of the campus architecture dates to that period, including the Admissions Office, which is located right on the town’s main street.

  When I walked into the front room of that proud nineteenth-century structure, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the sight of a tall maple high chest of drawers with an upswept, arched bonnet top. The mellow grain of the wood seemed to smolder in the dappled sunlight that streamed in through the small-paned windows that lined the room. I could barely move my eyes away from the chest in order to speak to the receptionist. But when I did, I realized that she was seated at an incredibly rare eighteenth-century butterfly table (so called because when open, its double leaves are supported from beneath by a bracket shaped like a butterfly’s wing). I stammered my name as I lightly touched the worn rounded edge of the small table. After finding my appointment in her book, the receptionist gestured for me to take a seat. I turned and quickly saw that the chair to which she pointed—much like the others that lined the room—was an early-nineteenth-century high-backed Windsor chair (so named because a prototype for the form is said to have been used by George I of England as lawn furniture at Windsor Castle). The chair’s signature design featured a curved multiple-spindle back that fit like an arched comb into the solid wood seat that rose and dipped at the center like a saddle and was supported below by slender lathe-turned legs that splayed outward.

  I was floored by my surroundings, literally. Before I could stop myself, I was down on the floor, studying the legs of the high chest of drawers that had first caught my eye. All around me the nervous chatter of parents and their teenagers quieted down, and it wasn’t long before I felt a quick tap on my shoulder. I edged out from beneath the chest, to see an admissions officer ready to usher me in for my interview. I noted the concern and sympathy on the faces of the parents as we walked by, but they needn’t have worried. That day, I had found my future on the floor of the Williams College Admissions Office.

  During my interview, I learned that the objects I had so admired all came from a large collection of American furniture that had been donated to the school in 1943 by a former graduate, Charles M. Davenport. There were 168 pieces of furniture in the collection, none of which had ever been properly researched or cataloged. After being admitted to Williams, I would spend the better part of the next two years devoting myself to that task. (Leigh had a parallel experience when the transferred to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and found that they, too, had an Americana collection for which he would also produce a catalog.)

  Dissecting the Davenport Collection was my first long-term, hands-on experience with a wide range of high-style American furniture. There were, for example, rich mahogany chests of drawers, dazzling walnut tilt-top tea tables, and a number of seventeenth-century chests that were so simple and elegant in form. Being able to handle and compare the appearance and construction of these varied pieces was a gift, for previously I had gotten no closer than a roped line at a museum. The college’s Davenport Collection also featured an astounding fifty-three Windsor chairs. This sizable inventory gave me an opportunity to examine for the first time the way a standard form was reinterpreted again and again. During my senior year, I prepared an exhibition and catalog based upon my research. Taking a cue from a show I had seen at Yale’s art gallery, I hung the chairs from fishing line strung at eye level around the rotunda of the Williams College Museum of Art. Doing so forced visitors to confront the chairs as sensual, sculptural forms rather than as merely utilitarian pieces of furniture. Just as the texture and shapes of the early hardware and hinges that Leigh and I had found in the woods nearly made audible the rapid-fire report of the blacksmith’s hammer, the bulbous turnings of these spindled chairs made the turner’s lathe whirl and whistle in my ear. Those sounds reverberate within me to this day.

  Our first business card.

  3

  Putting It Together

  LESLIE AND I HAD LONG SET OUR SIGHTS on moving to New York City, so it seemed only a matter of course that in late August 1979, with our newly minted degrees in hand, we finally made the move. We had gotten our f
irst real taste of the city back when we were sixteen, a visit that had coincided with our earliest brush with the New York auction scene. Together, they had left an indelible impression. We had decided to part with an unusual salt-glazed stoneware jug that we owned, one that was decorated with a pair of acrobats—a man grasping a woman upside down by the ankles. Human or figurative decoration is very rare in stoneware, followed by animals (such as deer or lions), birds, and, finally, flowers. We had owned the jug since we were fourteen, when we bought it at a small country auction for $3,500, which at the time was a world record for American stoneware (there was more than a moment of sustained applause in the room after the hammer fell). Because we had so much money invested in the piece and we wanted an infusion of cash to buy more things, we thought we would try our hand at a New York auction house. We took the jug to Sotheby’s for an evaluation by their folk art expert, Nancy Druckman (who within a few years would become a colleague of Leslie’s), and agreed to consign the piece.

