Extracting a drawer from an eighteenth-century high chest of drawers he plans to offer for $440,000 at his booth at Thursday night’s opening of the Winter Antiques Show, Leigh Keno takes a sniff and breaks into a broad grin, as if savoring the perfect truffle soufflé.
“You can’t fake the aroma of wood that’s aged for 200 years,” he insists. Given the stratospheric prices being paid for American furniture these days – a Queen Anne carved-mahogany secretary bookcase fetched $8.25 million at Sotheby’s last year, on the heels of a staggering $4.73 million for a Chippendale chest of drawers at Christie’s – it’s not surprising that this year’s Americana Week is shaping up to be an extravaganza. Kicking off with Thursday’s gala – the first highlight of the social season – the event comprises an annual round of auctions and exhibitions where connoisseurs gather to gasp over details such as carved serpentine crests, scrolled acanthus leaves, and clawed-ball feet.
No one will be more at home amid the diminutive tycoons and precious artifacts than the exuberantly squeaky-clean Madison Avenue dealer Leigh Keno and his twin brother Leslie, a fellow showman and furniture sleuth who heads the American-furniture department at Sotheby’s. Identically blond, blue-eyed, and almost preposterously affable, the Keno brothers are the reigning stars of the fiercely competitive world of American antiques. Sharing the same Savile Row tailor, they show up on occasion wearing similar bespoke suits. “It’s a bit scary,” Leigh admits. “We’re like the Bobbsey twins.” They once arrived separately at a post-auction party wearing identical custom-made shirts, having independently selected the same fabric from more than 300 swatches at Woods & Brown, their London shirt-makers. Even their dentist, Leslie notes, is spooked by the identical configuration of their teeth.
All the major players – including the Kenos – will be unveiling their wares this week, hoping to capture the imagination, and dollars, of a growing but still relatively small number of major collectors, like Robert Bass, the Texan billionaire who ponied up $12.1 million sight-unseen for the Nicholas Brown secretary at Christie’s in 1990; the anonymous buyer who snapped up the Captain Brintnall Chippendale mahogany tray-top tea table with open talon feet for $3.65 million at the Winter Antiques Show two years ago; and Eddy Nicolson, who once dropped a record $1.45 million on a pie-crust tea table at Christie’s.
As the American bull market continues to stampede, so does the seemingly insatiable demand for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American furniture of exalted provenance and rarity. Selected with an almost maniacal devotion to authenticity (pieces discovered to have been cleaned, restored, or otherwise meddled with face the indignity of losing two thirds of their value), these totems of Colonial splendor are pursued by an expanding number of demanding private collectors forced to compete for objects of increasing scarcity. “There’s a powerful psychology that says you want what you cannot have,” observes Arie Kopelman, the president of Chanel, who is also the chairman of the Winter Antiques Show.
“They’re nice boys,” dealer Albert Sack confesses. “I just don’t like to see them run away with all the attention.”
Given the enormous sums of money at stake and the almost puritanical zeal for authenticity and original condition endemic to the world of American furniture, minute inspections are an inevitable ritual. So it is not unusual to see expensively dressed collectors and dealers crawling about on the salesroom floor.
“When you’re looking at furniture,” Leigh advises, “it’s easier to have a single-breasted suit.”
The fervor for Americana is hardly limited to the high end of the market. Thanks in part to the popularity of Antiques Roadshow, which is currently in its fourth season as PBS’s most-watched series, with an audience of 14 million, as well as the runaway Internet success of eBay (where the average lot is $40), the previously rarefied world of fine antiques is becoming increasingly democratized.
To the exasperation of their competitors, the Keno twins appear to straddle both ends of the market with ease. Besides their status as the golden boys of Antiques Roadshow, they hold the distinction of having scored a $1 million book contract – the biggest advance ever paid for a book on antiques (“Their fan base is just enormous,” chirps their agent Susan Ginsburg) – for Hidden Treasures, which is due in stores November 2000.
Elaborately self-effacing, the twins attribute their Brobdingnagian deal to the success of the TV series, which has turned them into celebrities. “Just about everyone loves the idea of a treasure hunt, you know?” Leslie says. “I think the show basically has touched a nerve. It’s gotten people reconnected with the everyday objects they live with, and it’s got them going to the attic or the basement, literally hunting for treasure.”
