Auction, Fine and Decorative Arts March 10-11, 2012 9 am

147 Pages·2012·11.21 MB·English

Auction, Fine and
Decorative Arts
March 10-11, 2012
9 a.m.
117 Tunnel Road
Asheville, North Carolina
Preview Friday, March 9, 1–8 P.M.
Early Preview By Appointment
Fully illustrated color catalogue
$35 (Includes U.S. Postage)
$30 at the door
Catalogue available online,
www.brunkauctions.com
brunk
a u c t i o n s
Post Office Box 2135
Asheville, North Carolina 28802
828-254-6846 • Fax [phone]
[email protected]
Robert S. Brunk, NCAL 3041, Andrew Brunk NCAL 8830, Firm NC 3095
Lot 558
Robert S. Brunk Auction Services, Inc. Since 1983
Cover: Lot 515
Terms of Sale
1. All items are sold as is, where is, with to charge successful bids to credit cards if any loss or damage to shipped items.
all faults. There are no warranties or payment is not received within five days of 10. Note to internet absentee bidders. We do
representations of merchantability, of fitness, the auction. not accept cut bids, (bids less than the last
nor of any other kind, express or implied. 6. We are pleased to offer absentee and interval) from the floor or from phone
All items are available for your examination phone bidding for prospective bidders bidders, and we do not accept them from
prior to bidding. Your bidding will signify who cannot be present at the auction. internet bidders. Thus it is possible that a
that you have examined the items as fully Please complete the Absentee Bid and/or lot could go to another bidder for less than
as you desire, or that you have chosen Phone Reservation form. Absentee bids are your absentee bid. For example, if the bids
not to examine them. Written and oral executed competitively and confidentially. are progressing in ten dollar increments,
descriptions are our opinions and should All reservations for phone bidding are $50, $60, $70 and your absentee falls
in no way be construed as a guarantee of held in the strictest confidence and must at $75, we will not take the bid since it
any kind as to age, condition, materials or be received by 5 pm the day before the is less than the $10 interval. We always
any other feature of items being sold. Our auction. No additional phone bids can encourage bidders to bid by phone or to
goal is to provide prospective bidders with be accepted on the day of the auction leave absentee bids through our gallery to
accurate and detailed information. We including additions when speaking with a avoid such a situation.
recommend prospective bidders examine staff person on the phone. We can accept 11. All purchases are subject to 6.75% North
all items in which they have an interest. If written absentee bids submitted on the Carolina sales tax unless the North Carolina
you require absolute certainty in all areas Absentee Bid Form up to 30 lots before Certificate of Resale tax form is fully and
of authenticity, and the results of your the item comes up for auction. Leaving an completely filled out and received prior to
evaluation leave uncertainty in your mind, absentee or phone bid on a lot indicates your time of purchase. Resale tax numbers from
we recommend you not bid on the item willingness to open the bidding at one half the other states are accepted. International
in question. We do not give refunds. All printed low estimate, and gives the auctioneer buyers are responsible for tariffs, taxes, or
sales are final. No statement written or oral the authority to open the bidding at that level, assessments of shipped items to the buyer’s
made by the auctioneer shall be deemed a or to open the bidding on a lot with a printed country.
warranty or assumption of liability by Brunk reserve at the reserve price. Brunk Auctions 12. Bidding on an item indicates your
Auctions or by any seller represented by shall have the right to withdraw any item at understanding and acceptance of these
Brunk Auctions. any time for any reason and to default any sale Terms of Sale. If a purchaser breaches
2. If a lot is offered with a reserve price, in the event of an error or dispute. any of these Terms of Sale, including the
the reserve price is printed following the 7. In the case of identical absentee bids, the obligation to pay for purchased items,
description and bidding will begin at that bid received first will prevail. Bids left on Brunk Auctions may seek all remedies
price. Otherwise bidding will begin at a liveauctioneers.com are not executed until under the law including canceling the
price appropriate in auctioneer’s discretion. the item is offered in the live auction sale and reoffering the property without
The auctioneer always reserves the right and the order in which they are received reserve.
to withdraw a lot for any reason he deems is not a factor. We sell 70-100 lots 13. A buyer’s premium of 20% will be applied
appropriate. At the auctioneer's discretion, per hour. Following are general guidelines to the purchase price of all items. For
no bid of less than one half the low estimate for bidding increments: purchases made by cash, check or wire
will be accepted from any source: phone transfer, the buyer’s premium shall be
$0-$100..............................$50 increments
bidding, absentee bidding, internet bidding, discounted 2%.
