Lot 1

'She was generous over so many years to our Museum and other museums. She was very dedicated to the institutions that she was interested in, loyal over a long time and very personally involved. She was one of my favorite and most loyal trustees. When I retired from the Museum, she gave us a gift that enabled us to build a patio garden in our dream house in Hillsborough. My greatest regret is that she didn't live to see it. It was not perfect enough and had to be fine-tuned and worthy enough for her to see it....' - Ian White, former Director of the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco 'She never approached things from a scholar's point of view. She chose things that were highly decorative and happened to be very good. She had a great style that rarely exists anymore. The New York house was like stepping into a William Powell/Myrna Loy movie. She had great taste and the wherewithall to indulge. She was an extraordinary lady of great style and refinemet, sensibility and compassion. A unique and wonderful woman, a true friend and loyal supporter of anything she took interest in. She was really a remarkable person.' - Ronald Schwarz, longtime friend and decorator 'She was generous, kind, warm, friendly and very feminine. Everybody loved Doris. She was never short on friends. She was a very meticulous person. Everything was kept in wonderful condition. You could see your reflection on the floor.' - Nan Kempner 'She was a real lady. The old time school. I never heard her say an unkind thing about anybody. She was irreplaceable and will be sorely missed.' - Betty Sherrill DORIS MERRILL MAGOWAN BY MARK MAGOWAN "How much is 110 guineas?" My mother, small and tailored, with cornflower blue eyes, looked at me closely. She was easily flummoxed by foreign currencies. Any purchase, or the question of a suitable tip, was the cause of considerable anxiety, and required a flustered consultation with a pack of printed currency exchange cards, courtesy of American Express. My math skills were equally questionable, particularly if the gloomy appraisal of Miss Finn, my 6th grade teacher, were to be believed, but my mother had gradually come to depend upon me to come up with the approximate dollar rate for liras, francs (Swiss and French) and even drachmas. We had been traveling through Europe and were now in London at the Grosvenor House Antique Fair on a sunny June day in 1965. The double-height exhibition hall was splashed with light bouncing brilliantly off gilded objets and gleaming inlaid surfaces as we made our way through the aisles of one of the world's most celebrated antique fairs. At the entry, we had paused expectantly before a pair of great Sèvres-filled vitrines, on loan from some now forgotten member of the Royal Family, while my mother explained a fine point of Windsor genealogy. But now we contemplated four small Louis XVI silver gilt candlesticks, while my mother wondered if they would complement a bonheur-du-jour in San Francisco. Still, the problem remained--what was a guinea? A dapper partner quickly sorted out my confusion, explaining to me (but not to my mother) why everything at Grosvenor House was priced in guineas, praised the candlesticks' condition, and mentioned the rarity of pre-Revolutionary French silver. Yes, we'd take the candlesticks and would he please contact our shipper? My mother's instructions were noted, a bill was to be sent to my father's secretary at Safeway, the long suffering Miss Hickerson, and the guineas returned to Bond Street. And another extraordinary object would be carefully packed to join its brothers in distant California. "Wasn't he nice?" my mother would exclaim as we marched over to Spink's to add to my coin collection, "The English have such beautiful manners. And so knowledgeable!" Travel to another country, or a trip of a few miles to the next town, was not lightly undertaken. A trip to Europe involved prolonged research, exchanges of letters with dealers asking if they had or could find the right bracket or sconce for one of her four houses, the visiting hours of museums, and arrangements to visit friends' houses with intriguing collections of paintings and furniture. Part of her preparation involved detailed study of each issue of Apollo and Connoisseur, folding down corners of the advertisements that caught her attention, and making lists in peacock blue ink on notepads headed 'Do Not Forget'. If a piece seemed particularly captivating she would cut out a template and attempt to see where it might fit. She frequented the leading European dealers as well as their American competitors on 57th Street and Madison Avenue. She knew what she wanted, did not waste time holding pieces on reserve, and paid promptly. Moreover, she genuinely liked dealers and empathized with them. My mother always credited her interest in collecting to the influence of her father, Charles E. Merrill, a Southerner who emerged from the rural poverty of post Civil-War Florida to found Merrill Lynch. My grandfather's dynamism was tempered with what the French call l'art de vivre: beautiful gardens, an excellent table, memorable houses, and carefully collected examples of furniture, silver and decorative art. Charles Merrill had many houses in his lifetime: a sequence of townhouses and apartments in New York City, most famously 18 East 11th Street, subsequently destroyed in the 60's by bomb making Weathermen. But his greatest showplace was 'The Orchard', a white pillared Colonial pile on Southampton's Hill Street, surrounded by mature fin-de-siècle gardens, whose centerpiece was an allée of perennials and marble herms leading out from an ornamental circular pond. My grandfather had bought 'The Orchard' in 1926 from James L. Breese, who had commissioned the house and furnishings from Stanford White in around 1905. Photographs from family scrapbooks show that my grandfather left the original Breese/White interiors largely intact so that the house retained its Edwardian gravity. 