Although based on an ostensibly banal premise – people across America bring in objects for antiques experts to appraise for free – the relentlessly folksy program makes for surprisingly irresistible television. When Roadshow stopped in Secaucus, New Jersey, two years ago, the nattily tailored twins made much of their heart-pounding excitement as they examined a mahogany card table brought in by Claire Beckmann, a retired local schoolteacher who had paid $25 for it at a yard sale some 30 years earlier.
Identifying it on the show as a 1798 masterpiece by Boston craftsmen Thomas and John Seymour, Leslie explained how hot sand was used to create its inlaid satinwood bowknots and tapering bellflowers. Summing up, the brothers declared the admirably grungy table to be worth between $200,000 and $300,000 – the highest-ever estimate on Roadshow.
That coup, subsequently chronicled by People magazine and replayed on Oprah, handily catapulted the brothers to a new level of nationwide glory, to the considerable dismay of revered longtime dealers like Albert Sack, of Israel Sack, Inc. “I suppose they’re a marketable commodity,” he grumbles, going on to confess that last year, tiring of their fresh-faced countenances, “I wrote to the Antiques Roadshow and said, ‘You’re giving them too much exposure,’ and I got a letter back saying, ‘You’ve got to admit they’re cuter than you or I, and they have people running about asking for their autograph.’
“Listen,” Sack adds. “They’re nice boys, they’re ambitious, and they’re honest. I just don’t like to see them run away with all the attention.” That said, Sack lets slip that he will be appearing next week with almighty Martha herself on Martha Stewart Living, the morning TV show. “It’s actually my third time on Martha,” he says.
Aida Moreno, the executive producer of Antiques Roadshow, notes that the program’s roster of 250 appraisers includes plenty of experts with a considerable following of their own (including Leslie’s knowledgeable rival at Christie’s, John Hays). But, she adds, “the Kenos are wonderfully curious, and they convey their love for what they do on TV.” Another reason for all the hoopla, she says, is that “they’re twins, which is sort of weird and fascinating.”
Volunteering as traveling TV appraisers might not seem the best way to raise one’s profile in the exalted world of $3.65 million Newport tea tables and $2.75 million Chippendale armchairs, but the Roadshow has actually generated significant business for the twins. The show’s appraisers are forbidden from soliciting business. But that doesn’t stop anyone in the crowd of 10,000 that typically attends the nationwide summertime weekend-taping sessions from picking up appraisers’ business cards, which they are permitted to leave on a table by the exit.
“I remember thinking, Is she gonna call? Is she gonna call?” Leslie says, sitting in his new, sleekly appointed office at Sotheby’s, recalling his trepidation before hearing from Claire Beckmann, the lady from Secaucus whose $25 card table he had appraised on Antiques Roadshow. To his relief, she called a week after their vertiginous encounter to express interest in selling it at Sotheby’s.
“We’re talking someone who’s willing to own furniture with a grungy surface,” Leslie says, “who’s paying millions for the privilege of having those stains.”
Her choice proved the wisdom of the major auction houses’ forays into the populist world of dead-celebrity auctions, which began with the cookie-jar-and-major-Americana sale of Andy Warhol in 1987. Leslie recalls that Beckmann was engagingly frank about why she was interested in selling at Sotheby’s. “She explained how she’d gone with a friend to the Jackie O exhibition,” he says, “and she said she really loved the whole process – John-John’s first steps and all that.” Leslie sold the card table for $541,500, including the buyer’s premium of $51,000. (Although it was bought by Israel Sack, Inc., the underbidder happened to be Leigh.)
And Roadshow continues to yield agreeably auction-ready treasures. This Saturday, Sotheby’s will offer a painted-pine portrait medallion of George Washington (Lot 607, estimated at $50,000 to $80,000) attributed to Samuel McIntire, a Salem, Massachusetts, architect and carver. Leslie appraised it last summer in Des Moines, Iowa, after its current owner, Thomas Gould, drove all the way from Minneapolis to offer it for consideration.
Twin novelty aside, who better to feed the public’s cusp-of-the-millennium fascination for objects that bespeak the nation’s history than the Keno brothers, with their thrill-of-the-chase stories about high-style collectibles? At 42, the twins still exude fanatical teenage glee. “That’s super!” Leigh exclaims in his Madison Avenue showroom when a roving Americana scout calls to report a new find. “Another one! Oh, my God! Is it great?”
Given the intensity of their enthusiasm, it is not surprising to learn that the twins’ passion for collecting was instilled at an early age. Their parents, Ronald Keno, now a retired art teacher, and his wife, Norma, ran a little antiques store across the street from their house in Mohawk, New York, where the boys grew up with their older brother Mitchell. Before long, the budding bespectacled antiquarians (they now wear contact lenses) had their own corner of their parents’ shop, with business cards printed up by their father.