  On the day of the sale, we drove down to the city from Mohawk with our parents. I remember how thrilling it was to walk into the salesroom proper and see the rows of furniture lining the walls (the jug had been consigned to an Americana sale that included both furniture and decorative arts) and all the activity up on the dais. Everything had a very white-glove feel. We were entranced as we watched the auctioneer move the proceedings along. His wit and style seemed a far cry from the country auctions we were used to, where the pace and timbre of the sales tended to resemble something closer to a cattle auction. Unfortunately, the auctioneer’s charms that day did nothing to boost the sale of our jug above $2,800. It was disappointing to take a loss (in retrospect, I believe that our suggested estimate of from $3,000 to $3,500 was too high and probably dampened interest in the piece), but I think the experience left us with a great sense of determination to return to that environment and learn more about its wily ways. We have since gained some vicarious satisfaction in knowing that in 1986 the same jug sold again at Sotheby’s for $28,600 and then in 1994, in a private sale, for over $60,000, meaning our teenage instincts weren’t all that bad.

  When we moved to the city in 1979, we entered a landscape for Americana that looked vastly different from what it is today. Sotheby’s, the auction house with the firmest footing in the field, had yet to move to its York Avenue space and was still headquartered in the old Parke Bernet building at Madison Avenue and Seventy-sixth Street (ironically, the same building where my gallery is today). Christie’s, the London-based auction house, had established their stateside flagship in New York only two years previously, and with it, a newly minted American Furniture Department. Harold and Albert Sack were the favorite sons of American antiques, having taken over (with their brother Robert) the firm started by their father, Israel, almost seventy-five years earlier. They had some rivalry in the persons of John Walton and Bernard and S. Dean Levy, among others. Meanwhile, the finishing touches were being made on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s newly expanded American Wing, which was to give it a sixfold increase in size. In other words, change was in the air, and we had just arrived: young, eager, and ready to prove ourselves.

  In September, Leslie entered a rigorous one-year training program at Sotheby’s—which worked as a feeder into the firm. I, on the other hand, decided to try my hand at a smaller outfit called William Doyle Galleries, which had been founded by its namesake, Bill Doyle, in 1963. Bill built his business the old-fashioned way, through hard work and perseverance. In the early years, he used to drive through the New England countryside, buy all kinds of antiques, throw them into his truck, and return to the city to sell them off the back. He was a bighearted, charismatic man and had one of the greatest minds for antiques I have ever known. It was not unusual for Bill to overpay for an estate (even after his auction business was off and running, he continued to buy furniture outright) simply because he liked the owners. After his unexpected death in 1993, the firm passed into the capable hands of his dynamic wife, Kathleen, who runs it to this day. I thought that by going with Doyle’s I would get a crash course on the ins and outs of the auction world, and I was not mistaken. I also liked the way Bill hired me, fresh-faced and totally green, within moments of our meeting, saying by way of explanation, “I understand from my friend Bob Skinner [the owner of a Massachusetts auction house] that you’ve been in the business since you were a kid. Well, that’s good enough for me.”

  I worked for Bill for nearly four years, beginning as general appraiser, then quickly moving up to the position of an estate buyer, and eventually inaugurating and heading Doyle’s American Furniture and Decorative Arts Department. When I left Doyle’s in 1984 for Christie’s to become a vice president in the appraisals department, I found it particularly hard to say good-bye to Bill, whom I had come to look upon as a great friend and mentor. The move was a necessary one for me, however, because I felt I needed to understand thoroughly the workings of an international auction house like Christie’s if I ever hoped to fulfill my long-term dream of becoming a private dealer in top-notch American furniture.

