Pre-Lot Text
Evelyn Annenberg Hall, my mother, and William Jaffe, her second husband and my father, carried on a love affair with art collecting that spanned their 24-year marriage until his death in 1972. Often they pursued this passion together, building a formidable collection that ranged from European paintings, sculpture and furniture to Renaissance drawings and pre-Columbian artifacts. But when it came to Chinese porcelain my mother withdrew to the sidelines, for it was a world in which my father had long immersed himself and, for all his broad knowledge of art, the singular field in which his connoisseurship reached its highest level.
The first record of a purchase of Chinese porcelain that I could find in my father's papers dates to the early 1940s. Indeed, he kept meticulous records of his collecting, filed dealer by dealer, that offer a bird's eye view onto New York's post-war market in Chinese art. The detailed descriptions which some of those dealers provided with their wares remain today a trove of valuable information.
Then there was my father's own amateur scholarship. Here his excellent penmanship came in handy because even though he hadn't formally learned to read and write Chinese he painstakingly copied the inscriptions on his pieces, memorized what the characters meant and in the process created his own personal codebook so he could better identify objects when doing research. His lengthy notes - on tracing paper, legal paper and plain old scraps of paper - are a testament to how someone can educate himself about an area of art without academic training in that field.
My earliest childhood memory of my father studying art was coming upon him one night in our library reading an outsized 1934 hardcover volume on the Chinese pottery and porcelain collection of Sir Percival David. He surely must have considered the book a treasure in its own right because he resisted his longtime habit of jotting down copious marginalia on its pages. Another such memory was of a Saturday afternoon when I couldn't have been more than seven. My parents and I were in the library of our old apartment when the bell rang. My father answered the door and in walked a small wizened Chinese gentleman carrying a shopping bag from which he produced an elegant fabric-covered box that he handed to my father. As they spoke I asked my mother what was going on. She explained that the man was a dealer who'd brought my father a "new treasure." Sure enough, on cue my father opened the box and delicately removed a porcelain dish that he placed on a shelf of a big display case in our entry room. After bidding the man goodbye he asked us to come and admire this latest acquisition.
My father's interest in Chinese porcelain was not merely a private undertaking but one he gladly shared with others. There was, for instance, the talk on the subject he gave at Deerfield Academy, which I attended, to inaugurate a lecture series about art endowed by my parents. Moreover, they enthusiastically gave many pieces to Dartmouth College in honor of their children who attended that school - my mother's two sons by her first marriage and my father's son by his.
After my father's death my mother sensibly kept the Chinese porcelain collection intact, though apparently she did waver once. In going through her papers after she died last spring I came across a letter written to her in 1973 by a Christie's representative regarding her inquiry back then about selling the collection. He said that Christie's stood ready to oblige, that the market was strong and getting stronger. Now, 33 years later, the collection that my father built and my mother preserved will be shared again.