Poring over a box of diaries begun when they were 12 years old, Leigh points to their first entry, on July 16, 1969, where he wrote “We are antique dealers” in a backward-slanting hand. A few pages later, a naïve drawing of a nineteenth-century jug they purchased bears the inscription “Dynamite,” followed by the declaration “Our love for antiques is great.”
“It gave you an incredible sense of purpose and the thrill of the search,” Leslie says of their childhood collection of decorative stoneware, which wound up financing their college educations.
Single-minded in their quest for treasures, the boys were wrapped up in their shared discoveries. With the dawn of adolescence, however, they began sparring for girls’ attention in high school. “It got very competitive at one point,” Leslie recalls. “The twin-jealousy thing was pretty terrible – you know, when girls wanted one more than the other.” These days, he insists, there is no rivalry between them. “I’m proud of Leigh, and I think he is of me,” he says. “We’re just happy for the other when he achieves something.”
Opting to attend separate colleges, the twins moved in together in Manhattan upon graduation, taking jobs at different auction houses – Leslie at Sotheby’s, Leigh at William Doyle Galleries before moving to Christie’s. While working at rival auction houses, they often found themselves pursuing the same property. “We just learned to talk about fishing, cars, and girls, and to talk about antiques only in very general terms,” Leigh says.
Their identical looks frequently caused perplexing mix-ups. When Leigh turned up one afternoon at a Round Hill Road estate in Greenwich, a lady greeted him at the door, looking puzzled. “She said, ‘Did you forget something?’ ” he recalls. “It turned out she’d called Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and Leslie had been there earlier. And we both happened to be wearing a blue blazer and the same gray pants,” he adds. “She was pretty relieved to have me explain the situation.”
Around the same time, Leslie stopped into Christie’s one day and was aghast when Christopher Burge, the rival auction house’s then chairman, came up to him and began going over confidential details of an upcoming sale. “I said, ‘Wait! Don’t tell me any more – I’m Leslie,’ ” he remembers, laughing.
Arriving for lunch at the Hotel Carlyle one Sunday last month – they now live two blocks apart on the Upper East Side – the brothers fall into a halting ritual of politesse as they approach a revolving door. “After you,” Leigh says. “After you,” Leslie replies. “No, after you,” Leigh insists. The impasse finally ends when Leigh, who is older by twelve minutes, propels his brother forward.
Inside, the eerie sibling echo continues as they glance up from the lavish menu, startling the waiter as they simultaneously utter the words “Lobster bisque.” Today, Leigh is dressed in neatly pressed corduroys, Leslie in a blue blazer and gray flannels. Although they’re virtually indistinguishable, the twins’ good looks are subtly different: Leigh’s nose is aquiline, Leslie’s slants slightly to the left; Leigh has broader shoulders, Leslie is trimmer; and Leigh’s blond hair is parted in the center, Leslie’s to the side. “I don’t think it’s a conscious decision,” Leslie says. “It was always that way, even when we were in our teens.”
Of the two, Leslie is more conservative: more frequently seen in a tie, more palpably self-possessed, less hyperbolic. Though no less formal, Leigh is more animated, more rambunctious, and more obviously suited to the dealer’s arts of flattery and charm.
For all their bonhomie, the twins are deeply competitive, despite their claims to the contrary. When responding to questions, each speaks engagingly before wincing from an abrupt under-the-table kick from his brother, convinced he is talking too much. “We’re always getting bruised knees,” Leslie explains. “But when you’re twins, you automatically have a best friend,” he adds brightly.
Moments later, however, the brothers launch into an unexpected, bloodcurdling exchange of invective and accusations occasioned by some imperceptible slight, which concludes with Leigh’s telling Leslie, “You’re a real piece of work.”
Glancing nervously at the whirring tape recorder on the table as they recoil from their twin-world vituperation, both are full of apology, craving an opportunity for another interview and politely exhorting their lunch guest to erase their spat.
“We get along really well,” Leigh says beseechingly. “We’re just not good at faking it when we have an argument.” Ten minutes later, they are exchanging affectionate slaps on the back as they bid adieu on Madison Avenue: “Bye, Leigh.” “See ya, Les.”
