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26-D Maine Antique Digest, May 2015
- AUCTION -
S
he had nice legs and feet, wore a fancy
skirt, and showed some age despite a
nip here and a tuck there but still had
nice proportions. A southerner by birth but
a northeasterner most of her life, she led a
privileged life in fancy homes, and many a
cup of tea she held. Most of her contemporar-
ies were long gone, but she was a survivor, a
product of the time when the Williamsburg,
Virginia, area was the center of American
Colonial life.
The 18th-century Queen Anne tray-top
tea table with an old refinish was up for sale
at the February 20 and 21 Cottone auction
in Geneseo, New York, south of Rochester.
It was lot 657, out of 738, and pictured not
on the front or back of the 73-page catalog
but as one of nine pictures on page 65, and
it was estimated at only
$1500/2500. Described in
the catalog as “NE Queen
Anne tray top tea table,
18th century, mahogany,
scalloped skirt, pad feet,
old refinish. Ht 27" W 30
1/2"; D 19", ex Walter Vogel collection,” it
looked fetching, but not to the extent that the
ensuing bidding showed.
Cottone opened at $10,000, so that was an
indication something was afoot. Two bidders
went wild, one on the phone and one repre-
sented by an agent on the floor, with the floor
bidder winning it at $299,000 (includes buy-
er’s premium).
How? Why? As the clapping continued,
that’s what everyone was asking, and the
answer popped into Buffalo, New York,
dealer Dana Tillou’s mind as the piece sold.
Tillou had taken a casual look at it—nice, he
said, but nothing out of the ordinary, not a
drop-dead piece. He admitted that he knows
and deals in New England pieces and that is
his expertise. So the piece seemed to be of
slight interest to him as it looked like a typi-
cal New England tea table. He watched from
the back of the auction gallery, straining to
see who in the crowd was bidding.
Then the “aha” moment—she had to be
southern! Southern, Tillou told
M.A.D.
after
the sale. Why else the high price?
Another area dealer said he learned shortly
before the sale that the piece was important
and rare and from Virginia, and a lot of peo-
ple were interested in it. There had been a
high level of interest, in fact, evident to Cot-
tone from the inquiries he began getting as
the word spread.
According to scholars and museum staff
who specialize in southern furniture, the table
is very important, as it is no ordinary New
England piece but a rare southern master-
piece by the first documented cabinetmaker
from Colonial Virginia.
Thanks to research by Ronald Hurst of
Colonial Williamsburg (which has a similar
tea table) and Robert Leath of Old Salem
Museums and Gardens in Winston-Sa-
lem, North Carolina, and the publication
of
Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern
Virginia
,
1710-1790
, we know this was a
piece by cabinetmaker Peter Scott, who
came from England to Williamsburg in
1722 and continued his trade until 1775. He
died at age 81, which was remarkable lon-
gevity given the times. He was often called
the “dean of Williamsburg cabinetmakers,”
and it is said that Thomas Jefferson bought
tea tables from him. Also Scott is said to
have been a tenant of George Washington,
and he seems to have paid his rental bills
by taking commissions
for fine furniture for
the Washington family.
Pieces that definitely
can be attributed to Scott
are very few—the one at
Colonial Williamsburg
and two others in private hands, according
to scholars. And only recent research (2006)
has changed the printed information of the
1970s and 1980s about which Virginia cabi-
netmaker made what pieces.
But who knew about
this
piece? Well,
according to Sumpter Priddy III, longtime
dealer in Alexandria, Virginia, all of those
who collect early Virginia pieces did, includ-
ing institutions and collectors, and because
he “knew who was chasing it,” Priddy said
he did not bid. “Hard for anything like that
to slip through. No secret in the southern
circles,” he said.
“It was no surprise that the
piece turned up outside of the South. A huge
percentage of the South’s early furniture
migrated out of the region—much of it in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century
when southern families migrated westward
for better land, but also a surprising number
of pieces in the late nineteenth and twentieth
century, before regional scholarship made it
possible to identify the material products of
our fractured culture.”
The consignor was the daughter of old-
time collector/dealer Walter Vogel of Roch-
ester, New York, who bought from old-time
dealers like Sack. Most of Vogel’s collection
was sold in New York City after his death
decades ago, but a few pieces stayed with his
daughter. “She lived with the pieces,” said
Sam Cottone. She had consigned about 30 of
them to this sale, including a rare inlaid min-
iature chest that made $4830; a Hepplewhite
bowfront chest that got $1380; and three
New England Windsor chairs, $1092. (As
recently as 2011, Christie’s sold an ex-Vogel
piece for $194,500, a Federal inlaid
Pembroke table, with the prove-
nance of Eddy Nicholson, among
others.)
