by Leigh Keno
The table that sold at Christie's in 1991.
Thierry and I rendezvoused with the dealer at his home on a bustling street in the heart of Milan and then walked down the block to his nearby shop. The dealer was a well-dressed, well-groomed man, probably in his late fifties, with graying hair and a small mustache. I remember that, despite my jet lag, I watched him with a feeling of great excitement as he fumbled about for his keys. (The last moments of a long journey to a new object are sometimes the longest.)
Once inside, I was surprised by the decidedly informal look of the shop. It felt more like a workplace than a private gallery that had been set up to make an impression on the public. The French furniture that Thierry had come to see was located in the front room, so the dealer and I left him there to examine the various pieces while we walked deeper into the shop, toward a smaller room in the rear. The lights were out, so I stood in the virtual darkness for a moment or two, waiting for the dealer to turn them on. Just ahead, I could barely make out some shadowy furniture forms. Click. The lights went on, and immediately my eyes settled upon the two objects I had flown across an ocean to see—the Lannuier pier tables.
First and foremost, I was struck by the resemblance of the pair, which stood side by side, to the first pier table I had handled. The similarity in design was extraordinary—from the white marble tops, to the golden caryatids, to the outstretched lion's-paw feet—and I had no doubt these pieces had been made en suite with the earlier table. I glanced over at the dealer, who was watching me carefully to read my reaction. I smiled my approval and then made a gesture toward the tables to signal that I was going to step in and evaluate them more closely.
One of the most compelling aspects of the pair was that they appeared to have survived with their original surface intact. Typically, Lannuier had used a combination of matte and burnished gilding to give subtle contrast to the gilded figures. Along the gilded wing tips and torsos of the women, the gold was burnished bright, kept that way, perhaps, by fastidious dusting with soft cloths through the years. Furthermore, each table had apparently withstood a fair share of spills, because there were water marks and stains noticeable on both the gilding and the wood. I thought these areas of discoloration lent a delightful aura of vulnerability and authenticity to the tables and pointed to the life they had lived.
Like the earlier table I had sold, these two examples each had a pane of mirrored plate glass at the back, flanked by a pair of half-round figured mahogany columns. I noticed on each that the plate-glass back was marked by small black spots where the silvering had peeled away from the mirror. Like the stains on the gilding and the wood, I took this as a good sign, because it meant the panes were probably old. Furthermore, when I glanced into each mirror, my reflection seemed slightly distorted. I tapped the glass on each table lightly with my fingers and saw that each shivered slightly from the impact. That meant that the glass was thin, just as a nineteenth-century mirror ought to be. To bolster this point, I glanced at the back of the tables and saw that the backboards had never been removed. Each was secured with nails topped by slightly irregular heads that had clearly never been tampered with.
Now I moved on to the lively mahogany veneers displayed on the tables' skirts, bases, and rear columns (veneering is a process by which a thin layer of a valuable figured wood is glued onto a cheaper structural wood to provide a more stylish surface). Everywhere, the thin crotch wood (sliced from the juncture where a large branch meets the trunk) felt just as it should—seamless and smooth.
Next I moved on to the ormolu mounts, which were positioned on the skirt exactly as they had been on the first table, at the center and at the front corners, although the patterns of the appliqués themselves were slightly different from the earlier piece. Because of that variation, I wanted to confirm that the metalwork was original to the tables. To do so, I needed to examine the wood beneath each mount to see if the shadows matched the shape of the decorative cast metal and if there were no additional entry holes or markings left from an earlier set. This was not difficult to do because each mount was held in position by only three or four short tapered prongs that protruded from its back. I easily lifted a few from each table and was pleased to see that in every case, the wood below was dark and not oxidized.
The marble tops were next on my agenda. At this point, Thierry had joined us in the room, having finished with the pieces in the front, which, from the look on his face, he had found disappointing. “Well, this is a good-looking pair,” he said to me as we removed the top from each table. I peered down into the framework of each table and was relieved to see both were stamped twice—on the top of each of the two front corner blocks—with the now familiar mark H. Lannuier New-York. Neither table, however, bore a copy of the paper label seen on the earlier piece. I took a Polaroid camera out of my bag and shot a few pictures of the tables.
From the look of the shop, French furniture was clearly the dealer's forte. This made me somewhat nervous, because French furniture is collected under a completely different set of rules than American pieces. For one thing, there is no such worship of original patina. If anything, an old surface is considered a sign that a piece has been neglected by its previous owner. Even in the eighteenth century, not long after the furniture was first produced, French pieces were being refinished with polish and varnish to a much higher degree than their American counterparts. I wanted to make sure that the Italian dealer understood that American collectors view original surface as a strong indicator of authenticity. I turned to Thierry and asked him to explain in no uncertain terms that the furniture we were examining would greatly diminish in value if it were cleaned. Thierry translated my concern into French, and the dealer nodded his reply. He understood.
Not long after that, the three of us went out for a meal at a crowded restaurant nearby, where we were joined by the dealer's wife, a chic dark-haired Frenchwoman. Now removed from the furniture, my energy faded quickly. The time difference was really beginning to catch up with me and the conversation whirling around me in French and Italian certainly didn't help. At one point, though, I asked Thierry to query the dealer on the history of the tables. Was there anything more that he knew?
