The Great Auction

Into the mysterious English countryside.

The estate exceeded all our expectations, surrounded as it was by stone walls and seeming to sprawl endlessly within. The walk from the public road to the dark, classically inspired stone house accounted for a pleasant quarter hour stroll along avenues of trees, under the bluest sky. On arrival, we were confronted in the courtyard by the large tent in which the auction was then taking place. Below the central piazza on a terrace of the grassy slope stood yet another tent serving water cress sandwiches and the like, or, for the more ambitious, an elaborate buffet, and a variety of wines. After fortifying ourselves, we proceeded into the lions' den.

We'd arrived in London on a Sunday afternoon, and it wasn't until the next day that we found our way to Sotheby's auction house on New Bond Street, an avenue given over to the city's priciest antique stores and art galleries. We registered with the company in order to qualify for bidding, bought the two large catalogs describing the items to be sold, and established our identity and creditworthiness. It was by then too late to proceed to Northhamptonshire to view the items in situ, so we instead spent some hours exploring the Sotheby's premises.

It was our good fortune that on this day they were displaying paintings and art objects from Russia, spanning the last century-and-a-half. That country during the mid-1850s existed as an intellectual backwater of Europe, the reaction to which was a rabid interest in all things new and progressive by those so inclined. Often enough, that response resulted in fiercely individualistic art, inspired by the Enlightenment but bearing specifically Russian overtones: a flair for the romantic or dramatic, often with a nationalistic hue.

The collection featured sweeping military displays from the era of Napoleonic wars, native themes such as troika drivers fending off wolves in the snow, abstract geometric forms from the early 1900s, and later canvasses heralding the heroic Soviet future. We were particularly impressed with a bronze depicting soldiers driving their horses through mountains, a work evoking Frederick Remington's best, but our own favorite was a depiction of Venice by moonlight. We never saw a painting that so perfectly captured the allure of that place. The collection as a whole provided a rare treat, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see such a display, assembled from throughout the world. After their sale in a few days hence, these things would never be together again.

Then we blundered into a room full of photographic portfolios, laid out on long tables, where we came upon a collection of Edweard Muybridge's movement studies, 40 or 50 in all. These consisted of large, thick sheets of paper some 15 by 24 inches, each showing perhaps a score of small black and white photos demonstrating someone doing something, taken in quick succession. In addition to athletes and dancers going through their elaborate motions, one series showed a pretty young woman simply walking in circles, nude; we were charmed by her apparent tendency to avert her eyes modestly from the camera.

A Scot who settled in California after the Gold Rush, Muybridge traveled around the state from his San Francisco studio documenting the natural wonders of the West, making friends and establishing a reputation. When Leland Stanford needed to settle a wager as to whether a horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once, he turned to Muybridge. After installing himself at the former governor's horse farm in Palo Alto--now site of the university--Muybridge arranged a battery of trip wires and cameras. He got the telling picture of the horse suspended in air, and Stanford collected the $25,000 owed for the bet. Perfecting the technique, Muybridge continued similar series such as those we got to see. Thus began the modern motion picture. The photographer finished his professional life at the art department of Philadelphia's Temple University, a position he took after killing his wife's lover in Calistoga and beating the rap in a celebrated Napa trial. She eventually went insane, and probably to the Napa asylum.

Historical photographs, we discovered, were to be had in the auction we were attending. Several lots were included, most intersting to us a couple of collections taken by Isaiah West Taber, another old-time San Francisco photographer of renown. One lot amounted to several dozens, bound in a red leather book with "California" on the cover in gold letters; it contained two pictures of Napa Soda Springs, of special interest to us. Another group of twenty were devoted to the Palace Hotel, pictures we thought existed only in books. The estimated value of each lot was around $500; even if they sold for double that, they were a bargain. Taber's photos can easily sell for $500 to $1000; we were ecstatic at the possibilities.

We walked into the auction tent that Tuesday morning an hour or so after bidding had begun, and the star object had already sold, put on the block early to generate a sensational first-day interest. A pewter pitcher from the Middle Ages, it had languished for perhaps centuries in a hidden corner, only to be revealed while the Sotheby's staff prepared for the auction; the family hadn't known it existed for generations, and it brought a million dollars.

The auctioneer that morning, a man of perhaps 60, presented a tall, slender form, with longish silver hair and a blue suit of exquisite cut; he entertained with a performance humorous, efficient and fast, different lots often moving in 30, 45 seconds, the aproned male attendants rushing through with items of the moment. All told, they constituted a stereotypical sample of all the wonderful things families of that sort accumulated in lives of lavish spending. A pair of Louis the XVI tapestry covered chairs, estimated value $25,000; "A Cavalry Skirmish," painted by Il Borgognone, $10,000; a pair of George II carved giltwood mirrors, $60,000. But those were just estimated values; almost everything sold for many multiples beyond. This had become a very high-stakes game. If only the locals remained ignorant of the San Francisco treasures in their midst.

