Lot 1

MORNING SESSION TUESDAY 22 NOVEMBER 2011 10:00 am (Lots 1-202) Morgan, Frick, Huntington, Clark, Poor, Hearst They are names that conjure America's Gilded Age, in all its glory. The last two decades of the 19th century and the first three of the 20th bracketed the rise of the great American industrial fortunes -- most of which derived from the country's expansion westward to tap its abundant natural resources. The mining, timber and agricultural industries grew to an unprecedented scale on the strength of the burgeoning railroads, to say nothing of the banking and financial services that funded them, leading the way to levels of consumption the country, and the world, had never known. All of this came about even as economic and political crises throughout Europe had rendered its great noble collections increasingly vulnerable. Tastemakers and dealers such as Duveen in London and New York and Seligman in Paris were ready to facilitate as New World money spirited away Old World treasure, and the glow of history that came with it. Although -- due to their sometimes unscrupulous business practices and monopolies -- they are often referred to as "Robber Barons", it is largely for their philanthropy that America's early captains of industry are remembered, their names still resonating from the tympanum of countless libraries, colleges and museums. The motives for such philanthropy were of course complicated, and hardly devoid of self-interest; yet beneath or beyond the burnishing of reputations, the assuaging of plutocratic guilt, was surely also some measure of patriotism and pride in the rapid strides our young country was making economically, politically and culturally. Still, at least to begin with, private indulgence was the rule. In conscious imitation of the merchant princes of the Renaissance, these modern day princes of commerce built city palaces in Brooklyn and Manhattan, seaside cottages in Newport and Dark Harbor, hunting and fishing lodges in Tuxedo Park and the Adirondacks and Italianate villas basking endlessly in the California sun. The interiors of these buildings often included entire rooms removed from English country houses and French, Italian and German castles (two of such period rooms being included in this sale) and were furnished with decorative arts to rival the greatest European collections. It was these same collections that came to form the nucleus of most United States museums. From East Coast to West, with many great Mid-Western examples in between, American museums have benefitted from the outsized generosity and public-mindedness of the Gilded Age collectors or their heirs. For while European museum visitors take the support of the state for granted, in America, without the generosity of these great collectors, our institutions would be much the poorer, if existing at all. The institutions participating in this sale read like a roll-call of North America's most important public institutions and these include the Harvard Art Museums, Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Louisville's Speed Art Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Huntington Art Collections, among others. Included is a rich assemblage of furniture, sculpture, works of art, tapestries, ceramics and carpets; many of the pieces having been de-accessioned from these legendary institutions. Collectors in the Gilded Age were voracious, and the aesthetic of the period, wildly eclectic. The objects in this sale reflect that, ranging from massive Italian walnut refectory tables and choir stalls to refined English 18th century mahogany card tables. Renaissance terracotta and plaster sculpture, majolica, Venetian enamels, German Medieval sculpture, Baroque bronzes and Isfahan carpets are included, as well as entire period rooms - of English Baroque and French Neoclassical design. In short, the sale is a gorgeous, if, given the period of collecting it represents, appropriately mixed panoply of five hundred years of decorative arts. And the sale reflects these amazing collections. The art critic Royal Cortissoz, wrote in 1929 about the celebrated collection of Clarence Mackay on Long Island: 'the visitor finds himself in a hall of lordly dimensions: vast shadowy and splendid, the whole room breathes of history; the collector has not only specialized in architecture, painting, sculpture, tapestry and furniture but has specialized in fusing them as to produce a collection in itself a work of art.' While not all the objects in this sale come from museum collections, the others nonetheless reflect this lavish, yet sophisticated aesthetic. And, in this day and age, when it sometimes feels as if the Gilded Age trend of New World appropriation has been reversed with many objects leaving the American shores - indeed, not infrequently to return to their countries of origin -- this sale is a potent reminder of a golden age populated by titanic personalities and collections commensurate to them. Cleveland, in the early 20th century, was a city that combined many of the great industrial fortunes of the country together with a remarkable civic generosity and was home to some superb collections. And this is a tradition that is alive and well in early 21st century. Some of the objects included in this sale were once owned by some of Cleveland's most sophisticated and celebrated collectors. These included Elisabeth Severance Prentiss, Severance A. Millikin, William Tilden Blodgett and Salmon Portland Halle, among others. William Tilden Blodgett (1823-1875), a co-founder, patron, and chairman of the first executive committee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1870s, amassed a staggering collection of American and Old Master pictures including, perhaps, the most celebrated Hudson River School painting, Frederic Edwin Church's Heart of the Andes. A public sensation when it was first unveiled in 1859, it remains one of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's most iconic pictures. He lived between Cleveland, 5th Avenue and Newport and all three cities benefitted from his patronage. Salmon Portland Halle (1866-1949), who, together with his brother Samuel Horatio Halle, founded the Halle Brothers Co. department store. Their French style villa in Shaker Heights, built by John William Creswell Corbusier, was a center of philanthropic activity devoted to multiple artistic and social causes. Elisabeth Severance Prentiss (1863-1944) and her brother John L. Severance came from a prominent family of bankers and industrialists. They both actively continued the tradition of philanthropy started by their family and their impact upon Cleveland's medical, social, and cultural institutions has endured to this day. Their father was an early partner of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. John L. Severance donated a series of tapestries to the armor court of the Cleveland, among many other pieces. Their collections were housed in "Glen Allen", constructed in 1915 by Elizabeth Severance Allen in 1915 and "Longwood", John Severance's great estate, built in the same amalgam of English architectural styles.

A WHITE MARBLE FIGURE OF A FEMALE BACCHANTE

PROBABLY 19TH CENTURY

Details

A WHITE MARBLE FIGURE OF A FEMALE BACCHANTE
PROBABLY 19TH CENTURY
Depicted dancing with castanets and with a panther skin draped over a grape vine-entwined tree trunk, the integrally-carved circular base inscribed in red paint 44.128
14 in. (35.5 cm.) high

Provenance

[By repute] M. Goetz, Paris, 1871.
[By repute] M. Perdeau, Paris.
[By repute] A. de Jonge, Paris.
With French & Company, New York.
Elizabeth Severance Prentiss (1865-1944).
Bequest of Francis F. Prentiss, 1944.

Literature

L. Réau, Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Paris, 1922, II, 507.
W. M. Millikin, ed., Catalogue of the Elizabeth Severance Prentiss Collection, Cleveland, 1944, no. 41, pl. XXI.
D. C. Ditner, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century European Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum of Art, PhD. dissertation (Case Western Reserve University), 1985, p. 177.

Exhibited

L'exposition des Alsaciens-Lorrains, 1871 1874(?)
Masterpieces of Art from the New York and San Francisco World's Fairs, The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1940.

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Lot Essay

While this charming model has long been attributed to Etienne-Maurice Falconet, even being mentioned in Louis Réau's iconic publication of 1922, it is more likely 'in the manner of' Falconet. And while it retains the fine modeling, carving and grace of many late 18th century French marbles, it is probably a 19th century version.

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