Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  Carefully, I removed the top from the base by releasing the few screws that anchored it to the table's skirt. Then I laid the top, back side up, on the floor and set the table's frame down next to it on one of its two longer side rails. Now I could compare the inner wood of that longer rail with the wood of the top. I raked a strong light evenly across the two boards. I saw there in the sharp beam what I was looking for—color applied to both the inside of the side rail and the underside of the top. I made the same comparison against the other three rails, and by the time I had worked my way around the table, I was more certain than ever that the color was as old as it was honest. It had definitely not been brushed on to mask the marriage of a newer top with an older frame, as earlier appraisers had once suggested. Furthermore, with the top now removed, I could see that the four original screws and their corresponding holes aligned exactly. There were no extraneous holes on the top or frame left by a later alteration.

  By the time I rejoined the top with the base, I was more convinced than ever of the authenticity of this extraordinary piece, for which there seemed to be no exact precedent. So imagine my surprise the next morning, while browsing through a new book by cabinetmaker Jeffrey P. Greene called American Furniture of the 18th Century, when I came across a photograph of a table that looked to be identical to the Brintnall piece. (I like books by cabinetmakers because they often use exploded views or diagrams of the furniture to explain construction techniques.) To my great excitement, the table featured a top handled identically to the one on the Brintnall example and also featured claw-and-ball feet with openings above the balls—two of the key issues raised by the curators at Yale. From the caption, I learned that the table pictured was the one from the John Brown House in Providence—the one that Pat Kane had mentioned to me but which she had never seen.

  Knowing that Pat had intimated that there had been issues in the past as to the authenticity of the table in Providence, I called Linda Eppich, the curator at the John Brown House, to learn more about the piece directly. The next day, I flew up to Providence to meet with her and see the table for myself. It was then that I discovered that the table bore a line of descent in the Herreshoff-Sperry family, the members of which were the direct descendants of the wealthy Providence merchant John Brown (1736–1803) and generous donors to the Rhode Island Historical Society. For the piece to have a Herreshoff provenance was spectacular, because some of the most important and best-preserved Goddard-Townsend objects known had descended in that family. It made me curious to learn what kind of problems the table allegedly had.

  As it turned out, those “Problems” really had to do with the learning curve of furniture research. There simply hadn't been enough information available to the curatorial staff when the table was evaluated in 1983 (initially, they thought it was a nineteenth-century piece). Just like the Brintnall example at Yale, this table had been misunderstood because there was nothing else exactly like it known. The existence of the Herreshoff-Sperry piece, recently authenticated as a John Goddard piece, bolstered the strength of the Brintnall table because it supplied the type of stylistic comparison upon which American furniture research thrives. In that way, the rediscovery of each table helped confirm the authenticity of the other.

  Needless to say, my spirits were high as the show date loomed. I knew that an object this masterful would always sell—it was simply too rare and special to remain in limbo for long. But given the table's hefty price tag, I knew it would be smart to introduce the piece discretely to at least one key player before it went to the Armory, just to boost the odds. The collector I ended up contacting was someone who, I knew, had for years yearned to find a superb Newport tea table—a person, who, in my opinion, would be prepared to go all the way. One evening, we clocked a number of hours with the piece, surrounded by what amounted to a virtual picture gallery of related examples, because he was the type of client who thrived on that sort of careful form-by-form comparison.

  I had just ushered him out of the gallery at the end of our session, having received his assurance that he would in all probability make every attempt to be first in my booth on opening night, or send someone else in his stead. I had just returned the tea table to its hiding place beneath a blanket in my inner office when the phone rang. It was Leslie. He and Albert Sack had just had a drink across the street at the Carlyle Hotel. He wanted to know if they could stop by.

  “Come on over,” I said.

  Minutes later, I welcomed them in with a bottle of Scotch and some eighteenth-century port glasses. As I poured the liquor all around, I realized that Leslie was trying to signal me. He pointed his head toward the double wood doors of my office. Being a twin, I instantly knew the message he was trying to convey. Leslie wanted me to show Albert the Newport tea table, which he assumed was hidden in my office.