  Within a year, however, I left my job in appraisals (where I assessed general estate property from all over the country) when a position opened up in Christie’s burgeoning American Furniture Department, then running smoothly under the smart, easygoing guidance of Dean Failey. The move catapulted me to a place that I had long hoped to reach—the exclusive domain of American furniture at the highest level. More important, I was doing it at a time when the marketplace for Americana was really changing. Five years earlier, when I was still at Doyle’s, more than 85 percent of the furniture purchased at auction was bought by dealers (who then turned the merchandise around and sold it at a markup in their galleries). It was very rare to see a private collector bypass this well-entrenched system and bid independently.

  But by the mid-1980s, a new generation of buyers had arrived on the scene—many of them born negotiators, flush from their successes on Wall Street, who were willing to spend heretofore-unheard-of prices for Americana. They were a tenacious group, who often liked to bid on their own, but they needed some help analyzing the merchandise and the conditions of the market. Their need for guidance was great for me because I loved American furniture and could honestly think of nothing more enjoyable than getting others excited about it, as well. Because dealers had long dominated the field, I don’t think the auction houses were accustomed to reaching out to retail customers. In that way, the shifting marketplace was a boon to me at Christie’s (and for Leslie at Sotheby’s), because we were there in the thick of things, developing and educating clients, just as a new generation of collectors was finding its way.

  One such client was a man named Eddy Nicholson, a compact, intensely driven character (with a predilection for custom-made alligator cowboy boots), who was then president and CEO of Congoleum Corporation. Eddy well represented the new guard in Americana collecting. He had the means and intellect to seek out great objects, he enjoyed bidding for himself, and yet, as bullish as he was, his taste in furniture never strayed beyond absolute elegance. Eddy collected in earnest for a little over a decade, beginning in 1982, and during that time he probably felt a certain kinship to the wealthy colonists who had originally commissioned the many sumptuous pieces that he bought. (In 1995, Eddy abruptly decided to divest himself of his entire hard-won collection in a now legendary $13.6 million sale at Christie’s.)

  Eddy’s strategy, like that of many elite collectors of American furniture, was to home in on the purest examples of a particular furniture style, be it the lilting S curves of the sensuous baroque, the excessive and brilliant carved ornament of the rococo, or the intricate inlaid designs of America’s early Federal period. Searching for the finest examples meant that he did not limit himself to objects produced in any one city or region—a key factor to smart collecting.

  Targeting a place of manufacture is important to the collectors because design and construction techniques, such as the interpretation of the cl
aw-and-ball foot or the design of a chair’s back splat, generally developed in a manner unique to each Colonial port town, particularly those at the manufacturing hubs of the major Northeast ports. The reason for this was that the close quarters of early American cities allowed for a lot of cross-pollination and mutual inspiration among the furniture masters. Craftsmen in the port towns tended to set up shop near the waterfront, where the shipbuilding industry kept them busy and mercantile traffic was heaviest. In places like Boston and Newport, the wharves were literally lined with woodworking shops, which meant a short stroll near the dock was all an artisan needed to do to survey the competition. Today, furniture scholars have been able to trace many eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century design features to individual towns, and even to specific shops, which makes collecting American furniture all the more exciting. It allows a rich historic context to be built up around each object, which in turn informs and enhances our appreciation for the piece as a whole.

  Further compounding this interest in regional provenance is the fact that each of the major Colonial ports experienced what might be termed a golden age—a time when the town’s fashions were at the forefront of Colonial style. This makes the furniture of certain areas more desirable than examples from other regions. Boston was in the forefront of American style from roughly 1690 through the 1740s. Newport achieved its peak between the 1760s and 1780s. Philadelphia overlapped a bit with Newport, thanks to its fantastic rococo designs in the early 1750s through the 1770s, while New York furniture makers attained their distinctive mastery at the turn of the nineteenth century.