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Auction PR Publicity Announcements News and Information

Slosberg Fall Auction Results

At its Fall Quality Auction of October 5 to 7, B.S. Slosberg, Incorporated Auctioneers, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, offered some 375 lots of painting, prints, and furniture during the first session, a similar number of lots of decorative objects and sculpture in the second, and in the third session some 250 lots of fine silver and estate jewelry.

The first session featured an interesting group of Philadelphia Centennial furniture produced in the 1940’s by the renowned Feldenkreis Cabinetmakers firm of Germantown. The pieces were made for a family member. The preponderance of the firm’s output was always custom work, but the pieces in Slosberg’s sale had an added flair because the client was the sister of second generation owner Percy Feldenkreis. For example, several writing desks had elaborately carved top surfaces incorporating her monogram. Among the approximately 25 pieces, typically mahogany in the Chippendale style, were the following notable results: block front 7-piece bedroom set, $863; a pair of settees, $863; a block front chest-on-chest, $1,265; set of 7 elaborately carved side chairs, $2,300; and a block front secretary’s desk, $920.

Other interesting lots included: a Baker Louis XV-style 9-piece dining room set, $1,035; a 19th-century American Country corner closet, $863; a 19th-century New Jersey architectural cruciform copper church steeple, $978; A Neoclassical-style bronze tripod stair lantern, late 19th century, $2,013; a fine 36-inch Swiss musicbox, late 19th century, $2,300; an unusual Empire Revival mahogany single pedestal dining table with six leaves, $863; and a refined Renaissance Revival walnut tall dresser, $633.

More than half of the lots in the first session were art works drawn from two prominent Philadelphia estates, the collections of the late Esther and Philip Klein and the late Samuel L. Evans. By reason of his long-standing friendship with the family of the mid-century American painter and art educator Harold Weston, Evans had inherited three of this important artist’s works, and jointly they achieved “best of sale”. His oil, Transplanting, sold for $6,498, white a watercolor, Maple Leaves, reached $2,185; the masterwork landscape titled, From Saw Tooth Ledge, in its original Carl Sandelin frame, sold to a determined bidder for $13,225.

Also from the Evans estate were a Humbert Howard oil, Strawberries and Pear, $4,025, a Paul Keene charcoal, The Dark Death, painted in 1966, $2,875, and a Julius Bloch study for the Immigrants series, executed in 1938, $5,175.

From the Klein estate came the sought-after Julius Bloch etching, Prisoner, in an original issue of 50, which registered what is likely a record result of $2,990. Other prime lots from that source were a fine Sandor Bernath watercolor, Southwestern Pueblo Under a Starry Sky, $1,380, and the Jimmy Ernst watercolor, Abstraction, $978.

Other results included: Blanche Douglas-Hamilton, Renaissance genre painting after Vermeer, $2,185; an unsigned French late 19th-century triptych format, The Reapers, $1,495; Claudine Morrow’s oil, Man from Second Mesa, $690; a wonderful luminist George Essig watercolor/gouache, Moonlit South Jersey Marshes, $978; the Adam Leontus oil, Haitian Village Scene, $863; and Lilian Cheviot’s Yorkshire Terriers, $3,565.

Decorative objects in the sale’s second session also performed very well. An antique ivory Kwan Yin figure fetched $633, while a Japanese late 19th-century bronze figural sculpture, Woman Sewing, went out at $2,185. An Oliver China Company Flow Blue game set, circa 1900, sold for $432, and a pair of Tiffany bronze and enamel 10-inch candleholders reached $1,093.

Continental and American art glass and ceramics were well-represented, and among the results in these categories were: a Loetz iridescent green/gold dimpled body vase, $1,955; a Carnival Glass “Grape and Cable” variant plate, $1,495; a pair of Ruba Rombic crystal trays with tumbler, $2,300; a Boch Freres Art Pottery crackle glaze vase, $490; a Newcomb pink and purple glaze vase (artist Jonathan Hunt), $2,300; and a pair of Zsolnay seahorse-form pitcher vases, $518.

Other decorative lots and silver included: a Handel table lamp with floral and leaf motif, $2,185; a fine Continental buhl work and simulated tortoise shell jewelry box, $633; an American Folk Art carved owl decoy, $460; an unusual 19th-century American Folk Art wood, bronze and grain painted walking stick, $432; set of eight Limoges portrait plates, $575; a pair of late 19th-century Continental porcelain oyster plates, $805; an American Victorian crazy quilt with animal and music motifs, $288; an English silver center bowl, London, 1890, $490; a pair of silver and cut glass repoussÈ vases, $978; Tiffany and Company silver tongs, $403; and a Dominick & Haff 94-piece sterling flatware set, “Queen Anne Plain” pattern, $863.

A special feature of modern watches highlighted the jewelry segment of the sale’s last session. Among those lots were: an Elgin 14K yellow gold pocketwatch, early 20th-century, $720; a Waltham 14K yellow gold pocketwatch with jeweled chain and fob, $748; an English Dewsbury, Halifax 18K yellow gold chronograph repeater pocketwatch, $1,150; a man’s Rolex oyster silver and gold perpetual date wristwatch, $4,830; a man’s Vacheron Constantin 18K yellow gold wristwatch, $2,300; a lady’s Girard-Perregaux 18K yellow gold wristwatch, $748; and a man’s Rolex Submariner wristwatch, $2,300.

Fine jewelry included a number of rings, among them a lady’s 14K white gold ring with three princess cut diamonds, $805; and a lady’s 14K white gold and diamond solitaire ring surrounded by ten round-cut diamonds, $1,380.

The next Slosberg quality sale will take place on Sunday and Monday, February 22 to 23, 2009. As always, consignments are welcome for exceptional examples of American, European, and Oriental paintings, furniture, and decorative objects representing all periods.

Contact Slosberg’s at (215) 425-7030; or visit, www.bssauction.com.