Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  “I know you said those were all the pieces”, I told him, “but I would give you four thousand dollars if you could find that missing piece of wood.”

  Without missing a beat, Steve turned to his wife, Karen, who had come out of the house to watch the proceedings, and said, “Honey, get that box out of the garage.”

  Karen disappeared behind the corner of the house, then came back a few moments later with a large cardboard box of debris that Steve had swept from the chicken coop’s floor on the day he found the chairs. I sank to my knees on the asphalt and began to sift through the contents of the box. I pulled out, among other things, a heavily carved crest rail belonging to a Victorian sofa, a couple of old Coke cans, a mouse skeleton, and a few fistfuls of straw. I fished deeper into the box, and soon my hand came across something distinctively cold, hard, and heavy. It felt different from the other bric-a-brac in the box. I quickly extracted the item from the tangle of stuff and held it up in the sunlight. It was a dense reddish piece of mahogany—a segment of the missing section of stile.

  My heartbeat quickened as I gripped that lush piece of wood in one hand and plunged the other back into the box. A moment later, I came up with a second piece of wood. I brought my hands together and joined the two pieces. They fit together perfectly. I smiled broadly and looked up at Gary, who had by this time turned off the van’s engine and gotten out. I then looked at Steve and his wife, each of whom wore a look of cautious expectancy.

  “Yes, this is probably the most expensive piece of broken wood ever purchased,” I said in answer to their looks as I passed the wood to Gary and took out my checkbook to write Steve my second dealer’s check.

  I had come up with the four-thousand-dollar figure on the spur of the moment, but in retrospect, it was a gamble worth taking. Without that extra part, I had merely purchased a chair and a half, but with that missing link, I suddenly had a potential pair of gems on my hands. When I got the chairs back to my apartment that evening, I began to think long and hard about the type of collector who should own them. I thought it best that the chairs be sold in their present condition so that the buyer could restore them to his or her liking. That meant whoever bought the pair needed to have a strong sense of vision and determination. I decided to contact Eddy Nicholson. But before I did, I called my dad, because I also knew that Eddy liked a good bawdy joke and that my dad always had a stockpile of them. Dad did not disappoint. He reached down and deep and dirty and gave me something Eddy was sure to love.

  Eddy and I were still chuckling on the phone (he was out at his second home in Palm Springs) when I began to describe the chairs to him and the conditions under which they had been found. We talked about what measures would need to be taken to restore the two to their former dignity and how the best person for the job was no doubt a man named Alan Miller. Miller is a Pennsylvania-based restorer-cum-consultant and his hands are among the best in the business. I had, in fact, queried Alan earlier in the day about the chairs, in preparation for my pitch to Eddy. He had told me that he had some dark, dense Cuban mahogany in his shop that might be useful for filling in any small missing sections once the pieces were reassembled.

  The restored chairs.

  The John Goddard chairs find a more suitable home in Eddy Nicholson’s front hall.

  Within twenty-four hours, sight unseen, Eddy bought the chairs at the six-figure price I quoted him. That night, for the first time in years, I felt the profound urge to write in a diary. I found an empty notebook among my things and began to recount the events of the past few days. Near the end of that first entry, I wrote, “I am going to go to bed—but first want to say that I feel as if I stand at the threshold…of being directly involved in…handling the most important pieces in the world—mainstream. We’ll see.”

  Posing with Leslie, at right, beside my first purchase as a dealer.

  4

  The Shell Game

  WHEN I ARRIVED AT SOTHEBY’S in September 1979—a place where scholarship, commerce, and cultivation glamorously intersected under one roof—I was completely focused on my future. It was only the second time in the history of the auction house that a recruitment program had been offered to groom future specialists, and the competition for enrollment had been stiff. I now laugh at the memory, but my first day there, I somehow managed to corner Bill Stahl, then director of the American Furniture and Decorative Arts Department, and declare, “My name is Leslie Keno and I would like to work in American furniture. “Ever the gentleman, Bill threw a few words of polite encouragement my way before promptly moving on.

