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Maine Antique Digest, March 2015 13-B
- AUCTION -
Sotheby’s, New York City
Bunny Mellon’s Americana
by Lita Solis-Cohen
Photos courtesy Sotheby’s
R
achel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon had all
the money in the world to spend on what
amused her. Heir to the Listerine fortune,
she first married a Lloyd from Philadelphia, and
after two children and a divorce she became
the second wife of Paul Mellon (1907-1999), a
financier, philanthropist, and thoroughbred horse
breeder. Mellon died at age 103 in March 2014 at
her Virginia farm, and by November, Sotheby’s
was selling her worldly goods from four cata-
logs: one for an evening art sale on November
10; another for the jewelry sale on the evening of
November 20 and morning of November 21; and
two for interiors sales—five sessions held from
November 21 to November 23. The sales gave a
needed boost to the markets.
Most of the furnishings for
the interiors sale came from Oak
Spring Farms, the Mellon house
in Upperville, Virginia, where
Bunny Mellon’s unsurpassed
botanical library will remain and
be accessible. Some things came
from her New York City town-
house on 70th Street, and some
came from houses in Washing-
ton, D.C., Antigua, Cape Cod,
and Nantucket. (Sotheby’s ran out of the boxed
set of the four catalogs that cost $167. The cata-
logs are now selling used for much more.)
Collectors, decorators, the London and New
York trade, and “ladies who lunch” came to
Sotheby’s to take a look, knowing that this sale
reflected old-fashioned taste of inherited wealth
and offered a rare opportunity to buy objects that
have not been on the market for decades.
Did Bunny Mellon collect Americana? Not
much. She had simple taste. She liked English
and French painted furniture, Georgian silver,
china in the shapes of vegetables, and anything
blue—blue paintings, blue diamonds, lapis
lazuli snuffboxes, blue embroidered linens, blue-
painted furniture, some of it American, blue-
painted firkins, baskets, and wooden bowls, and
blue-sponged pitchers. She had some hooked
rugs, weathervanes, and a fewAmerican pictures.
Bunny Mellon was best known as a passionate
gardener and garden designer. She redesigned
the Rose Garden at the White House for John F.
Kennedy and worked with I.M. Pei on the gar-
den at the JFK Library. She collected art and
furnishings like a plant collector collects plants,
buying what works and what caught her whim.
She didn’t have a decorator. She must have liked
to shop and apparently bought china and silver
from the best dealers in London and in NewYork
and jewelry from Verdura, Van Cleef & Arpels,
Cartier, Black, Starr & Frost, and Tiffany.
She and her husband, Paul Mellon, gave much
of their art to museums, but Bunny had kept
some good paintings, good jewelry that she
rarely wore (Sotheby’s jewelry department said
it could not find any pictures of her wearing it),
and the furnishings of her several houses.
The grand total for the sales from all four cat-
alogs came to $218 million (with buyers’ pre-
miums). The proceeds will benefit the Gerard
B. Lambert Foundation, established by Mellon
in memory of her father to support horticultural
and educational endeavors, headquartered at
Oak Spring Farms. The sale doubled the presale
estimates and brought much more than other
celebrity sales at Sotheby’s in New York. Brooke
Astor’s possessions brought $18.8 million in
2012, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s sale in
1996 brought $34.5 million. That is probably an
unfair comparison because Onassis did not have
a significant art collection or serious jewelry.
Take away Bunny Mellon’s art and jewelry, and
the two-catalog three-day interiors sale, dubbed
“the garage sale for millionaires,” brought a total
of $14.3 million, well over the high estimate of
$5.9 million, which is a considerable total for
a rich person who was not a household name
and who had public relations people to keep her
name out of the paper.
Sotheby’s used digital images on scrim to
re-create Bunny Mellon’s signature pergola in
her garden and allowed for alcoves where cli-
ents could try on jewelry. Scrim was also used
to suggest the rooms at Oak Spring Farms. The
exhibition for Bunny Mellon’s interiors and
jewelry took up five floors at Sotheby’s and was
attended by 5000-plus people. The five-session
interiors sale went late on Sunday night; it was
after 9 p.m. before 98% of the 1250 lots of fur-
nishing offered had found buyers.
The 43 paintings she owned, after she and her
husband gave or bequeathedmore than 900 works
to museums, including the National Gallery of
Art in Washington, D.C., sold in an evening sale
on November 10 for $158.7 million, topping the
high estimate of $120 million. Her green and
blue Mark Rothko accounted for $39,925,000,
nearly twice the high estimate ($15/20 mil-
lion). Her yellow and orange Rothko, estimated
at $20/30 million, sold for $36,565,000. The
Georgia O’Keeffe painting of
a barn that hung in her Virginia
dining room sold for $3.2 mil-
lion, topping its $2.5 million
high estimate. Two coffee tables
designed by Diego Giacometti,
with a white patina instead of the
usual green or brown, sold well
above estimates. One, estimated
at $200,000/300,000, sold for
$1.745 million, and another with
a $150,000/200,000 estimate
brought $1.445 million.
