Art: Salomon Sale

A century and a half ago the ladies of France, their skirts shining like inverted sprays of silver in the light of many candles, looked over their fans at a crumbling world and at gentlemen who took snuff, with elaborate and effeminate gesture, from small, silver boxes. In the rooms where they danced or laughed or whispered were chairs, tapestried in stiff silk, little frivolous statues, the infinitely suave and polished paintings of Watteau or Jean Honore Fragonard. Last week, in Manhattan, snuff boxes, chairs, desks, paintings, tapestries, busts, the wide golden branches in which tall candles had once burned brightly, were offered for sale at the American Art Galleries. These—877 pieces which had formed the collection of the late Mrs. William Salomon, wife of famed Banker William Salomon—were considered to comprise, with few exceptions,* the finest such collection in the world.

The sale lasted for four days. The first three were spent in auctioning off the smaller, the less valuable pieces. A rich woman purchased a pair of Irish silver sauce-boats for $2,500; other collectors bought in card-tables, marble clocks, lamps, figurines, inkstands, door knockers, small sofas and chairs, portraits of French ladies whose furtive, lovely faces looked down with gay bewilderment at the solemn faces of antique dealers and U. S. ladies of fashion. On the fourth day of the sale the finest pieces were brought on the platform; the buyers, in their excitement, kept crossing their knees or powdering their noses.

So aroused were the buyers by the fourth day’s display that they furnished almost $500,000 for the remaining pieces in the Salomon Collection; in the first three days they had paid altogether a little less than $200,000. Mrs. Elisha Walker, Manhattan social bigwig, successfully proffered $44,000 for six tapestried chairs and a sofa that had been made, a long time ago, for Queen Marie Antoinette of France. A little Watteau, which showed a pale libidinous god making love to a plump nymph, went to a dealer for $12,500. A portrait by Fragonard of the Chevalier de Billaut, “in gay attire, seated in a chair,” drew $24,000 from P. W. French & Co. P. W. French & Co. also paid the highest price—$28,000—that was offered for any single item. This secured them a bust of Madame de Wailly, wife of Charles de Wailly, court architect to the last king of France. A lady with long thick curls, a sullen mouth and a thick nose, her oblique but unmistakable disdain was not softened by the compliment.

* More valuable collections of French art: museum collections of France; the Wallace Collection, London.