  Now, Albert may be a professional rival, but he is first and foremost a friend, not to mention a legend in the field, one whose love of Americana knows no bounds. Leslie was right: It would be a shame for him to leave my shop, never knowing he had been feet away from that incredible piece.

  “Albert,” I said, as he settled into a large eighteenth-century Boston easy chair, “I want to show you something.”

  I walked into my office and returned a minute later grasping the table with both hands, then set it upon the carpeted floor in front of Albert. Leslie and I then stood to the side (both grinning from ear to ear) and watched Albert assess the table from his seat. Starting at the gleaming top, he worked his way from the sinuous edge to the wavy skirt and down to the powerful legs and feet. “Well now,” he said in a low, deep voice, “that's incredible.”

  Within a few days, though, I was finally able to take the Brintnall tea table officially out of hiding and present it to the public at large in my booth at the Winter Antiques Show. Although I couldn't really fulfill my fantasy of showing the table solo—imagine how disconcerted potential customers would be by a single object for sale with a price tag in the range of $4 million—I had surrounded the piece with a variety of objects that were beautiful in their own right.

  The Britnall tea table on display at the 1998 New York Winter Antiques Show.

  There was, for example, an outstanding early Philadelphia rococo tall-case clock that stood just under ten feet in height—nearly the farthest depth of a swimming pool—which had already generated a buzz because I had advertised it in The Magazine Antiques. Every year, I have the first booth to the right of the entrance to the show. My close proximity to the gate means that as the opening hour nears, I am keenly aware of the growing buzz out in the hall of buyers waiting to enter.

  A few minutes after four o'clock, a pair of security guards ushered the swelling crowd into a large room, satellite to the show space, replete with windows designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Here, champagne and hors d'oeuvres were being served before the event's official 4:30 start. Bob Filed, the mild-mannered furniture conservator, who had been standing patiently at the head of that group on behalf of my client, was first to enter that room. He stopped momentarily to grab a drink, bypassed the food, and then stationed himself near a doorway on the far side of the room that was cordoned off by a velvet rope. There he remained for the next half hour, until the crimson cord was lifted, whereupon he and the dozens behind him finally moved forward into the main exhibition space at a pace that he later described as like being in Grand Central Station during rush hour.

  I had just turned to face the doors as they were thrown open at 4:30 P.M. and the well-heeled crowd of early ticket holders began to stream into the show, so it was hard to miss Bob Filed quickly bearing down upon my booth. He had the confident look on his face of someone about to complete a job well done. Bob walked purposefully up to the tea table at the center of the booth, placed one hand upon the gleaming surface of its cool mahogany top, and turned to face me. Tapping the table lightly with his palm, Bob announced, “I'll take it.”

  The selling price for the table? $3.65 million.

  Bo
b then pointed to the tall-case clock, which had a price tag of $365,000. “I'll take that, too.”

  The words had just left his lips when Wendy Cooper and Michael Podmaninsky, the senior curator of American Furniture and the director of conservation, respectively, at Winterthur, came briskly into the booth. They had seen my ad for the clock in The Magazine Antiques and were anxious to examine the piece, but as holders of the twentieth spot on the line, they were literally seconds too late.

  Bob and I sealed the deal with a handshake, and as he turned to leave, I placed a red sticker on the table's description card, indicating the object had been sold. I knew that news of the sale, which instantly set an opening-night record for the show, would spread quickly across the selling floor. However, since my client wanted to remain anonymous, I was never able to answer the evening's burning question: “Who bought the table?”

  Later in the evening, Yale's Pat Kane, who was also in attendance that night, stopped by my booth to visit her former charge. Silently, she regarded the table, which dazzled in the glare of the hot exhibition lights. “Doesn't it look great?” I said to her gently.

  “It's quite a piece,” she replied softly, nodding her head, “It will be missed.”