  Reaching that department, however, proved a harder task than I would have imagined. The end of my year’s training coincided with Sotheby’s move from its headquarters on Madison Avenue to its current, larger space (formerly a Kodak processing plant) on York Avenue and Seventy-second Street. The expansion left the auction house short-staffed in the new building, and I, as a recent graduate, was placed on the loading dock, where I was expected to receive and tag property for upcoming sales.

  It was the summer of 1980, and the loading dock where I had been sent was located in the basement of the new headquarters. Not surprisingly, my “office” lacked air conditioning, which meant I spent most days drenched in sweat as I worked my way through an endless onslaught of furniture. Indeed, my beleaguered colleagues and I were forced to wear shorts simply to survive the oppressive heat on the platform.

  To say I was miserable would be putting it mildly. Obviously, this was not what I had studied so hard to achieve. The black plumes of exhaust emitted from each incoming truck only deepened my dark mood, and I began to think seriously about contacting rival auction houses for work. Nonetheless, whenever a cargo of American furniture arrived, I’d linger over the new objects as long as I could, admiring their contours, examining their interior construction, and trying to pinpoint their origins as I filled out form after Sotheby’s form.

  One sultry afternoon, a pair of country maple chairs arrived, along with documents that described them as having been made in New England around 1760. The pair had been loosely wrapped in some off-white padded blankets, which I easily peeled back to uncover them. As the blankets slid to the concrete floor, they revealed a matched set of chairs with plain yoke-shaped crest rails, vase-shaped back splats, woven rush seats, and lathe-turned back posts and front legs that ended in simple splayed-brush, or Spanish, feet (both terms used to describe a carved scroll foot with vertical fluting that curves backward at the base). The chair form had met with great popularity throughout New England from about 1730 through the 1780s, and had in fact changed very little during that time. They were the kind of chairs that might be found in a grandparent’s country house dining room—old, charming, but not particularly comfortable.

  But it was something in the appearance of this particular set that made me uncomfortable. The turned stiles and legs seemed a little too fresh and blemish-free, the perfect edge of the back splats didn’t look hand-hewn, and although the neat geometric patterning of the seats appeared to be original (woven or rush seats wear out with time and are often replaced), their bright yellow tone belied their age. Even the chairs’ most vulnerable spots, such as the oft-handled crest rails or the tops of the legs (which usually bear the brunt of a careless shove), were clean. Furthermore, chairs of this type were almost always originally painted, but as I examined the various crevices and turnings on the pair before me, I found not a speck of paint remained, which was highly unusual, even if possibly they had been refinished.

  The clamor of the loading dock swelled in my ears for a moment, but I quickly tuned it out as I grasped one of the chairs firmly by the back post and flipped it on end to examine the underside of its irregularly shaped brush feet. I was dismayed to see an absence of checking, the distinctive dark patterning that occurs over time as wood naturally loses moisture. Checking is usually most apparent at the feet because they are formed from end cuts of wood (sawn at right angles to the medullar rings). Such cuts leave the wood po
res exposed, and over time, as the wood dries, a speckled or checked pattern begins to emerge. But the bottoms of the feet on these chairs were as smooth and unmarked as sea-washed stone. I studied them a minute longer, then set the chair back on the ground, completed the arrival notice, and sent the paperwork along.

  A few hours later, I received a call from the American Furniture Department asking why I had labeled the chairs reproductions. I started to explain my reasoning but was quickly informed that Bill Stahl was coming down to hear and see for himself. When Bill appeared, he brought with him the department’s senior cataloger, Tom Lloyd, a tall, rangy man with a long, solemn face that, I later learned, masked an incredible sardonic wit. I’m sure I would have broken into a nervous sweat at the sight of them if I hadn’t already been drenched from the heat of the loading dock. If I was wrong in my analysis, I knew any chance of my joining their department would all but evaporate. Bill and Tom moved with efficiency over to the chairs and began to examine them, flipping them over and back and from side to side as I stood close by, shifting my weight from one leg to the other. When they were through, they straightened up and turned around to face me. Their matched looks of approval told me all I needed to know: They, too, thought the chairs were fakes that had somehow slipped through the cracks of a hasty appraisal. It was an unpleasant bit of news that they needed to break quickly to the consignor, but for me, the verdict stood as an endorsement. They turned to leave and were almost to the elevator when Bill turned back to look at me and said with a quick nod, “Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of here.”