The next day, Leigh is sitting on the cozy, worn leather sofa in his second-floor showroom across the street, surrounded by piles of antique reference books and examining pieces he is thinking of including in his booth at the upcoming Winter Antiques Show. At four o’clock, two handsome tall-case antique clocks with major-league price tags chime a split second apart, eerily reminiscent of the Keno twins’ ordering lobster bisque the day before.
“I’m very excited about this piece,” Leigh says, pointing to a slender-cased, bonnet-topped clock in the corner that was made near Boston around 1800. Priced at $185,000, it has a face ornamented by a tiny rocking ship that bobs from side to side, animated by the swinging pendulum below. Not only does the clock have a distinguished provenance – the piece has been in the same Massachusetts family since 1800 – but its value is enhanced by the fact that the ship bears an American, not a British, flag. This makes it especially rare, Leigh explains, because American clocks from the period were often made using British mechanical parts from the prerevolutionary 1770s.
“With some clocks, you can see where someone has painted stars and stripes over a British flag,” Leigh says. “It’s amazing what a bit of red, white, and blue will do.” If the flag were merely British, he notes, the entire clock would be worth roughly 30 percent less – a difference of about $54,000. “It’s quite something for an area that’s about a quarter of an inch square,” he admits.
Given some of the extravagant prices paid at auction for Americana during the past decade, it is curious to consider that for much of the twentieth century, American antiques were regarded as the poor cousins of British and French furniture.
Albert Sack, the respected Americana dealer who in 1934 joined the family business his pioneering father, Israel Sack, had started in 1905, recalls that it was not until the sixties that American furniture began to attract serious attention. “It was a matter of survival for 30 years,” he says, noting that the first auction to bring in $100,000 for an item of American furniture was not until 1971. These days, however, while a fine English eighteenth-century turret-topped card table might fetch $20,000, a virtually identical piece made in America during the same period can command as much as $300,000. The wild discrepancy, it seems, is due to three principal factors: the relatively small quantity of furniture produced in America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the scarcity of desirably unrestored objects reaching the marketplace, and the growing number and sophistication of deep-pocketed Americans eager to acquire examples of their nation’s patrimony.
Making a distinction between what he calls consumer pieces (furniture someone might buy to decorate a home) and collector pieces (ranging from $100,000 into the millions), Sack notes that the fiercest competition these days is in the upper category. “It’s become a very sophisticated market,” he says, “with a big emphasis on scholarship and research. The new collectors are concentrating on the premier objects, and they’re willing to pay.”
Adding a notch to the intensity of the competition is the fact that collectors of Americana often develop cravings for furniture of specific periods and regions – early rococo pieces from Boston or Philadelphia, for instance, or Federal gems from New York or Newport, with each city possessing its own golden period and master craftsmen – creating a bidding frenzy when an outstanding piece that fills a hole in their collection appears on the market.
“The regional aspect is really a huge factor in people’s passions,” Leigh says. “It’s really about patriotism, this pride in what our ancestors made and collected, even though these things are inspired by furniture and tastes in England.”
To acquire and resell the best antiques and remain at the pinnacle of their trade, the Keno twins, like other successful antiques vendors, must cultivate an unimpeachable reputation, optimum exposure, and virtuoso charm.
One of the star dealers of the Winter Antiques Show, Leigh always holds the prime booth – to the right as you enter the vast drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue – and invariably dazzles with one or two exceptional wares. Now in its forty-sixth year, the show has 72 dealers, a third of whom specialize in Americana, and is widely viewed as the premier Americana show in the country. As such, it inevitably inspires dealers like Leigh to put aside choice offerings during the year in order to captivate patrons each year in January.
Five years ago, he scored a memorable coup by flying to Buenos Aires in early January to inspect and purchase a rare $440,000 Federal inlaid-mahogany secretary bookcase with 25 églomisé glass panels, bringing it back just in time for the Winter Antiques Show. Jack Warner, the former CEO of the Gulf States Paper Corporation in Tuscaloosa and a longtime client of Leigh’s, was intrigued to hear about it, but since Winter Antiques Show dealers are forbidden from exhibiting at the show any items that have been pre-sold, Warner flew to New York on opening night to buy it. “He was first on line to purchase it himself,” Leigh recalls, grinning. Spotting a pair of tables on either side, Warner asked him to throw those on the bill, too. “I was pretty excited,” Leigh says, “because it was all within twelve seconds.”
Of the two, Leslie is more conservative: more frequently seen in a tie, more palpably self-possessed, less hyperbolic. Though no less formal, Leigh is more animated, more rambunctious, and more obviously suited to the dealer’s arts of flattery and charm.