The dealer nodded quickly. Yes. Recently, he had learned that the elderly woman who owned the tables was a descendant of a woman named Eugénie de Bouchart. Bouchart was the mistress of the original owner of the furniture—a man named James Leray de Chaumont. According to the dealer, Leray was born into a titled family of French merchants but had spent many years in New York, married an heiress from New Jersey, and even became an American citizen, which gave him the right to purchase land there. (I later learned that at one point Leray owned upward of 600,000 acres in northern New York State.) Long after the death of his wife in 1812, Leray returned to Paris, where he apparently took up with Bouchart, an actress, to whom he willed all his personal property. Following his death in 1840, she inherited it (despite the fact that he had two surviving children by his American wife).
The tables' likely first home:the Leray mansion in Jefferson county, New York, built circa 1808.
Hearing this tale revived me. Finally, the presence of this exquisite group of New York furniture in France made sense—it had been commissioned by a Frenchman, from a Frenchman, while both were living on American shores. But on the flight back to New York, try as I might to rest and enjoy the memory of those beautiful tables standing side by side, I instead felt an overwhelming sense of unease. I couldn't shake the thought of the highly polished French furniture stacked around them. My concern was so great that on the journey home I drafted a letter to the dealer, in which I reiterated my position about the importance of original finish on American pieces. The next day, back at my desk at Sotheby's, I bolstered my written argument with photographs of a few actual examples plucked from my files, including two pairs of identical mid-eighteenth-century Boston side chairs that we had recently sold. The first pair had a crusty old finish and had brought $120,000 at auction, whil
e the second set, which had been completely skinned, or cleaned, had sold for around $30,000. That nearly $100,000 price difference was based upon surface alone.
James Leray de Chaumont.
I then had the letter translated into French, along with my formal proposal on the pair (giving each table a pre-sale estimate of from $300,000 to $500,000), and I sent it and the photographs overnight to Milan. Within days, I received a brief response from the dealer. The tables were on their way to Sotheby's. When they arrived, I went down to the loading dock to see them uncrated, just as I had with the earlier table. But when the lid came off and the sides fell down on the first box, I was met by a shocking sight—a table I simply did not recognize. Although the piece displayed the same decorative elements of the pair I had seen in Italy—the marble top (wrapped separately), the gilded caryatids, the mirrored back—the resemblance stopped there. Quite simply, this looked like a brand-new table.
My first thought was that I had been duped, that the table I had evaluated in Milan had been replaced with a copy. But just as quickly, I was overcome with that sickening feeling that hits when your worst fears are about to be realized. Suddenly, I knew with great certainty that the Italian dealer, for whatever reason of his own, had chosen to disregard my advice about the furniture. I couldn't stop shaking my head as I watched the men on the loading dock uncrate the second table. It, too, had suffered the same fate.
I was so distressed, I started pacing around the pair, looking for any points of reference to their former state. There were none to be found. The mahogany wood had been heavily cleaned and polished, the gilding repainted a bright shade of yellow gold, and the original nut brown surface of the pine framework had been rubbed down with a reddish liquid stain that completely obscured the early surface. Even the lovely shadows beneath the brass ormolu mounts had been erased. To my mind, what the dealer had done was as bad as repainting and reoutfitting a vintage 1962 Ferrari GTO Team Car (the Mona Lisa of all cars) for a more modern look.
I couldn't get back to my desk fast enough to call the dealer in Milan and ask him what had happened. Why had he disregarded my warnings, particularly given Sotheby's track record with the earlier table, which had been only lightly touched up? He explained that the family would never have wanted to send the two tables to auction in the grungy state in which I had seen them. It was a matter of pride. I could barely contain my disappointment.
Two of James Leray's tables, each unmistakably the work of master cabinetmaker Charles-Honoré Lanmiier.
I managed to contain my anger, knowing that even though the tables had been stripped and dipped, they remained the work of master cabinetmaker Charles-Honoré Lannuier and it was my job to promote them as best I could. I advised the dealer that given the altered condition of the pair, it would be wise to adjust the presale estimate to broaden the pool of potential buyers, but he was unbending in his commitment to the reserve (the lowest price for which the owner would agree to sell). The previous pier table had set a record for classical furniture, and he was confident that this pair would do the same.
Later that day, I ran into Thierry in the hallway and told him what had happened.
“Typical,” he said with a slightly bemused look. “A striking example of what not to do with American furniture. I suppose we should have anticipated it, given all the French pieces in that shop. The rival aesthetics of our genres are just too deeply ingrained.”
When I began showing the tables to collectors like Stuart Feld and Peter Terian, it was immediately clear that they were not going to sell. No one was willing to accept them in their refurbished state. Even the twenty or thirty photos that I had taken on my initial visit with the pair failed to bolster their case. Stuart told me point-blank that he thought the two were frauds. “These are the same tables,” I explained, pointing to the swirled grain of the mahogany wood clearly evident in the photographs and still discernible through the thick gloss of the newly shellacked surface. “The brilliant striations of the grain essentially amount to the fingerprint of the wood. They are completely unique and cannot be copied.” Still, this was not enough to convince him.