  11

  Double Take

  IT WAS A FAIRLY TYPICAL MONDAY MORNING in the American Furniture Department at Sotheby's in early October 1998. The phones were reawakening after the quiet of the weekend, a few pieces of furniture had just arrived to be photographed for an upcoming catalog, and the all-important mail (the lifeblood of the department) had already been distributed. I was sitting in my office scanning some catalog proofs when John Nye, the young, smart, mild-mannered, and invariably bow-tied senior cataloger for the department, walked in holding a photograph.

  “Leslie, you've got to take a look at this table!” John is rarely given to histrionics, so when I heard the urgency in his voice, I braced myself for something truly extraordinary.

  The essence of grace and beauty: the S-shaped legs of the marble-top table.

  I was not disappointed. The photo he extended toward me featured a magnificent-looking pier table with a gray-veined white marble slab top and a trim mahogany cabriole-legged frame. I marveled at the understated S shape of the legs and the fluid handling of the skirt, which was edged in a rippling pattern of cyma and ogee curves on three of the table's four sides. The powerful claws that gripped the round ball feet were formal and stylized—utterly in keeping with the cool beauty of the entire form. The mahogany frame was so gracefully rendered, it seemed to belie the fact that it was designed to support the massive weight of the solid marble top (which, judging from the size of the slab, easily weighed close to two hundred pounds). Based upon the distinctive shape of the skirt and treatment of the legs, I thought the table was probably made in Boston around 1755.

  “This is fantastic,” I said to John. “What's the story?”

  “I just got off the phone with the owner,” John replied. “He's a San Francisco-based antiques dealer. I think his specialty is estate jewelry and silver—things like that—but definitely not furniture. He found the table in a consignment shop, suspected it might be American, and wanted to know if it might be worthy of one of our sales.”

  “Worthy,” I said to John. “We'd put it on the cover!”

  “No kidding,” he replied. “Out of curiosity, I asked him what he thought the table might bring at auction, but he really didn't want to answer. Finally, I said to him, ‘I can see that you're not going to name a figure.' Only then did he reluctantly say, ‘Well, I guess about thirty thousand dollars—maybe fifty thousand on a good day.'”

  “So what did you tell him?”

  “I said that it could be worth more than twenty times that,” John replied. “Then, after some considerable silence, he asked me how I could be so sure.”

  John had then explained to the man that even from a photograph—and a poor one at that—it was easy to see the electrifying beauty of the form. “When you see something by a master craftsman, it just sings out,” he had said. “You get a hunch, a feeling—it's nothing that can be calibrated.”

  I nodded in agreement. People often find it hard to understand that appraisers can glean so much information from a handful of photographs. They forget that our days are often spent looking at furniture and saying, “This is a fake” or “That has been repaired.” Over time, we've developed a sixth sense about such matters. Furthermore, the sheer volume of inquiries received by Sotheby's—or even a private dealer such as Leigh—from far-flung corners of the country makes it impossible for us to visit every object. We had better be skilled at reading photographs; otherwise, we'd constantly risk losing objects to competitors.

  Of course, when a truly great piece such as the slab table reveals itself, it is vital that we see it firsthand and promptly attempt to establish a rapport with the owners so they'd feel comfortable about consigning it to Sotheby's. I knew that by fortunate coincidence, John was already scheduled to fly to San Francisco within two days' time to give a talk to a local branch of the Daughters of the American Revolution, so it would be easy for him to arrange a visit with the table's owner.

  “I already have an appointment scheduled for Thursday,” he told me with a grin as he turned to leave my office.

  After a day of anxious waiting, I finally received a call from John, just through with his visit, who had this to report: Robert Backlund, the table's owner, lived in a 1960s ranch-style house perched on a steep hilltop overlooking San Francisco Bay. The living room was furnished with mostly nondescript contemporary pieces, except for a couple of baroque-looking side chairs missing their seats, a pair that Backlund also wanted John to examine (they turned out to be New England in origin, heavily repaired, and worth no more than the few hundred dollars he had paid for them), and, of course, the extraordinary slab table tucked in a corner next to the sofa.

