Art: Inisfada Sale

When rich & pious Mrs. Nicholas Frederic Brady announced her engagement last February to William J. Babington Macaulay, Irish Free State envoy to the Vatican, it also became known that she was planning to turn over her huge Manhasset estate, “Inisfada.” to the Society of Jesus, sell off its reputedly brilliant collection of art. Fortnight ago a posse of New York dealers and collectors’ agents trekked through the fragrance of a Long Island spring to “Inisfada,” paid 50¢ a head (for charity) to enter the rambling, 87-room Tudoresque structure, took long, thoughtful looks at its contents before the sale was opened by the American Art Association-Anderson Galleries.

Of Chelsea figurines, old Crown Derby dinner services, Georgian silver, Oriental table screens, crystal candelabra, needlepoint armchairs, Elizabethan joint-stools, satinwood bedsteads, Jacobean armchairs, cut-glass fingerbowls, Flemish oak chests, potted palms, tooled leather wastebaskets and bronze andirons, they saw enough to stock all the dealers in Manhattan. Of the great art which legend maintained was “Inisfada’s” glory, they saw little. Artistically respectable by most current standards was the garden-sculpture of Malvina Hoffman, auctioned off in situ among the rose bushes. For the rest, it appeared that the Bradys, in their assiduous years of collecting, had amassed a store of art faintly reminiscent of the collection owned by Major Edward Bowes.

Big item, of painting in the sale was Indian Warfare, by Frederic Remington, incorrectly subtitled Custer’s Last Stand. Though not the traditional Custer’s Last Fight, painted especially in 1888 for Budweiser Beer advertisements by Cassidy Adams, this canvas brought top price for painting. It went for $7,700 to a Manhattan connoisseur whose agents, the Macbeth Gallery, also laid out $10,200 for a pair of similar Western pictures by Charles Marion Russell: Hunter’s Luck, a hunter stymied by a cliff, and The Holdup, a stagecoach robbery.

High Roman Catholic prelates never had a more enthusiastic friend than Mrs. Macaulay, whose pleasure it was to entertain the dignitaries of her Church at “Inisfada.” On sale last week were the beds they slept in, the antique crucifixes before which they prayed, the scenic tapestries which undoubtedly inspired them to homely homiletics. Some of the most important of these tapestries figured in the auction’s largest sale—$43,000 each for two 11-by-15-ft. genre scenes, woven circa 1500, of country life at the Château d’Effiat in Auvergne. These Tournai Gothic tapestries went to a New York dealer. For $32,000, the same dealer carried off a rare 16th Century Brussels Gothic tapestry, 13-by-21 ft., depicting the story of the Prodigal Son. For practicing prodigals was the sale’s oddest item, a rare Georgian walnut & leather “drunkard’s chair” with slots at the sides for poles by which chair & occupant could be carried. Total sales for the week: $471,761.