So after the clapping ended and
the crowd calmed down, it was evi-
dent that serious collectors/dealers
of early Virginia furniture knew
about the table and had been hold-
ing their cards close. Cottone would
not reveal the two final bidders, say-
ing they were private collectors.
Exciting story, right? But Cottone
had other items to shout about, as
he usually does. The other six-fig-
ure piece was about as opposite as
it could be from the southern lady.
Its consignor, a longtime collector
in Rochester, has distinctly opposite
taste. Richard Brush, former owner
of SentrySafe, likes modern, and
among the dozens of pieces he sent
to Cottone was an 8'9" kinetic sculp-
ture of stainless steel. By George
Warren Rickey (1907-2002), the
signed piece brought $115,000. It
was featured on the inside cover of
the catalog, in a full page at that!
Cottone Auctions, Geneseo, New York
An Important Discovery at Cottone
by Fran Kramer
Photos courtesy Cottone Auctions
Then the “aha”
moment—she had
to be southern!
In the Cottone sale catalog, this tea
table was described as a New England
Queen Anne tray-top tea table and
was estimated at $1000/2500. It was
not a New England table, and it sold
for almost 300 times the low estimate.
“Remarkable. It’s a special addi-
tion to the literature on the subject.
A singular object and unequivocally
the work of Peter Scott of Williams-
burg,” said dealer, scholar, author,
and established expert on southern
furniture Sumpter Priddy III of Alex-
andria, Virginia. Contacted after the
sale, Priddy gave a sincere, enthusias-
tic endorsement of the tea table, which
brought $299,000 from an unidenti-
fied man in his 40s or 50s, said to be an
agent bidding in person for a collector.
“First of all, I am not surprised that a
table of such rarity turned up where
it did, as many early southern pieces
are found in the Northeast as so much
early furniture was pulled out of the
South into major metropolitan areas
as our country evolved.”
Priddy has handled a lot of south-
ern furniture over the years, some by
Robert Walker, another early docu-
mented Virginia cabinetmaker, and a
piece or two by Scott, selling to both
institutions and collectors. Priddy also
wrote the introduction to
Furniture of
Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia,
1710-1790
in 1979 and edited the
manuscript.
Robert Leath, chief curator at Old
Salem Museums and Gardens in Win-
ston-Salem, North Carolina, wrote in
an e-mail, “Ron Hurst and I unraveled
the mystery of Peter Scott and Colo-
nial Virginia cabinetmaking almost
ten years ago. After figuring out
that the body of work that had been
attributed to Scott was actually made
by a different cabinetmaker working
in a completely different location, i.e.,
Robert Walker, we published our find-
ings in the 2006 issue of Chipstone’s
journal,
American Furniture
.
“Ron’s article was titled ‘Peter
Scott, Cabinetmaker ofWilliamsburg:
AReappraisal,’ and mine was ‘Robert
and William Walker and the ‘Ne Plus
Ultra’: Scottish Design and Colonial
Virginia Furniture, 1730-1775.’
“Ron and I realized that the highly
carved and ornamented furniture
group that had been attributed to
Peter Scott all had histories in the
Rappahannock River valley, far away
from the Colonial capital where Scott
worked. A few documents proved that
these items were actually made by the
Scottish émigré brothers Robert and
WilliamWalker, who came to Virginia
in the 1730s to build architecturally
ambitious houses and to furnish them
with stylish baroque furniture that
reflected the wealth and taste of north-
ern Virginia’s merchant-planter elite.
“Simultaneously, the cabinet shop
of Peter Scott, in Williamsburg, pro-
duced much of the ‘neat and plain’
cabinet furniture—tea tables, dining
tables, dressing bureaus, desks, and
desk-and-bookcases—that epitomized
the more reserved taste of the south-
ern Tidewater region. Scott’s sphere
of influence extended from Williams-
burg to the south side of the James
River and to the north side of the York
River and slightly beyond, but we dis-
covered that the Rappahannock River
was its own economic sphere with its
own cabinetmakers.
“The very elegant Chinese-inspired
tea table that sold at Cottone is one of
a small handful that we identified in
our research, including one in the col-
lection of Colonial Williamsburg. Its
record price reflects the importance of
Peter Scott as one of Colonial Virgin-
ia’s first urban-trained cabinetmak-
ers who worked in the Colonial capi-
tal for almost fifty years, and the very
high quality of his work. We don’t
know who owned it in the eighteenth
century, but it was certainly a mem-
ber of the Tidewater aristocracy.”
When is a clock
more than just a
timepiece? When
it’s a rare Stephen
Taber shelf clock
with old patina
and an original
signed iron dial. It
sold for $19,550 to
a phone bidder.