Art: Property of a Gentleman

Last spring 74-year-old William Randolph Hearst began to set his enormous affairs in order. One of the properties on which he wanted the public to lend him $35,500,000 was St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, the Lord of San Simeon’s European seigniory. Two months ago the registration statement by which Mr. Hearst sought the approval of the Securities & Exchange Commission for an issue of bonds to that amount was discreetly withdrawn. Recently, however, Publisher Hearst unburdened himself of four of his newspapers, and last week he succeeded in realizing a little something on St. Donat’s. He sold the silverware.

Catalogued by old, famed Sotheby’s auction rooms in London as “The Property of a Gentleman, a well-known Collector,” the Hearst hoard weighed 31,000 ounces or almost precisely one ton. Some of the pieces had been acquired as recently as six months ago. Most of them had been bought by high-bidding Hearst agents, once known as the most prominent silver buyers in London. Over a green baize table in Sotheby’s quiet Bond Street rooms last week, red-faced Auctioneer Major Felix Walter Warre sold all 86 items to nodding, winking bidders for $108,320.

Since Collector Hearst had paid about $125,000 for 32 of his Tudor, Stuart and Early Georgian silver pieces included in this sale, his loss on the whole transaction was estimated to be at least 50%. Nobody knew what the chances were that Mr. Hearst might soon part with his armor, of which his collection is supposedly one of the best in the world.