'The Orchard' was furnished with a mixture of Sheraton, Hepplewhite and Adam, some original and others 19th Century reproductions, intermingled with the occasional Italian 16th Century cassone or Neopolitan mirror. It was serious furniture and it had a decisive influence upon the development of my mother's taste. Her homes were predominantly decorated with good quality English, French and Italian pieces. My mother had warm memories of 'The Orchard' and of her life there with her father and stepmother, the vivacious Hellen Ingram Merrill, who made the shy young girl (that my mother was at age 12) and her younger brother Charles feel welcome and important. Hellen was chic, stylish and Southern - a plus in my mother's eyes. Hellen rode beautifully, played bridge as well or better than any man, and had up-to-date taste. She lightened the somber dècor, replacing heavy damask fabrics with printed chintzes, acquired some of the more notable pieces, particularly the good Georgian furniture and decorative arts during her trips to Europe with my grandfather in the 1920s and 30s. But my Uncle Jimmy, the poet son of Charles and Hellen, saw things differently, and his most anthologized poem, The Broken Home, is tinged with melancholy as he remembered the unhappiness of his parents' lives. My mother was spared many of these scenes, as she was away at Ethel Walker's School and later, at 18, at the Sheldon-Nixon School in Fiesole, the hill town above Florence. The year spent in Florence gave mother an introduction to art history and a lasting affection for Italian language and culture. Throughout her life she practiced her Italian on unsuspecting visitors and headwaiters, subscribed to Oggi and took weekly language lessons. In 1949 my parents and brothers spent the summer in a rented villa in Rapallo, then a small unspoiled resort town. Robin and Merrill remember visits to dealers in Florence and Milan, where my mother purchased a superb pair of sphinx headed overdoors (lot 50) and a neo-classical suite of Piemontese cream and gilt chairs (now in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). My mother and father recalled their Rapallo sojourn as the happiest summer of their lives. In my father, Robert Anderson Magowan, my mother found a version of her self-made father. My father, like Charles Merrill, was born a poor boy (his father was a railroad stationmaster in Chester, Pennsylvania), ambitious, tough minded and sentimental. He attributed his success to his capacity for hard work and for his good luck in marrying "the boss's daughter". Years later, for a course at Harvard on folk literature, I asked my father if he had read the Horatio Alger books as a boy. He replied that the books were as vivid in his mind after sixty years as when first read in sooty Chester. While he mocked my mother's unending quest after costly furniture and bric-a-brac, he was secretly proud of her eye for finding beautiful things. Perhaps he realized that her houses were her works of art. Once he retired from Safeway he accompanied mother to Europe each June and November. It was my father who purchased the pair of giltwood mirrors (lot 210) from Partridge and, despite his Scotch background, insured them against earthquake damage. Of course, earthquakes were an ever-present reality in San Francisco and one evening the plaster ceiling of my parents' bedroom collapsed, narrowly missing them. While most of the room's contents were destroyed, my father was amazed to see that a Georgian bureau desk (lot #165) went unscathed; he credited this miracle to superior English craftsmanship. My father was staunchly pro-British, delighting in his KBE awarded for Safeway's British investments and, as it turned out, mother's charitable donations. The Italians might be more fun, the French had the better cuisine, but the British in his eyes were loyal, and my father appreciated loyalty over all other virtues. When the French resigned from NATO in 1966, my father vowed to never again purchase French wine. Fortunately Franco-American amity was restored by 1971 just as his cellar approached dangerously low levels, and my father could resume buying new vintages of his favorite 1ière crus with an untroubled conscience. A year after their marriage my parents moved to San Francisco where my father spent two years learning the Safeway business from the bottom up. My parents loved San Francisco, the climate, the light, and the people; they effortlessly made close friendships that would sustain them through the rest of their lives. But in 1938 they returned to New York, where they lived for a few years at 19 East 72nd Street before buying a five-story limestone townhouse at 46 East 69th Street designed by Mott Schmidt. From the entry rose a four-story oval staircase that offered the five Magowan brothers thrilling (and dangerous) rides down the banister. My grandfather gave my parents numerous pieces of furniture for their new home, including the large mahogany breakfront (lot 17) that stood in the 69th Street ground floor entryway. Visitors often commented on the beauty of the second floor rooms: the pine-paneled library facing the street, the landing with its bar hidden in the paneling, and the well proportioned living room with its cream Adam plaster moldings above warm yellow walls. My parents' most important pieces were displayed