The Taber photos came up the next afternoon, and in the preceeding hours we'd prevailed upon the Sotheby's staff to let us have a private look at them given that we'd missed the initial viewings. Toward the stables we walked, behind the great house, and then to the looming, iron-shod wooden doors, pushed back to reveal the orchestrated disarray of the auction's backside. Mitzi, my guide, sidled by this table and that looking among piles of ephemera for the elusive photographs, eventually finding them in a dingy corner of the old masonry building. We eagerly flipped through the "California" collection, finding ourselves looking first at a stunningly perfect portrait of an indian; this alone was priceless. We found the Rotunda at Soda Springs, and another, taken from the resort's Castle Rock, showing a forest of big fir trees long ago burned in the fires of the 20th Century.

Another stack revealed the imposing facade of the Palace, one of the classic views of what was at the time the most luxurious hotel anywhere. Through the photos beneath we looked, into the faces of confident, urbane loungers in the lobby, proud workman in the corridors, imperious nabobs leaning against ornate mezanine railings above the Grand Court. This was the San Francisco of the Champagne Days, the Cocktail Route and the Poodle Dog Cafe.

Bidding started at a thousand dollars, double the photo lot's estimated value. We were taken aback, but gave it a try, offering the first bid on the "California" portfolio; we were the only bidder in the room, yet the price continued to rise. On one side of the tent sat twenty or so impeccably dressed men and women, ears to phones, taking bids from people out in the world; in this instance we were probably bidding against someone in California. We bailed at some several thousands of dollars, far more than we'd intended to spend; the amounts sky-rocketed, ultimately reaching $18,000. These bargains were not to be.

We had no time to recover before the Palace series went up for bid, and again we started the race with our upthrust blue Sotheby's paddle to the call for $1000. Again we were the only bidder in the room, and again the bids came in from the phones; we surrendered at $1600, losing the lot to a bid for $1800.

Here we confronted a painful dilemma; we had some thousands of dollars we were willing to spend on the opium pipe, but it wouldn't come up until rather late in the last day of the auction. Meanwhile, we were forced to sit silently and observe many things of interest to us selling for quite reasonable prices; but we had to conserve our funds for the real object of our desire. Beautiful silver work from San Francisco's Shreve & Company, photographs of Flora Sharon Fermor-Hesketh and her children, and countless other intriguing artifacts came and went, things we could have afforded easily, but had to ignore.

The one exception we made was for what was described in the catalog as a "Polynesian club," in which no one was very interested; we got it for a about $150 as a gift for a young friend. It was in fact a Maori war club, probably from New Zealand; we already owned some, and thought it slightly odd that the Sotheby's experts didn't know it as such. We know little, but we knew a Maori club on seeing one. Then, on collecting it, we discovered that it was in reality a replica, carved only on one side.

Over the course of our time at the estate, we passed many hours in the food tent, drinking the Bordeaux and scanning the catalog with fellow treasure hunters. One 60ish couple came from a nearby estate where they'd recently planted almost 20,000 trees; he dropped $50,000 on a portrait, she hoped--vainly, as it turned out--to pick up some Jane Austin volumes, which brought many times their estimates. We met a young woman in her 30s who was descended from the last kings of Wales and had worked for a decade for one of London's preeminent interior design firms; now she lived in the Welsh hills in a cottage overlooking her small town. She'd come just to watch the spectacle. A prosperous working-class man with the easy confidence of a colonial sergeant-major and his own landscaping business--this can be highly lucrative in a fox-hunting shire of large rural estates where people plant trees by the thousands--came for my opium pipe.

Here we conversed across a wide range of topics, the auction, of course, dominating the discussions, and the extraordinary sums taken in; as much money was generated on the first morning as was expected from the entire affair. This led to rampant speculation that the inventories had been deliberately under-valued in order to get more people out to the sale, a practice apparently often attributed to the auction business.

But it was following our purchase of the club that we encountered the most tantalizing anecdotes of, shall we say, irregularities. We were invited to join a party of substantial-looking gents, two of whom turned out to be dealers of expensive Oriental antiques; they'd rented a large, silver Mercedes to drive up from London, and came with a driver, the third man at the table, who worked in the shop owned by one of them. They were musing about the large sums being raised and certain anomalies they thought they'd noticed.

I was really watching, said the driver, and the auctioneer went back and forth between one of the phone bidders and the room, but I couldn't see a single bidder in the crowd. And the price kept going up until they reached the phone bidder's limit; then there were no more bids from the room. Looked fishy to me.

He was accusing Sotheby's of artificially raising the sale price by pretending that there were several bidders, while there was really just one, on the phone somewhere, who was unable to see what transpired in the auction tent. They determined his limit and ran the price up to it. So the story goes, anyway.

Well, said the older of the two antique dealers, I told you about that time I was having a pint in a pub near Sotheby's; I actually heard some of their people fixing the price on a painting that was bought by....

He cited the name of a famous figure of the international stage. By then we'd consumed several bottles of wine and champagne, and were speeding toward London on country roads bisecting picturesque villages. As we drove through one of these, the older man asked if we'd ever heard the expression "a cock and bull" story.

Yes, we had, we responded.

This is where the term came from, he asserted, as we drove past a pub called the 'Cock.'

See up there? The pub called the 'Bull?' he queried, indicating an establishment a hundred feet further along the road.

A cock and bull story, he explained, was a story that changed beyond recognition in the telling as it made its way from the "Cock" to the "Bull."

We kept that specific anecdote in mind as we continued drinking through the evening at yet another pub, the men's tales getting increasingly dramatic as we descended into a pleasant, Scotch-fueled intoxication.


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