Needless to say, the tables did not find a buyer at the October 1992 sale. The general rule of thumb when important objects (like this pair) do not sell at auction is that they should be taken out of circulation for a while before being offered again. New buyers enter the market and hopefully the memory of their failure will fade or changes in the market will affect the way they are perceived. For three years, James Leray's beautiful pier tables sat in the Sotheby's warehouse. In January 1995, I notified the dealer that an acceptable amount of time had passed and that the pair could be offered again. I also recommended that he lower the estimate range to $150,000 to $200,000 each. This time, the tables ended up selling, to a southern collector with very eclectic taste (she freely mixes old-master paintings with Arts and Crafts and contemporary). Looking back on that sale now, I think she got a great buy. Despite their tragic refurbishment, the tables remain among the most ambitiously designed and extraordinarily well-made American tables I have ever seen.
In the fall of 1998, I once again heard from the dealer in Milan. He wanted me to go to the Christie's warehouse in Long Island City to examine a Lannuier center table that he had sent there (presumably in response to the poor showing of the paired pier tables at Sotheby's). Now he was unhappy because John Hays, my counterpart at Christie's, had told him the table was fake. News travels quickly in the auction world, and I had already heard rumors about the table, so I was curious to see it in person. A few days later, in the company of John Nye, then the senior cataloger for my department (he is now the director), I visited the Christie's warehouse (an occurrence that is not as unusual as it sounds).
It didn't take long for us to render an opinion on the marble-top center table with four winged female figures at its base. John Hays was absolutely correct: The piece was either a complete fake or one that had been built around a few older elements (I strongly suspected the latter). Having arguably sold more Lannuier furniture at auction than anyone else in the world, I was fairly certain that Lannuier had indeed made the four caryatids. The style and quality of the carving was undeniably superb. But on the rest of the table, the same high level of craftsmanship did not exist. The mahogany veneers were of poor quality, the brass inlay running around the table's edge was crude and imprecise and the construction details of the base and frame simply didn't come close to matching the jewel-like precision for which Lannuier was known. I recalled for a moment the alleged pair of Lannuier torchéres that the dealer had mentioned to me during our first phone call, a decade before. Could these caryatids have been lifted from those mysterious and still-unseen pieces? I could only hope not.
8
Catch and Release
ON A CHILLY NOVEMBER AFTERNOON IN 1994, I received a phone call at my shop from Morgan MacWhinnie, the Southampton antiques dealer who had led me to the Tillinghast suite of furniture. Seconds into the conversation, it was clear that he had some news for me.
“Yesterday I was up in Portsmouth visiting my old friend Ed Weissman,” Morgan said, “and he told me a story that I think you'll want to hear.” He paused for a moment and then added in a leading tone, “Although I almost didn't get it out of him!”
Well that got my attention. I was only marginally acquainted with Morgan's friend, a sturdy bulldog of a guy whose ads for his New Hampshire antiques business always begin “Discover the Source—Ed Weissman.” But if Morgan said Ed was the source of a tantalizing story, I'd certainly hear him out.
“Go on,” I urged Morgan, who clearly needed little encouragement.
Back in September, Morgan said, Ed and his wife, Margaret, were vacationing in Buenos Aires. On the day of their arrival in the Argentine capital, while Margaret rested in their hotel room, Ed went out to explore the neighborhood and stopped in a local bookstore. While there, he noticed a nice-looking bronze statue of a lion set on a marble plinth in a corner near the stac
ks. Ed asked the store's two young owners (a brother and sister) about it and learned that the statue was on loan from their parents, whose antiques shop was a short walk from the bookstore. A quarter of an hour later, Ed found himself in a narrow store that was well stocked with decorative European furnishings and Asian art, most of which didn't really interest him.
When he said as much to the woman minding the shop (the mother of the book–store owners, who, as it turned out, spoke perfect English), she asked him what he did like. “American furniture,” Ed replied. The woman paused thoughtfully for a moment and then said, “I think my husband knows of an American piece.” The woman called her husband out of the back and spoke a few words to him in Spanish. He then proceeded to draw a quick sketch on a sheet of paper. When the man was through, Ed found himself staring at something that “looked like a bastardized nineteenth-century English Edwardian secretary,” he told Morgan.
As Ed gazed down at the page rather skeptically, the woman explained that the secretary was owned by another pair of antiques dealers, who kept a shop in the nearby suburb of Acassuso. If Ed wanted to see it, she would call ahead. “She was pretty aggressive,” Ed later reported to Morgan, “but in a nice way. And when she found out how I made my living, she seemed determined to help me.”
At that point, Ed realized that he had been away from his wife longer than he had anticipated and that she might be getting worried. So he left the small shop without having committed to a trip to Acassuso and returned to the hotel. When he arrived back, he immediately told Margaret what had happened. “What should I do?” Ed asked her, knowing that they already had plans to visit a mountain village with a tour group the next day. “This could really be a wild-goose chase.”