Maine Antique Digest March 2015

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Maine Antique Digest, March 2015 13-D
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auctioneers noted that of around
30 or so recorded examples,
none demonstrates any indica-
tion of having been specifically
influenced by the two that were
made for Bayezid II. His inter-
est in astronomy, however, was
well known and the institutions
of court munajjims (astrono-
mer-astrologers) and mosque
muwaqqits (timekeepers) were
established in his time.
Bayezid II studied mathemat-
ics and astronomy under Miriam
Chelebi, grandson of Qadi Zade
al-Rumi, director of the obser-
vatory at Samarkand that was
founded by astronomer, math-
ematician, and Timurid ruler
Ulugh Beg in the first half of the
15th century. The sultan’s own
studies and commissions, com-
mentaries, etc., are all recorded,
as one would expect—but little
is known of the maker of this
astrolabe.
A craftsman whose name
means “the red one,” al-Ahmar
al-Nujumi al-Rumi may have
been a Turk from central Anato-
lia, and the epithet “al-Nujumi”
indicates that he was an astron-
omer, but he does not appear in
a recently published bio-bibli-
ographical survey of Ottoman
astronomers and their works.
This complex and rare instru-
ment, which measures 3¾" in
diameter, was sold at $1,547,890.
The early 16th-century astrolabe,
sold last October for $1.548 mil-
lion at Sotheby’s.
First exhibited at the Rome Biennale of 1925, in
the section devoted to sacred art, and on Decem-
ber 11 last year sold for $230,050 at Sotheby’s,
Adolfo Wildt’s cream marble head of the Vergine,
also known as Testina di Maria, recalls one of his
earliest marbles, a Vedova, or Widow, of 1892—a
portrait of a woman with a scarf encircling her
face—that was in its turn inspired by a Canova bust
of a Vestal Virgin now in the Galleria d’Arte Mod-
erna in Milan.
Wildt’s model for the earlier bust of a widow was
actually his wife, Dina Boschi, which may seem a
touch morbid for a sculptor who was then only 24
and presumably not long married when he created
it, but then it seems he was known for his melan-
cholic temperament.
In this 1920s head, however, he simplified both
of those earlier prototypes and
focussed wholly on the face,
employing soft forms rather than
his more usual sharp lines and
angles. Wildt’s Vergine was also
shown in a New York exhibition
of Italian modern art in 1926 and
he is known to have produced at
least three versions within two
years.
This one was first owned by
Pia Scheiwiller, sister of the
publisher and art critic Giovanni
Scheiwiller, who had married
Wildt’s eldest daughter, Arte-
mia. It may have been a gift from
Giovanni and Artemia, if not
from Wildt himself, to the “Aunt
in Rome,” as Pia was known to
the family.
A Virgin for the “Aunt in Rome”?
At Sotheby’s on December 11,
Adolfo Wildt’s life-size head of
the Virgin, mounted on a veined
yellow marble slab—and seen
here full face and in profile—was
sold at $230,050.
At a Sotheby’s Geneva sale
on November 11, 2014,
the gold watch seen at top right
became the most expensive time-
piece of any kind sold at auction
when bidding reached $24.016
million. It had in fact more than
doubled its own record of $11
million, set in 1999 in a Sothe-
by’s New York sale of Seth
Atwood’s Time Museum.
To be more precise, that was
the bid that secured it for Sheikh
Saud bin Mohammed al-Thani, a
member of Qatar’s ruling family
who, until 2005, when charges of
corruption were brought against
him and he was dismissed from
his post, had been both a prolific
private collector and from 1997,
Qatar’s minister of culture,
arts, and heritage. Many times
described as the world’s richest
and most powerful art collector,
he is reputed to have spent $1.5
billion in filling new museums
in Doha and, through bidding
extraordinary sums, had a dra-
matic and, for some, unwelcome
impact on the international auc-
tion market.
Prompted by news of his
death, a story in the November
17, 2014, issue of the New York
Times* states, “In 2012 a High
Court judge in London froze $15
million worth of Sheikh Saud’s
assets as part of a dispute over
unpaid bills to auction houses.
To pay the debt, he consigned
the Graves watch to Sotheby’s in
Geneva.”
It was sold on November 11,
two days after he died. On its
return to the salesrooms, it was
simply provenanced to a “pri-
vate collection.”
Commissioned in the mid-
“Complications,” Certainly—but Bidding Ticks
Up to $24 Million
1920s from Patek Philippe by
the New York City banker, boat-
ing enthusiast, and print collec-
tor, Henry Graves Jr., the watch
that came to be known as the
“Henry Graves Supercomplica-
tion” resulted from a round of
pocket-watch one-upmanship
that Graves had indulged in with
James Ward Packard, the car
manufacturer.
Graves asked Patek Philippe to
conjure up the most complicated
watch ever made. They obliged
and seven years later he handed
over $15,000 for the “Supercom-
plication,” which is just under 3"
in diameter and 1½" thick, and
contains 920 separate compo-
nents, including 430 screws, 110
wheels, 120 mechanical levers
or parts, and 70 jewels that facil-
itate its 24 horological com-
plications—all packed into an
18-karat gold case and weighing
one pound, three ounces in all.
In 1989, to mark the compa-
ny’s 150th anniversary, Patek
Philippe did come up with a
33-complication watch, the
“Calibre 89,” but that one incor-
porated computer controlled
functions, and the Graves special
remains the most complicated
analog watch ever made.
