Word: auctioneers
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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When the doors of Christie's opened in London one day last week, a full-house crowd was waiting to squeeze into the auction room. Up for sale was a collection of 166 pictures, including Joseph Mallord William Turner's seascape of Helvoetsluys, the Dutch port. For the fourth time in a century, Londoners would get a chance to buy the painting that had become a legendary symbol of the rivalry between England's two greatest painters: Turner and John Constable...
...heart, every art collector yearns to pick up a painting for a few dollars, dust it off and discover it is really a long-lost old master. For one collector, the wish has come true. In Johannesburg, Businessman (tire-recapping) Maurice Hirsch poked around at a local auction sale and bought for $375 a painting he thought "looked good." Local collectors were doubtful, but Hirsch sent detail photographs of the painting to Belgian Historian Leo van Puyvelde. The verdict: Van Puyvelde had examined that very painting before in 1937. It is, he wrote, L'Erection de la Croix...
Last week the boom met its first real test at the first chinchilla auction. Farmers Chinchilla Cooperative of America, which had staged a pre-auction fashion show, put 10,600 pelts up for sale in Manhattan. The first lot sold for $175 a pelt, but prices quickly drifted down to $25, considered the break-even point. When they dropped to $11, the remaining lots were withdrawn. The 2,760 pelts sold were only enough for about 60 jackets...
...Montgomery, Ala., the first Confederate capita], he was invited to join the Southern Congress in secret session. But on his way to the Capitol, Russell had driven past a slave auction, and he was so upset that he refused point-blank to sit with "a Congress of Slave States." One day beside the Mississippi River, an "an-thropoproprietor" insisted upon conducting him around an evil-smelling set of slave pens, beneath their canopy of flies...
...rose-draped hall in Manhattan's Roosevelt Hotel, 69 mortgages went under the auctioneer's gavel at the newly formed New York Mortgagee Exchange. Fromkes had expected sales of second mortgages to predominate, but almost two-thirds of the sales were first mortgages. More than 1,400 buyers and spectators jammed the room, and, all told, mortgages with a face value of $964,200 were sold for $821,045. Banks that felt overloaded with mortgages and private holders who wanted to thaw out assets were glad to sell at discounts (but did better than by private sale...