  “When I first saw the table, my jaw nearly hit the ground,” John said to me over the phone. “It just seemed so out of place—and it was such an absolute knockout, completely honest. I never had any doubts about it.”

  Still, John had a job to do, so with the help of the owner, a heavyset silver-haired man in his early fifties, he removed the table's heavy marble top and leaned it against the sofa. Then, because the light in the living room was not ideal for viewing furniture, he carried the mahogany frame out onto the sun-drenched deck.

  “I probably spent half an hour going over the piece,” he reported, “to be reassured that it was as good as I first believed.” John didn't need to look beyond the table's surface for confirmation: The mahogany wood boasted an exceptional swirled grain that was predominantly deep purplish brown, enlivened by reddish undertones that simmered beneath the surface like molten lava. The cabinetmaker had expertly used the figured wood to enhance dramatically the serpentine, convex swell of the table's front rail.

  The table's old finish was, of course, another plus. As expected, dirt and grime had settled in all its nooks and crannies, including the crevices above the serpentine corners of the frieze, the swelled knees, and the furrows surrounding the ankles and jointed talons. There was, however, a faint glossiness to the wood, indicating that at some point in the table's history—possibly in the nineteenth century—it had been treated with a thin coat of shellac or varnish, which had settled in the table's original finish. But enough time had passed since the application of that once-shiny coating that it had begun to develop a crackled, dark patina of its own, evoking the canvas of an old master painting. (If the sealant had been applied in the twentieth century and had had less time to mellow and age, the surface value would have been brash and far less compelling.

  While John examined the table, Backlund filled him in on some of the details of its discovery in the consignment shop. He said the place had been filled with some terrific things and that he had nearly purchased a tall baroque cabinet before homing in on the slab table. While he was studying the piece, he learned from the woman who overs
aw the place that most of the furniture had been evaluated by an outside appraiser. That appraiser had deemed the table a nineteenth-century English piece with a replaced marble top and had valued it at $4,500—a price that was later reduced to $1,500 because one of the leg joints was slightly loose and the back of the marble slab had sustained some minor damage.

  The consignment shop.

  The table in Robert Backlund's living room.

  John shook his head in disbelief. “So you paid almost nothing for it?” he said incredulously.

  “Well, not exactly nothing,” Backlund replied. “But at first, my name was simply placed on a waiting list, because two other people had placed holds on the piece. For whatever reason, those folks decided not to buy it, so the shop gave me a call.”

  Toward the end of John's visit, the table's owner announced that he was prepared to consign the piece to Sotheby's. Right there in the living room, he signed the contract John had brought along with him. But minutes later, while he and John were saying their good-byes out in the driveway, Backlund said quite casually, “I think I'd better call Christie's.”

  John was momentarily flustered. “But we just shook hands and you happily signed a contract.”

  “No, no, not like that,” the consignor said quickly, seeking to allay John's fears. “You see, in addition to Sotheby's, I also sent pictures of the table to Christie's. I think I should call them and let them know that the piece has been accounted for.”

  John relaxed. “Don't worry, they'll call you,” he said with a smile. “Believe me, when they open your letter and see the pictures, they'll call you.”

  Five days later, the marble-top table had been crated and shipped to Sotheby's vast warehouse in New York, where I went to see it almost immediately. It was easy to spot amid the shadowy maze of mahogany, walnut, and maple furnishings that always piles up before our January sales. Despite the harsh, uneven lights of the warehouse, the blue-gray marble was luminous. It was not hard to imagine the table standing against the wall of a mid-eighteenth-century Boston parlor, perhaps richly appointed with silver or glassware or laden with platters brimming with savory foods. (Like its predecessor, the slate-top table, marble-top tables were commonly used as servers or sideboards because the stone was nearly impervious to heat and spills.) Since marble was expensive and hard to come by in Colonial New England, it was sometimes the well-connected merchant who commissioned the table—rather than the cabinetmaker—who found the stone. Once the marble was selected, it was submitted to a stonecutter for shaping.