PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF EDWIN L. WEISL, JR. (LOTS 300-326) Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. was among the last of a generation of collectors passionate about the arts of the early Italian Renaissance. His acquaintance with Robert Lehman, his father's close friend and confidant, and through him with Bernard Berenson, were formative experiences that determined his own, almost obsessive preoccupation with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Siena, Florence, and Venice. His love of Renaissance paintings caused him to surround himself with other Renaisance works of art, making his apartment as much like an Italian villa as was possible on the East Side of Manhattan. Throughout a busy life in legal and public service, he invariably preferred debating artistic discoveries or obscure attributions (about which he was astonishingly well-informed) to political or economic principles (about which he was scarcely less well-informed), and the news he wished to hear was of his friends in the art world rather than from Wall Street or in Washington. He and his wife Barbara - who had herself emerged from the art world as a critic and friend of such modern masters as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning - furnished their homes on the model of Berenson's Villa I Tatti. More than anything else, it seemed they enjoyed, to a degree rarely encountered today, the company of their paintings, sculptures, textiles, ceramics, and above all books, and the urgency, honesty, and integrity of their feelings for these things with which they surrounded themselves was utterly infectious. A former United States assistant attorney general for land and natural resources (1965-7) and the civil division (1967-9), and the director of the New York State Democratic Campaign in 1964, Ed Weisl was also the Commissioner of Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Affairs for the City of New York under the Beame administration, from 1973 to 1975. After graduating from Yale in 1951 and Columbia Law School in 1956, he began his legal career at Simpson, Thatcher, and Bartlett, the firm to which he returned after his time in Washington. His artistic interests later led him to become the president of the International Foundation for Art Research and to serve on the board of directors of the Robert Lehman Foundation, the Villa I Tatti Council (Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies), and the visiting committee of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Given his claim to have spent his entire law-school career looking at pictures in Columbia University's Art History Library, these events hardly seem surprising. Although the art world was his great and abiding love, he was also intensely proud of his naval service as a lieutenant (j.g.) on the Destroyer the U.S.S. Beatty in the Korean War, as well as of his prominent if 'behind-the-scenes' role in Lyndon Johnson's Civil Rights program in Mississippi and Alabama in the late 1960s. His generosity to the Metropolitan Museum and his unfailing, enthusiastic commitment to the activities of the Robert Lehman Foundation remain a permanent contribution to the cultural life of the one city he loved even more than his spiritual home in the Tuscany of the Renaissance. Angela J. Weisl and Laurence B. Kanter

A GLAZED TERRACOTTA FIGURE OF A SERAPHIM

FLORENTINE, POSSIBLY 15TH CENTURY

细节

A GLAZED TERRACOTTA FIGURE OF A SERAPHIM
FLORENTINE, POSSIBLY 15TH CENTURY
Inscribed on the back in graphite and red paint 'F.360' and in black paint '213'and with a paper label inscribed '104'
11½ in. (20 cm.) high, 15 in. (38 cm.) wide, 4½ in. (11.5 cm.) deep