here: the silver tables, one by John Cobb (lot 20) holding my mother's collection of Battersea and an exceptional pair of Chinese export mirror paintings (lot 25). But everyone noted the Brockhurst portrait of my mother wearing a deep blue velvet dress and a suite of ruby and diamond jewelry, which hung over the yellow and white marble mantle. My mother wore her chestnut hair in a chignon and had a severe expression; it was beautifully painted but not especially lifelike, as my mother's habitual look was warm and kind. But my grandfather was not troubled by mother's gaze and commissioned a second Brockhurst portrait for 'The Orchard'; this painting, while a far greater artistic success than its predecessor, was mysteriously slashed in the early 1950's by either a disgruntled gardener or one of Charles Merrill's jealous girlfriends. Somewhat reworked and disguised, this event provided James Merrill with the chilling opening of The Seraglio, his first novel. After my grandfather's death in 1956, my parents inherited 'The Beach House', a single story Norman brick and timber house standing on a dune just to the east of the Beach Club. This was a house of great charm and character that had previously been the scene of Charles Merrill's summer lunches and restorative naps. My parents added bedrooms and a pool pavilion, furnished it comfortably with oversize sofas, many pieces from 'The Orchard' and a pair of Bernard Lamotte murals for each end of the living room. We would look forward each June to the first sight of the 'The Beach House's ochre tiled roof with its twin brick chimneys. From the living room doors opened to the south terrace, protected by a high glass windbreak, overlooking the sea; the windbreak was a deadly trap for unsuspecting shore birds and lunch might be punctuated by the sickening sound of a final crash. The terrace terminated in a pair of busts of my grandfather and my brother Peter sculpted by Guitou Knoup, a Romanian-born artist imported by Uncle Jimmy to dally with my grandfather. A second set of doors led from the living room to the north terrace overlooking a parterre bordered with much hated pansies (my brothers and I weeded the gardens). An arch set in the Provencal mural led to the bar, a sunny room with wide window seats hung with Merrill Lynch-themed New Yorker cartoons where my brothers and I often bartended before dinner. The cream colored dining room was decorated with mother's collection of blue and white porcelain (lots 95-101), an eye catching mix of many forms, styles and periods. Reversing direction, a few steps led to a hall lined with bedrooms overlooking the sapphire-blue tiled swimming pool, the house's most important feature. Content as we were at 'The Beach House' my mother was troubled by the lack of privacy (gawkers would peep over the terrace rim) and by the salt spray that that frustrated her efforts to grow flowers in her garden beyond the pansies and lima beans destined for father's succotash. In 1976 my parents bought 'Swan House', a wood frame house on a property spreading alongside Heady Creek, an arm of Shinnecock Bay. There, with the help of landscape designer Robert Welsh, she planted herbaceous borders, extensive perennial gardens, a small formal rose garden and a Giverny green bridge spanning an ornamental pond. 'Swan House' revived decorative groups and concepts tested in other houses. The upstairs living room looked out to the Creek, the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, and the sea in the distant background. This view, so unchanged over time, always reminded me of a Twachtman painting. Inside, under a high tray ceiling, stood a painted satinwood center table (lot 121), always surmounted by a tall arrangement of summer flowers, surrounded by a set of three handsome mahogany armchairs (lot 128). Downstairs, next to the dining room with its blue and white collection was an informal reception room with Windsor chairs and an early Georgian library table. My parents bought their San Francisco house in 1956, after my father became Chairman of the Board and CEO of Safeway Stores. The house sits in a favorable position on the corner of Octavia and Washington Streets overlooking the Bay and Lafayette Park. Octavia, with its slippery brick paving and serpentine roadway, is one of San Francisco's steepest streets; I would occasionally awaken at night to the scream of tires attempting to grip the slick brickwork. The house had remarkably high ceilings on the first floor, creamy white marble floors, and a large loggia pierced with beaux arts windows. My parents kept their good paintings in San Francisco. Their interest in French painting was stimulated by my brother Peter, who had begun to collect while a student at Oxford. Peter had started with prints, a Toulouse-Lautrec and an excellent Cezanne Bather, followed rapidly by some Matisse drawings. Soon London and Paris dealers were sending transparencies for my parents' consideration. Within a few months Peter successfully recommended the purchase of an early Loiseau and a Guillaumin. On their 1965 trip my parents bought a second Guillaumin and the following year two Henri Moret seascapes. There was momentary alarm in San Francisco when my brother Merrill misread mother's postcard and believed that she had bought two Monets. But such a purchase was unlikely, as my father was fairly careful with large sums. On one trip to London, mother and I spotted a sublime Fantin-Latour of white roses in a celadon bowl at Arthur Tooth, a bargain at 22,000 guineas, or so we thought until we received father's furious telegram questioning our sanity. In the early 1970's my parents became interested by