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The following item was recently sold at an American auction house. Detailed information about this item, including pre-sale estimate, price realized and sale location can be found in the Prices4Antiques reference database.
Oil on panel still life painting by Henry Faulkner titled Iris in Milk Pitcher.
Henry Faulkner oil on panel painting, still life, titled Iris in Milk Pitcher
A giant in the field of American Antiques has passed from the scene. Albert Sack is dead at the age of 94. In a field characterized by its fragmentation, Albert Sack was a unifier, a scholar, a much-loved mentor, an incomparable leader and a legendary dealer whose hand guided many of the best collections, public and private, in the field of American decorative art. To say that he will be missed is inadequate; Albert Sack is irreplaceable. With his departure the curtain has closed on a seminal era in the appreciation and collection of American antiques.
Kent D. Anderson
General Manager
www.prices4antiques.com
Ninth plate tintype of an young Confederate soldier with a Bowie knife
Is it just me or did we once seem to be a much more interesting country? The Civil War is full of amazing personalities and it’s no wonder that cdv (carte de visite) photographs of the key players became some sort of 19th-century version of baseball cards, with people filling albums with the faces of men they’d only read about in papers. There’s Grant, the lifelong soldier, the workhorse of the Civil War (memorialized in this bust) whose perseverance won him the war and the White House, and Lee, the quintessential eloquent Southern gentleman whose devotion to his men made him a living legend and whose letters command large prices, but there are countless others like Joshua Chamberlain, George McClellan, Robert Gould Shaw, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, P.G.T. Beauregard, John Hunt Morgan, who are still telling their part of the story through the artifacts in the database.
Of course, there are so many unknowns too, men who have long since been left nameless or faceless by history, but their stories are no less compelling. The unknown Confederate soldier pictured above bravely sports a Bowie knife, while this Bowie knife belonged to a Union man who shot himself while recovering from illness in the hospital. The photographica category of the p4A database is filled not just with the cdvs of well-known officers, but also with the now-unknown rank and file, some facing the camera with good-natured bravado while others seem uncertain and huddle next to friends. Then there are the archives of letters; some, like this one, give great “battle detail,” a key factor in determining value, while others are filled with tender expressions for wives and concerns for the developing character of children. Like literary characters, these men populate my thoughts when I work with these records and never really leave. A few years ago on a cold January day, I was editing a record that included the fate of the Confederate soldier represented; he had died 145 years earlier, almost to the day, freezing to death at the Ohio State Penitentiary, which stood less than 20 miles from where I sat. War leaves ghosts everywhere….
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
To search the Prices4Antiques antiques reference database for valuation information on hundreds of thousands of antiques and fine art visit our homepage www.prices4antiques.com
1873 American School oil painting, Ohio River at Parkersburg
Prices4Antiques is sponsoring the inaugural Midwest Antiques Forum Weekend to be held in Lancaster, Ohio May 13-15, 2011 at the Decorative Arts Center of Ohio.
The Forum will bring together museum curators, scholars, collectors, and members of the antiques trade to share research on the early decorative arts of the American Midwest.
Topics include Midwestern Germanic furniture, Ohio coverlets, Anna Pottery of Illinois and early Wisconsin decorative arts.
For more information and registration visit: http://www.midwestantiquesforum.com
William Henry Harrison portrait reverse painting on glass
Poor William Henry Harrison! He had already had a very full life – participating in the vicious conflicts in the Northwest Territory before and during the War of 1812, serving as governor of the Indiana Territory, traveling to Columbia as a diplomat. Aside from an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1836, he’d come home to Ohio, where, then in his early 60s, he was contentedly puttering around his farm. But then the 1840 election came calling and Harrison left behind the contented provincial “log cabin” life he was mocked for during the campaign to win the election. The campaign was a vigorous one and an early example of political spin: Harrison, born into a Virginia slaveholding family, was depicted by Van Buren as a bumptious backwoods man who wanted to sit around picking his teeth and drinking hard cider. This failed, fueling instead the image of Harrison as a man of the people while Van Buren came off as an elitist. The “Log Cabin” campaign resulted in log cabin imagery being plastered on everything, including whole sets of china, and anything that couldn’t easily bear the picture of a log cabin, like this inkwell, could be made in the shape of a cider barrel.
Determined to prove he hadn’t gotten soft in his old age, Harrison (pictured above in this reverse painting on glass) insisted on giving his inaugural address on a raw March day, sans coat or hat, an address that it should be noted took him two hours to read. That did not, as is commonly thought, make him ill. What felled him was a cold that cropped up three weeks later. The busy first days of holding the office did not allow Harrison any rest or even any peace and quiet, and he went downhill quickly, likely not helped by all the castor oil and leeches, dying nine days after falling ill, thirty days after taking office, and 170 years ago on this April 4th.
This was the first time the country had lost a president in office and regardless of political affiliation, Americans seemed to take the death hard. The funeral was quite an affair and Harrison was commemorated everywhere, even on schoolgirl samplers like this one. This unique situation continues to impact the marketplace today. Because of Harrison’s short time in office, there are few documents signed by him as president, and autograph collectors will often pay 10-20 times more for a signature from his presidency than one of the many signatures from the years before!
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