For all their bonhomie, the twins are deeply competitive, despite their claims to the contrary. When responding to questions, each speaks engagingly before wincing from an abrupt under-the-table kick from his brother, convinced he is talking too much. “We’re always getting bruised knees,” Leslie explains. “But when you’re twins, you automatically have a best friend,” he adds brightly.
Moments later, however, the brothers launch into an unexpected, bloodcurdling exchange of invective and accusations occasioned by some imperceptible slight, which concludes with Leigh’s telling Leslie, “You’re a real piece of work.”
Glancing nervously at the whirring tape recorder on the table as they recoil from their twin-world vituperation, both are full of apology, craving an opportunity for another interview and politely exhorting their lunch guest to erase their spat.
“We get along really well,” Leigh says beseechingly. “We’re just not good at faking it when we have an argument.” Ten minutes later, they are exchanging affectionate slaps on the back as they bid adieu on Madison Avenue: “Bye, Leigh.” “See ya, Les.”
The next day, Leigh is sitting on the cozy, worn leather sofa in his second-floor showroom across the street, surrounded by piles of antique reference books and examining pieces he is thinking of including in his booth at the upcoming Winter Antiques Show. At four o’clock, two handsome tall-case antique clocks with major-league price tags chime a split second apart, eerily reminiscent of the Keno twins’ ordering lobster bisque the day before.
“I’m very excited about this piece,” Leigh says, pointing to a slender-cased, bonnet-topped clock in the corner that was made near Boston around 1800. Priced at $185,000, it has a face ornamented by a tiny rocking ship that bobs from side to side, animated by the swinging pendulum below. Not only does the clock have a distinguished provenance – the piece has been in the same Massachusetts family since 1800 – but its value is enhanced by the fact that the ship bears an American, not a British, flag. This makes it especially rare, Leigh explains, because American clocks from the period were often made using British mechanical parts from the prerevolutionary 1770s.
“With some clocks, you can see where someone has painted stars and stripes over a British flag,” Leigh says. “It’s amazing what a bit of red, white, and blue will do.” If the flag were merely British, he notes, the entire clock would be worth roughly 30 percent less – a difference of about $54,000. “It’s quite something for an area that’s about a quarter of an inch square,” he admits.
Given some of the extravagant prices paid at auction for Americana during the past decade, it is curious to consider that for much of the twentieth century, American antiques were regarded as the poor cousins of British and French furniture.
Albert Sack, the respected Americana dealer who in 1934 joined the family business his pioneering father, Israel Sack, had started in 1905, recalls that it was not until the sixties that American furniture began to attract serious attention. “It was a matter of survival for 30 years,” he says, noting that the first auction to bring in $100,000 for an item of American furniture was not until 1971. These days, however, while a fine English eighteenth-century turret-topped card table might fetch $20,000, a virtually identical piece made in America during the same period can command as much as $300,000. The wild discrepancy, it seems, is due to three principal factors: the relatively small quantity of furniture produced in America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the scarcity of desirably unrestored objects reaching the marketplace, and the growing number and sophistication of deep-pocketed Americans eager to acquire examples of their nation’s patrimony.
Making a distinction between what he calls consumer pieces (furniture someone might buy to decorate a home) and collector pieces (ranging from $100,000 into the millions), Sack notes that the fiercest competition these days is in the upper category. “It’s become a very sophisticated market,” he says, “with a big emphasis on scholarship and research. The new collectors are concentrating on the premier objects, and they’re willing to pay.”
Adding a notch to the intensity of the competition is the fact that collectors of Americana often develop cravings for furniture of specific periods and regions – early rococo pieces from Boston or Philadelphia, for instance, or Federal gems from New York or Newport, with each city possessing its own golden period and master craftsmen – creating a bidding frenzy when an outstanding piece that fills a hole in their collection appears on the market.
“The regional aspect is really a huge factor in people’s passions,” Leigh says. “It’s really about patriotism, this pride in what our ancestors made and collected, even though these things are inspired by furniture and tastes in England.”
To acquire and resell the best antiques and remain at the pinnacle of their trade, the Keno twins, like other successful antiques vendors, must cultivate an unimpeachable reputation, optimum exposure, and virtuoso charm.