$100-1,000.........................$50 increments
or bidding in the gallery. On lots with a 14. Purchased items not picked up from our
$1,000-3,000....................$100 increments
printed reserve, bidding will begin at the auction facility within ten business days
$3,000-10,000.... $200 or $500 increments
reserve price. of the auction will be assessed a storage
$10,000-$50,000................$1,000, $2,000
3. Once we declare that an item is sold, we fee of $5.00 per day, per item. You
or $5,000 increments
cannot reopen the bidding. It is the bidder’s authorize us to re-sell on your behalf any
above $50,000...........auctioneers discretion
responsibility to get our attention prior to item not picked up within sixty calendar
our saying “sold”. We reserve the right to 8. In our experience, cellular phones are not days. The costs of storage, plus any other
reject any bids deemed inappropriate or to always dependable, and we recommend costs directly related to the item, and an
withdraw any item(s) for lack of appropriate phone bidding reservations be made on auctioneer’s commission of 17 %, will be
bids. If an item is withdrawn from the land lines. Telephone bidding is offered subtracted from the proceeds unless other
auction it will be offered again only at the only to clients outside the 828 area code. arrangements have been made with Brunk
auctioneer’s discretion. We make every effort to honor all absentee Auctions. The minimum charge will be
4. Payment must be made by cash, approved and phone bid reservations, but we are not $50. The net proceeds will be mailed to
check, wire transfer, or MasterCard and Visa liable for any losses incurred as a result of your address as stated herein in full and
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known to us who wish to write a check must bids or bidding by phone does not imply week following auctions. Please arrange
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Credit arrangements must be made by the 9. Purchaser agrees that packing and shipping tortoiseshell, or other animal materials may
Friday prior to the day of auction so bank is done at the purchaser’s risk and that the be subject to regulations imposed by the
statements can be verified. We reserve the purchaser will pay in advance all packing Endangered Species Act and by the United
right to not issue a buyer’s number or to expenses, materials, carrier fees and States Fish and Wildlife Department.
withhold merchandise if appropriate credit insurance charges. At our discretion, items Some countries prohibit the importation
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of purchase. Payment for successful absentee, items is the responsibility of the purchaser. bidding if they intend to import these lots
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within five business days of the auction. Your and shippers if a purchaser so requests.
signature on this form constitutes permission Brunk Auctions will have no liability for
• 385 •
Featured estates and ColleCtions
Collection of the late reynolds Price
Property deaccessioned by the north Carolina Museum of art
Property of Philip and Charlotte Hanes, Winston-salem, north Carolina
estate of the late Glenn e. and Faye Hicks Jr., atlanta, Georgia
estate of the late Patrick H. Booth, Jr., Petersburg, Virginia
estate of dr. Joseph Chandler Battaile, sr., Memphis, tennessee
Property of a south african Collector
Private east tennessee Collection
Private Collection, Memphis, tennessee
Property of a lady, Paris, France
Private Collection, tryon, north Carolina
estate of the late Mary Whiting ewing, Chapel Hill, north Carolina
estate of the late Jane B. Wishner, Hendersonville, north Carolina
Private Collection, lexington, Kentucky
Private Collection of a Washington, d.C., Gentleman
Private Collection, Maryland
Property From the estate of the late Charles dickgiesser
estate of Bessie Goldner, Phoenix, arizona
Private Collection, linville ridge, north Carolina
estate of Georg Hilgers, Germany
Private Collection, nashville, tennessee
Private Collection, Blowing rock, north Carolina
•548 •
March 10, 2012 9 a.m.
•
1
Lots 001 - 691
• 163 •
8 • March 10, 2012 • Collection of the Late Reynolds Price
Allan Gurganus, author of Oldest Living Confederate
Widow Tells All, delivered a eulogy for his col-
league Reynolds Price at the American Academy of Arts
and letters in New York City on April 7, 2011. Price, the
James B. Duke Professor of English at Duke, his alma
mater, passed away January 20. Our sincere thanks to
Alan Gurganus for his permission to reprint that eulogy:
Eulogy for Reynolds Price
Storytelling aloud, doing all the accents—(while
incidentally saving some young academic couple’s first
dinner party)—Reynolds Price embodied a narrative
force, a charm unmet before and never likely again.