American painters and added a Potthast beach scene, a Prendergast Venetian view (now at the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts) and a Childe Hassam watercolor. After my father's death in 1985 my mother discovered the 19th Century Scandinavians and bought some wonderful Danish city scenes and flower paintings. In the early 60s my mother became a Trustee of the de Young Museum (now the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco) and was appointed to the Acquisition Committee. She enjoyed the committee meetings and became particularly interested in the development of the museum's collection of furniture and decorative arts for which she underwrote the purchase of 18th and 19th Century paintings and furniture. She became more knowledgeable through her museum affiliation and through her friendship with the curators. Michael Conforti, then the Curator of Decorative Arts, and Ian White, the Director, were her partners in crime, and brought magnificent pieces to her attention. While she had always studied - she had taken a silver course at The Metropolitan in 1934 upon her return from Florence - her museum connections opened her eyes to the sophisticated taste of the Regency and William IV eras. Probably the best example of mother's new interest is the rosewood and gilt mounted games table (lot 215) that she purchased from Devenish for San Francisco; she also provided the funds and a number of important pieces for a coral and pink Regency period dining room at the Museum. Through her interest in the decorative arts she became a patron of Filoli, the splendid house of the ship-owning Matson family. Mother's museum connections gave us the chance to visit memorable collections such as Robert Lehman's 54th Street townhouse and the British Rail Pension Fund collection then kept by Phillip Wilson at Lady Bailey's castle in Kent. My mother always believed that California deserved an antique fair to rival the best fairs in New York and in the early 80's she helped establish the San Francisco Antique Show as a benefit for Enterprise, a non-profit group dedicated to the betterment of inner city children. She tirelessly twisted the arms of her New York and London dealer friends to take a chance on a fledgling fair in desolate Fort Mason. Fortunately, the Antique Show was a tremendous success, as mother persuaded her friends and relatives to patronize the dealers who had risked so much. Her Christmas present list expanded wildly as she bought knickknacks and bibelots to help support Enterprise and the dealers. My brother Merrill, mother's financial advisor, rued the depredations to her account caused by each Fair. Following Charles Merrill's example, my parents took great pleasure in escaping to Palm Beach. My grandfather had built a large comfortable house, 'Merrill's Landing' in 1928 on property that stretched from the ocean to Lake Worth. The house was shaded by louvered doors and shutters which permitted cool ocean breezes to circulate throughout the interior. A curved verandah led from the main house to a guest wing while a path through palms descended to the lake boathouse where grandfather kept a sport fishing boat. To the south of the main house a waterfall of evil-smelling sulfur water trickled down limestone steps to the green swimming pool. My grandfather left an oceanfront parcel of land to my mother and she asked Howard Major to design a pink Bermuda style house with a white stepped roof. The house was open with large windows and took advantage of its position overlooking the sea. My parents added bedrooms and a bow fronted dining room to the original house and built an ensemble of pink stucco buildings including a pool pavilion and guesthouse. The house was simply furnished with English, Italian and modern furniture, watercolors of Paris and Venice, and a friendly porcelain putto (lot 141) that greeted guests at the front door. Many years after my initial visit to Grosvenor House my mother and I visited another antique fair, a small one of mixed quality in the Southampton High School gym. Mother was in her mid 80's and had begun to feel her age; she no longer traveled freely to visit dealers across Europe. But as we turned a corner and started down a new aisle we simultaneously saw a 19th Century pair of Indian paintings on glass, crude but full of life, of a Raja and his Rani. Although the portraits were not first quality objects I decided to take them. Mother objected--she had seen them first, they were too expensive, she had the perfect place for them, and moreover where would I hang them? After some banter between us she consented, teasing me, 'They're yours - even though they'd look better in my house'! Competitive to the last, always certain of her taste, my mother had retained her lifelong talent for finding and enjoying beautiful things. PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF DORIS MERRILL MAGOWAN WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2002 AT 10:00 A.M. (LOTS 1-225) NEW YORK (LOTS 1-93)

A REGENCY BRASS-MOUNTED AND BRASS-INLAID MAHOGANY GAMES TABLE

CIRCA 1815

Details

A REGENCY BRASS-MOUNTED AND BRASS-INLAID MAHOGANY GAMES TABLE
Circa 1815
The hinged canted rectangular top with brass stringing, swiveling above a well and opening to a similar playing surface, the plain frieze on trestles with spreading reeded columnar uprights joined by a baluster-turned and reeded stretcher, on splayed legs with brass paw feet and casters
29½in. (75cm.) high, 36¾in. (93.5cm.) wide, 17¾in. (45cm.) deep

Provenance

Charles E. Merrill, 'The Orchard', Southampton, New York.
Thence by descent.

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