Leverhulme Sale

A Manhattan drawing room bloomed with soft red light. A company of people, stained with the same grave color, sat staring at a pair of red plush curtains. It was a breathless moment. Once the curtains, brushed from behind by a moving shape, vaguely stirred, and then an excited whisper rippled over the red room and vanished in diminishing circles of sound, as if a crumb had been dropped into a pool of claret.

At the left of the curtains waited a middle-aged man in a cutaway coat. He kept pulling out his handkerchief and putting it back again; he fidgeted with his necktie. Clearly he too felt the suspense of this taut interval, this moment so charged with imminent revelations. What mystery waited for exploitation?what exotic, perhaps sinister spectacle would be disclosed upon that curtained dais?. . . The curtains twitched again. Then slowly, awfully, they were drawn back. There, stripped of all covering, backed by a golden screen and brilliantly illuminated from above and below, stood nine Chippendale chairs.

Instantly relief overtook the people in the red room. The man in the cutaway coat began to recite a chant, while his listeners turned around and smiled at one another, signaled and whispered, some even rising from their chairs to shout aloud. They were, in person or by proxy, the 700 millionaires who had been invited to come to this drawing room (the auction booth of the Anderson Galleries, Manhattan) to bid for the first items of the collection left by the late Viscount Leverhulme, the manufacturer of Lifebuoy Soap.

“… Probably the finest chairs of the period in existence. [For once the man in the frock coat, F. A. Chapman, auctioneer, was speaking with the strictest accuracy.] I think I cannot do less than start them at $10,000…. Five?… All right, we all of us have to get warmed up… Six?… You are too generous, Sir…. Who’ll give me seven?… I have seven. Eight?. . . Will nobody… Oh, many thanks. I am your debtor, madame; you owe me nothing…. And now nine?… I have nine; I have ten… ten thousand dollars. That was, I think, my first suggestion…. Eleven?… It is still eleven. Eleven and two fifty… eleven and three quarters… twelve….”

And so the Chippendale chairs came to be sold, in the end, to the P. W. French & Co., dealers, for $15,000. Everyone was bidding now. Most of the dealers and agents sat in the back of the room, among them Frank Partridge, Esq., of London, who was rumored to be representing the King of England. He bought a suite in golden walnut and velvet, made in 1695, for $12,500; also some 1795 painted Sheraton side-seats the backs of which were covered with petit-point, and a segmental side-table of about 1780, fitted with a carved lambrequin and finished in cream and gold.

Fritz Kreisler picked up a mahogany English tea-caddy. 1779, for $140.

E. F. Albee, vaudeville manager, bought a pair of console tables.

The French Co. once more paid the highest price of the day for an 18th Century tapestry.

The Metropolitan Museum paid $1,300 for a George I side-table in black and gold. The proceeds of the first day’s sale were $169,460.

The bidders went home and slept and came back again through a raging snowstorm. Partridge of London, pressed closely by Henry Symons, Manhattan dealer, appeared to have no bottom to his purse. Was it truly the King’s gold that he was spending? Dealers thought not, but the rumor persisted. S. D. Bowers, a collector, bought two satinwood commodes for $11,600. On the third day Mr. Partridge again paid the highest price?$16,000?for a pair of Adam bookcases, heirlooms of the Chesterfield family. English and American bidders worked against each other as if the sale had been an international polo match. But now the excitement had cooled a little. Fevered patricians did not get up and shout their bids; they were represented by their agents who, to indicate a raise of $1,000, lifted a forefinger, waved a catalog or merely jerked their heads. One dealer made most of his bids by leaning back and nonchalantly tugging the coat of an auctioneer who stood near him and who appeared to translate these tugs into dollars according to their strength. The most interesting item on the fourth day was a pair of William and Mary walnut chairs sold to Alvin T. Fuller (Governor of Massachusetts) for $1100. Receipts for four days of the sale totaled $490,200. And still, in the soft red room, the fluid light poured and eddied; the fine people came and went; the voice of the auctioneer trickled on and on. …