Two smaller Diego Giacometti tables
with greenish patinas sold in the interi-
ors sale on November 21 for $221,000
(est. $80,000/120,000) and $245,000 (est.
$50,000/70,000). Both are pictured in the cata-
log in use outdoors. A bronze sculpture by Diego
Giacometti cast in 1971 of a Mellon horse, Mill
Reef, bred at Paul Mellon’s Rokeby Stables in
Upperville, Virginia, that spent the majority of
his racing career in Europe, sold for $149,000
(est. $5000/7000). In 1971 Mill Reef was
crowned the European horse of the year and was
the winner of both the Epsom Derby and the Prix
de l’Arc de Triomphe.
The evening jewelry sale held on November
20 saw a 9.75-carat fancy vivid blue diamond
sell for $32,645,000, more than doubling the
presale estimate of $10/15 million, a new world
auction record total price for any blue diamond.
That price is $3,348,205 per carat, which is also
a new world auction record for price per carat
for any diamond. Seven bidders competed for
20 minutes for the extraordinary stone, which
ultimately sold to a Hong Kong private collector
who named the stone the Zoe Diamond, accord-
ing to Sotheby’s press department.
The catalog for Mellon’s jewelry also included
gold boxes and handbags and brought a total of
$45.045 million. Her black alligator Christian
Dior handbag, with a Jean Schlumberger gold
clasp and a gold “BM” monogram underneath
the closure, sold for $7500 (est. $2000/3000),
and an 18k gold and ruby compact, designed
as a flower head by Schlumberger for Tiffany,
brought $46,250 (est. $20,000/30,000).
The crowds, mostly “ladies who lunch” and
dealers, came to the three days of interior sales
and competed with phone bidders and bidders
on line, paying some astounding sums for fine
and rare china and far less but almost always
way over purposely low estimates for English
and French furniture, Georgian silver, and some
Americana.
The Americana may have come from the Mel-
lons’ summer houses. There was a small, 9¾" x
12", Grandma Moses
Springtime Landscape
that
sold for a strong $121,250 (est. $25,000/35,000).
Mellon paid $36,000 for it at Sotheby’s on
December 3, 2003. A theorem painting of a
watermelon inscribed “Walter [sic] Melon E.L.
Ryan,
1839,” 17" x 17", with an Edith Gregor
Halpert and American Folk Art Gallery prove-
nance, sold for $11,250 (est. $1000/1500). Three
spongeware pitchers of unusual form were bid
up to $8750 (est. $200/300). A Shaker oval
box, 11½" long, sold for $2500 (est. $100/150).
Shaker boxes used to sell for that price. A blue-
painted firkin sold together with a small blue-
painted splint basket for $5938 (est. $300/400).
A group of about 20 hooked rugs, offered one
at a time, sold for prices ranging from $875 to
$21,250, most underbid by the trade. The most
expensive was a pictorial hearth rug, 17" x 69",
with a black cat, two roosters, and two bunnies.
What was
important was
that a house
sale brought
life into the
marketplace at
all levels.
Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses (1860-1961)
Springtime Land-
scape
,
signed “MOSES” lower left, oil on masonite, 9¾" x 12", sold for
$121,250 (est. $25,000/35,000). Bunny Mellon purchased it at Sotheby’s on
December 3, 2003, for $36,000.
A pair of 7" long Chelsea asparagus tureens and covers, circa 1755, sold for
$118,750 (est. $20,000/30,000). Each is realistically modeled as a bundle of
asparagus tied at either end. They have a red anchor mark and the number
17 on the base of one and 15 on the other. Faience asparagus tureens sold for
less, ranging from $10,625 for a French one to $27,500 for one from Brussels.
Chinese export porcelain “Pseudo Tobacco Leaf” partial service, 1775-85,
98 pieces in all, comprises a pair of soup tureens, covers, and stands, four
salts, a pair of sauceboats, two circular dishes, four side plates, 12 berry
dishes, 18 soup plates, 35 dinner plates, a dessert plate, platters, and sauce
tureens. The set brought $293,000 (est. $100,000/150,000).
An assorted group of
embroidered table linens,
comprising four linen table-
cloths, 24 dinner napkins,
10 placemats, and 43 cock-
tail napkins, all cream or
white and embroidered in
blue with trees, 81 pieces
in all, sold for $31,250 (est.
$600/800).
☞