If his prose came clear and conversational, his con-
versation could be opulent, allusive. Author of thirty-
Mariana R. Cook, 1986 seven books in all known genres, his every observation
brought its own character witness: I mean Reynolds’
God-like James Mason bass-baritone. (If that voice told you how one afternoon in Rome in 1961, while Richard
Burton was in another room, Liz Taylor sort of put the moves on beautiful boy Reynolds, the sheer timbre of telling
made you feel an infidel for doubting.)
Reynolds was fluent in Aramaic, at ease in ancient Greek. And he was rightly proud of his North Carolina
memory. Once asked to talk about his first-grade class—Reynolds smiled, “Left to right or right to left?”
His choicest stories, breathed and written, leapt as a birthright from his rural Warren County. Reynolds’
novels benefit from his having memorized all the parables of Christ. Price’s own prose sounds a sweet clear cer-
tainty we hear in ‘The Book of Ruth’. Like that work, his fiction typically considers worthy people, secure only in
family ties, tested by death or poverty, folks who, thanks to memory then forgiveness, somehow endure.
Reynolds Price could be a very funny man. His humor was insinuating, cracked, and at peace with the hu-
man body. Since the books he loved most were the Bible and Paradise Lost—from those he’d founded a Christian
notion that all of us have fallen but some have visibly slipped, if not lower than others, then a bit more volition-
ally, strategically. And these become the storytellers, the feelers, the first-rate first-grade rememberers. Reynolds
was all of those combined. Juggling gifts, he was like Isaac Newton tossing all the apples back up.
The worst year of the Depression was 1933, when Reynolds Price appeared in Macon, North Carolina. He
remained an only child till his brother, Bill, the distinguished historian, arrived less than a decade later. But Reyn-
olds remained for that time the single kid among a bevy of great-aunts and grandparents, folks ready to adore and
get him talking. He complied. In early photographs he shines like some MGM feature-player. A dark-eyed pretty
child, he opened into the comic intelligence that forever lit his family’s home. He’d been born a prodigy. For all
that Existence first granted him—then later seemed, via poor health, to withdraw—Reynolds Price remained pre-
cocious a full 77 years.
Duke University saw his brilliance at 18 and took him unto itself. After a Rhodes scholarship, and ac-
quaintance with Auden and Spender, the prodigal returned to publish at age 29, A Long and Happy Life. It is still
my candidate for best novel by the youngest person. A short parlous tale of happy people, it loves its young char-
acters into being then absolves them of crimes their own loves require. Most novelists don’t emerge till after 40,
after realizing their own mortality by enduring at least three divorces, after delivering too many eulogies of friends.
But Reynolds seemed born knowing and laughing. His social poise was peerless and the one mistake he ever
readmitted he made in this very building. Reynolds regretted it ever-after: he went to introduce Stephen Sondheim
then said instead “Stephen Spielberg”. He’d rue this slip aloud a dozen times.
Price’s poems and novels understand how a landscape shapes its citizens. His prose has by heart the
names of every bird and wildflower. We likewise feel his deep acceptance of sin and mortality as the very things
that give us all our color.
March 10, 2012 • Collection of the Late Reynolds Price • 9
From the start, people knew him as a boy—if one who had already made literature. Price grew up to be,
with his Bible translations, his poems, plays and essays, an old-fashioned Man of Letters, on Victor Hugo’s scale
of pursuit-production. In this, he resembles our much-missed colleague John Updike. They both danced a Virginia
reel among the genres. Both had so much to say about so many things, they always seemed to be playing doubles
against any single subject.
Reynolds’ state of buoyant blessedness darkened at age 51. The aggressive treatment of a spinal
malignancy killed both the cancer and his ability to walk. Typical of Reynolds to find, almost at once, immobil-
ity’s every hidden benefit. Always a closet pasha, he rightly pointed out: most writers would secretly prefer to be
wheeled by some literate young person from their desk to a waiting meal and, after some stimulating (if brief)
conversation, back to the desk again.
I’ll devote just five sentences to his positive influence on me, a fellow North Carolinian 15 years his junior.
Not long after I’d escaped our native state, Reynolds read my first stories and summoned me back from Palo Alto
to teach at Duke. He’d reeled me back, half against my will, to a state I felt belonged to my family, not me. (Being
24, I had Corfu in mind!) This native’s return was eased by my seeing Reynolds’ own lair—its Rembrandt etchings,
ancient Russian icons, death masks of Blake and Keats, and more than a few superb new portraits of—somehow,
naturally—Reynolds Price. I saw how daily he worked. He showed me: talent is never an excuse to coast. Talent
is the one reason to struggle. From Reynolds I learned just three things: how to work, what to write about, and
where.