One of the star dealers of the Winter Antiques Show, Leigh always holds the prime booth – to the right as you enter the vast drill hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue – and invariably dazzles with one or two exceptional wares. Now in its forty-sixth year, the show has 72 dealers, a third of whom specialize in Americana, and is widely viewed as the premier Americana show in the country. As such, it inevitably inspires dealers like Leigh to put aside choice offerings during the year in order to captivate patrons each year in January.
Five years ago, he scored a memorable coup by flying to Buenos Aires in early January to inspect and purchase a rare $440,000 Federal inlaid-mahogany secretary bookcase with 25 églomisé glass panels, bringing it back just in time for the Winter Antiques Show. Jack Warner, the former CEO of the Gulf States Paper Corporation in Tuscaloosa and a longtime client of Leigh’s, was intrigued to hear about it, but since Winter Antiques Show dealers are forbidden from exhibiting at the show any items that have been pre-sold, Warner flew to New York on opening night to buy it. “He was first on line to purchase it himself,” Leigh recalls, grinning. Spotting a pair of tables on either side, Warner asked him to throw those on the bill, too. “I was pretty excited,” Leigh says, “because it was all within twelve seconds.”
When asked by a client to produce a condition report on a piece of furniture, Leigh arrives with bright lights and a series of instruments, looking more like a forensic pathologist than a furniture dealer. Amazingly, such detective work is not limited to showrooms and salesrooms. At the homes of collectors, he says, “It’s not unusual at a cocktail party to flip a piece upside down to inspect it. Believe it or not, that’s not considered a faux pas.” This cavorting is often viewed with horror by aficionados of British and French furniture, he admits.
Hearing devotees of American furniture extolling the virtues of unrestored furniture, you could swear they were speaking of the Holy Grail, not of a few pieces of nicely carved old wood. “It’s almost a seal of authenticity, you know?” Leslie says, eyes ablaze as he peers at the desirable dirt at the base of a Philadelphia high chest being stored just outside his office. “You get to see all the natural and honest wear patterns on the surface shellac that are intact with the original finish. And it tells a story – it speaks to you in an honest way that screams out authenticity and integrity.”
While it is considered perfectly respectable for a masterpiece by Rubens or a Versailles-quality French boulle cabinet to be cleaned a couple of times in 200 years, such maintenance is heresy to many collectors of American furniture. “With European pieces, they clean it up within an inch of its life,” Albert Sack says. “But Americans love the authenticity.”
Coveting honest-to-goodness gunk and unrestored perfection, serious buyers are almost immune to aesthetic beauty, according to Leslie. “They’re not buying for the look, they’re buying for the object,” he says. “We’re talking someone who’s willing to own furniture with a grungy surface – who’s paying millions for the privilege of having those stains.”
While exceptional objects remain scarce, the currently booming seller’s market for Americana appears to be enticing families who have owned pieces for more than 200 years to take the plunge. Among the cream of its 330 lots on sale this week, Christie’s has six such hallowed items, including an ornately carved mahogany high-style Philadelphia card table expected to go for between $1 million and $2 million, which is being offered by George G. Meade Easby, a direct descendant of the original owner, Cornelius Stevenson. “It’s rare to see pieces with that kind of provenance at auction,” Hays says gleefully.
Sotheby’s 733-lot sale, meanwhile, has 21 items of direct-descent provenance, including 14 being sold by the Beekman Family Association, descendants of James W. Beekman, a prosperous eighteenth-century dry-goods merchant and landowner. One of the sale’s highlights is Lot 718, a pair of mahogany five-legged gaming tables, identified as having been commissioned for his country house, Mount Pleasant, which once occupied what is now Beekman Place. Also identical twins, the tables are estimated to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000.
With combined sales of American furniture and folk art for 1999 of $25.9 million, however, Sotheby’s still has a way to go to match Christie’s $27.5 million.
This year, Christie’s has gone to the expense of producing a separate 52-page catalogue for a single object identified as having been in the same family for over 300 years: the Joseph and Bathsheba Pope valuables cabinet, a carved-oak piece the size of a small safe, from Salem, Massachusetts. Drawing potential purchasers’ attention to the historical chic of the notorious Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the text describes how the original owners, after being accused of dabbling in witchcraft themselves, ratted on fellow Puritans by claiming to have witnessed the demonic powers of several local witches.
Though the catalogue says “Estimate on request” – a further marketing ploy to arouse speculation and interest – John Hays points out that the cabinet is expected to realize between $600,000 and $900,000. If so, it will break the $528,000 record for seventeenth-century furniture. “We always hope for millions,” Hays says cheerfully. “But who knows?”