For the more horologically
minded of M.A.D. readers, the
basic description is as follows:
“A gold, double dialled and dou-
ble open-faced, minute repeating
clockwatch with Westminster
chimes, grande and petite son-
nerie, split seconds chronograph,
registers for 60-minutes and
12-hours, perpetual calendar
accurate to the year 2100, moon-
phases, equation of time, dual
power reserve for striking and
going trains, mean and sidereal
time, central alarm, indications
for times of sunrise/sunset and
a celestial chart for the night
time sky of New York City at
40 degrees 41.0 minutes North
latitude.”
The latter is clearly visible in
the accompanying illustrations
along with glimpses of the orig-
inal fitted tulipwood box, inlaid
with ebony and centred by a
mother-of-pearl panel engraved
with the arms of Henry Graves
Jr. and accompanied by the Patek
Philippe Certificate of Origin.
Graves died in 1953, but the
“Supercomplication” remained
in his family until 1969, when it
was sold to SethAtwood, founder
of the Time Museum. Thirty
years later, when Sotheby’s New
York sold “Masterpieces from
the Time Museum,” it made
$11,002,500—as noted above.
Sadly, I have not been able
to ascertain its present where-
abouts, though one British news-
paper, the Daily Express, help-
fully noted that it went to a man
in a red tie!
* You can find the New York
Times story and more back-
html?_r=0) and .
The “Henry Graves Supercompli-
cation,” sold for just over $24 mil-
lion by Sotheby’s Geneva.
It doesn’t work anymore—the
ratchet no longer engages
with the springs—but the pat-
ent corkscrew pictured here is a
real corker and in a November
26, 2014, regional sale, held by
Reeman Dansie of Colchester in
Essex, it was valued at $600/900
but went on to extract a bid from
one admirer of no less $75,540!
Among those who know their
corkscrews, this is perhaps the
ultimate prize—historically
significant and until last year,
known only from one other
example in an English private
collection.
The standard reference work,
British Corkscrew Patents from
1795 by Fletcher Wallis, iden-
tifies it as just the third British
corkscrew to be patented—
on July 2, 1839, by Charles
Osborne of Birmingham, who
explained the mechanism thus:
“My improvements in the con-
struction of cork-screws consist
in the adaptation or application
of springs. Introducing the worm
into the cork compresses the
bow springs and brings them in
a state of tension. When the elas-
tic force of the springs exceeds
that of the friction between the
cork and the bottle, it will cause
the cork to be drawn up a short
distance, when it can be easily
drawn out in the ordinary way.”
Sadly, Osborne, never lived
to see whether his corkscrew
would be a success, for he died
of consumption only six months
later, but his tragic end certainly
ensured the model’s rarity and
this was a chance that the serious
helixophiles (corkscrew collec-
tors—named for the coiled shape
of the worm) could not afford to
miss.
Almost exactly the same as
the version illustrated in British
Corkscrew Patents… , it bears no
actual patent markings but has
the same inscription engraved
to one of the springs: “Made
from the Iron Shoe that was
taken from a pillar that was 656
years in the Foundation of Old
London Bridge.” That medieval
bridge had been dismantled in
1831, following the completion
of John Rennie’s stone arched
bridge—the one that in 1967
was itself dismantled, sold, and
re-erected at Lake Havasu City,
Arizona.
By a remarkable coincidence,
another very early corkscrew had
got collectors excited only a few
weeks earlier, when it turned up
on the French version of eBay.
Utilising bowed springs but
not the ratchet mechanism, that
one was marked to the collar
“Soho Patent” and “By Her
Majesty’s Royal Letters.” My
colleague Roland Arkell, whose
article in an issue of Antiques
Trade Gazette first alerted me to
this corkscrew story, noted that
this inscription suggested that
it had emerged from the Soho
(Birmingham) manufactory of
the entrepreneur Matthew Boul-
ton, and that corkscrews made
by Boulton to a 1795 design by
Samuel Henshall are similarly
marked.
Bids on that eBay corkscrew
closed on November 14 at
$27,935.
Happy Days for Helixophiles
Charles Osborne’s record-break-
ing patent corkscrew of 1839, sold
for $75,540 by Reeman Dansie last
November and destined by its new
European owner for his private
corkscrew museum.
Last year, the two rare ceramic
pieces illustrated here were
surrendered or, if you pre-
fer, restored into the hands of
descendants of their original
owners when it was recognised
by museum administrators that
they were yet more examples
of those many works of art that
were confiscated from their
rightful owners by the Nazis—
either by straightforward theft or
by forced sales, which amounted
to pretty much the same thing.
The 1998 Washington Prin-
ciples directive, in which 44
nations agreed to take active
steps to return such confiscated
items to their lawful owners
or heirs, sought to address this
issue, but there were all sorts of
problems to face. Many things
had later passed into museums
or private collections across
Europe and around the world,
acquired in good faith without
their new owners having any
notion that they were effectively
stolen goods.
Tracing items that had been
catalogued, formed part of an
inventory, or been otherwise
documented was one thing, but
for many of those seeking to
recover their family inheritance,
things have often proved much
more difficult.
The Meissen teapot and cover
of 1725-30 provides an example
of the well-documented variety.
It was once part of a collection
formed over some 30 years by
the banker Gustav von Klem-
perer and his wife, Charlotte.
Harlequin and the Teapot: Not Restored—Just Restituted
Gustav died in 1926, just as
Ludwig Schnorr von Carols-
feld’s catalogue of what was
reckoned to be one of the finer
Meissen collections of modern
times was published in an edi-
tion of just 150 copies, and that
A Meissen teapot, once part of
the magnificent von Klemperer
collection, sold for $202,230 in
Knightsbridge. ☞