His home still contains a wall of books, in chronological order, all first editions, each of course, by Reyn-
olds Price. In that glass case, across its nearly 40 titles, there is not a careless or hurried sentence, not a banal
thought, not one image unfelt before being dentally polished and aligned. His is, I think, a truly humane and uni-
fied contribution to our literature. It is lasting because it feels as natural, as inevitably breathed-into as some deep
clear Schubert song.
But what we remember best is his warming voice, his total recall, his suave simplicity when relaxed and at
his funniest. Born Depression-poor, rightly praised from the beginning, there was always something of the prince
about Reynolds Price. And, as with worthy royals, visible adversity became, in his hands, a new and deepening
subject. His scope of talent was never insisted on, merely exercised and daily. Not assumed, enjoyed.
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
0001 002 003
Reynolds Price’s Vintage Olivetti Typewriter Four Annotated Books by Reynolds Price Ben Long
(North Carolina/Italy, born
Olivetti Lettera 22, circa 1950s, with original cover comprising The Laws of Ice, A Private Contentment 1945)
inscribed “Reynolds Price” and original cloth and (signed on title page), Vital Provisions, The
zippered case, generally good condition, cover Foreseeable Future, all inscribed on title page Portrait of Reynolds Price, 1985,
with separations at seams, zippered case with with notes for corrections, all in good condition signed with monogram lower
surface wear, abrasions, losses at leather handles with minor bumps at corners, wear and slight right “BL” and inscribed with
and other wear overall discoloration to some jackets title and “Durham 1985/Merry
Christmas! 1997”, graphite on
Estimate: $100 - $200 Estimate: $300 - $500 laid paper, 9-3/4 x 7-1/8 in.
(sight); gilt wood frame, stains,
Price typed almost all of his early books on this
handling grime, foxing, not
Olivetti, starting with A Long and Happy Life.
examined out of frame
Estimate: $400 - $600
For additional details and images see our website, www.brunkauctions.com
10 • March 10, 2012 • Collection of the Late Reynolds Price
004 005 006
After Cornelis Janssens Van Ceulen Wedgwood Bust of Milton British School
(or Cornelius Johnson, Flemish/English, 1593- (19th century)
British, late 19th century, black
1661)
basalt with impressed mark “Milton/ Portrait of John Milton (1608-1674), English
John Milton, aged 10 years, inscribed at top Wedgwood/F.W. Wyon”, mounted on poet, unsigned, oil on copper, 8-1/8 x 6-1/2
“John Milton Aetat 10”, possibly a 17th or socle, 13-1/2 in., excellent condition in.; gilt wood liner, yellowed varnish, flaking,
18th century copy, oil on canvas, 12-3/4 x 10 abrasions; liner resurfaced
Estimate: $400 - $600
in.; carved gilt and lacquered wood frame by
Provenance: Michael Evans Fine Art, Ferndale,
Alexander Laing, Edinburgh, resurfaced, some
Reynolds Price wrote his thesis at Oxford Pennsylvania, purchased 2008 (original
skinning of surface, restretched, lined, several
on Milton, and taught a course on receipt accompanies lot)
periods of restoration, retouch throughout,
Milton's poety at Duke for decades
flaking, abrasions at edges, craquelure; frame
Estimate: $200 - $400
with abrasions
Provenance: Phillips, sale No. 306, lot 125
(label verso)
Estimate: $300 - $500
008
Parian Ware Figure of Milton
British, 19th century, figure standing beside pillar with a scroll,
“Into the heaven of heavens I have presumed an earthly guest
and drawn ethyreal [sic] air”, 13 in.; lot accompanied by book,
007
The English Poems of John Milton, Oxford University Press, blue
cloth binding, inscription on front papers “Given to W.S.P.C.
Three English Ceramic Busts
1958” and signed “Edward Reynolds Price, May 1953”, thought
British, 19th century: one of Milton, probably Staffordshire, 9-1/4 to be Reynolds Price’s first copy of Milton, 6-1/4 x 3-7/8 in.,
in., overall light crazing; two unidentified, probably English authors, figure with failed repair to proper right foot, otherwise good
7-1/4 in., overall light crazing, and 8 in., tape residue, generally good condition; book in good condition, corners slightly bumped
condition
Estimate: $300 - $600
Estimate: $200 - $400
Reynolds Price was 20 years old when purchased this copy of
Milton's Poems.
For additional details and images see our website, www.brunkauctions.com