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EVELYN ANNENBERG HALL AT 640 PARK AVENUE
Evelyn Annenberg Hall is recognized as one of New York City's most dedicated and dynamic philanthropists and patrons of the arts. Together with her brother Walter and six sisters, she established a proud record of charitable giving that will stand for generations to come.
For more than fifty years Mrs. Hall donated artworks to museums around the country. Closest to her heart was the Museum of Modern Art, where she became a trustee in 1979 and a member of its International Council. During this time she also made diverse gifts to the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was elected a Benefactor of that museum, and she endowed the Jaffe-Friede Art Gallery at Dartmouth College and funded a scholarship in art history at Yale University. Mrs. Hall was deeply interested in the area of medicine and made numerous contributions to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2003 she was honored by the hospital with its award for excellence in philanthropy. Mrs. Hall was a donor to Mt. Sinai Hospital as well, and endowed a lecture series at its medical school.
Mrs. Hall had a love affair with New York City. Although she traveled widely and also had houses in Palm Beach and Newport, whenever she was away from New York she couldn't wait to return, regularly saying it was 'the most exciting place on earth.' From the late 1940's through the 1960's, one of her greatest pleasures in the city she loved was to prowl the art galleries of that era with her second husband Bill Jaffe.
Most of the collection of European furniture and works of art was housed at 640 Park Avenue, in an apartment that occupied an entire floor of the building. There, in a dazzling display of sophistication, Evelyn Hall mixed paintings by Picasso and Soutine with Georgian and Louis XV mirrors, terracottas by Lipchitz with classic Italian Renaissance bronzes and Chinese export and 1970's furniture with English, French and Italian 18th and 19th century furniture. This sale follows on the success of her Egyptian, Greek and Roman Antiquities and jewelry sold at Christie's Rockefeller Center in December, 2005, and her and William Jaffe's legendary collection of Chinese porcelain, sold in March, 2006.
640 Park Avenue is one of New York's most storied apartment buildings. It was designed and built in 1914 by J.E.R. Carpenter who created more than twenty six of the most exclusive buildings along Park and Fifth Avenues. In fact it was Carpenter who, along with Rosario Candela, set the standard for luxury apartments in Manhattan which remains unsurpassed to this day. Built as an elongated limestone palazzo with a rusticated base, arched windows and complex cornice, it was clearly modeled after the palaces of the merchant princes of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, this building was intended for the New World merchant princes of the 20th century. Both the apartment and its contents provide a fascinating glimpse up into the high altitude living and collecting of mid-20th century Manhattan.
Evelyn Hall worked closely with many of the most important decorative arts dealers of the 20th century, and her archives shed a fascinating light on these relationships. Duveen Brothers, Wildenstein, French & Company, Alavoine, Georges de Batz, Ginsburg & Levy, Mathias Komor, Edward Lubin and Edward Farmer all actively helped build the collection. Many of the pieces she acquired also had illustrious provenances of their own ranging from the Royal Palace of Stupinigi, the collections of the Lords Islington and Hillingdon, to her own contemporaries such as Edward Stotesbury of Whitemarsh Hall, Benjamin Stern and René Fribourg, among others.
Christie's is honored to present the collections from Evelyn Annenberg Hall's home at 640 Park Avenue.
A PAIR OF FRENCH ORMOLU TWO-BRANCH WALL LIGHTS
LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Details
A PAIR OF FRENCH ORMOLU TWO-BRANCH WALL LIGHTS
LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Of Louis XVI style, each with a term figure of a child dressed in Classical armour and ending in a draped lion skin, holding the scrolling acanthus-cast branches and laurel-leaf-cast bobèches, on a fluted shaft ending in an acanthus-cast pendant finial
14¼ in. (36 cm.) high, 13½ in. (34 cm.) wide (2)
LATE 19TH EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Of Louis XVI style, each with a term figure of a child dressed in Classical armour and ending in a draped lion skin, holding the scrolling acanthus-cast branches and laurel-leaf-cast bobèches, on a fluted shaft ending in an acanthus-cast pendant finial
14¼ in. (36 cm.) high, 13½ in. (34 cm.) wide (2)
Provenance
with Georges de Batz, New York.