  Those words carried me through the next few months, and by October, true to his word, Bill did get me off the loading dock and up into his department as a junior cataloger. I think the prolonged wait made my arrival in Americana all the more sweet. I savored every aspect of the job, from sorting the mail (I relished the possibility of untold treasures to be found in the daily stream of client inquiries) to the frenzied pace of the research that precipitated every catalog deadline. Suddenly, my opinion had the power of Sotheby’s behind it and I began to feel that I had graduated from the small shops and flea markets of my past.

  Nearly two years into my tenure in Americana, I came across an object that marked a turning point in my career. Sipping my morning coffee, I had just begun plowing through a sizable stack of mail that had built up over the Labor Day weekend when I came across a moderately sized ivory-colored envelope bearing a Ticonderoga, New York, return address. The envelope initially gave me pause because the carefully scripted blue-ink lettering on its front and back reminded me of my grandmother’s own elegant hand. I opened the envelope and was just beginning to pull out a folded two-page letter when a small color photograph slid out from between the horizontal creases. I stopped it with my hand and righted it, only to be met by an astonishing sight: a Newport bureau table with a shell-decorated block-front façade—quite simply, an icon of American furniture.

  As I gazed at this incredible image, I also felt an almost-intuitive awareness of the contents of the letter. Although I had yet to read a word, I could see the distinctive format of a family tree carefully drafted down one of the two pages, and that gave me cause for even greater excitement. Provenance is a word used in the business to describe the ownership history of a piece. The more complete that history, the greater our perspective on its life. Collectors at the most rarified levels delight in strong provenance because it helps personalize the furniture. They enjoy knowing who else has treasured and safeguarded an object through the centuries. Furthermore, a solid history in one family implies a certain “freshness” to a piece, which presumably has never left private hands.

  Of course I wanted to share the news of my discovery with my colleagues, but I also wanted to savor the moment a few minutes longer. So rather than leap to my feet, I settled back into my chair, lit a cigarette (in those days we were still allowed to smoke at Sotheby’s), and contemplated the beauty of the image, while the letter fell, unread, to my desk.

  Initially, I was struck by the sculptural presence of the bureau. Its artistic impact clearly outweighed its practical use as a dresser and occasional writing table (usually found in a bedchamber). I was quite familiar with the form from books, and I knew that if the piece was authentic, it probably dated to sometime between 1760 and 1780. I can’t think of an equivalent object found in the bedrooms of today. Shell-carved block-front bureaus were meant for a time when people still used the morning light to minister to their toilet, or occasionally received close friends or relatives in the bedroom, or drafted quick handwritten notes to be sent off in the morning post. In that sense, it was a decidedly old-fashioned piece, which, of course, was part of its great appeal.

  The force of the bureau’s tactile design came from two sources: the four expressively carved shells that punctuated the façade like a series of perfect half-moons (three evenly spaced on the top drawer, and one on the door of a central recessed kneehole compartment) and the wonderful, undulant, blocked surface. The shells all had voluptuously ribbed bodies that were identically made, save for the fact that the one appearing on the center of the drawer and the one fronting the kneehole door were hewn from the surface of the piece, while the remaining two were convex and bulged outward.

  The blocking (meaning the swelled projections seen on the two stacked columns of small drawers flanking the kneehole space) took its cue from the gesture and alignment of those two convex shells. Each raised passage began its descent directly beneath the end-points of the fan-shaped spread of the shell back, which gave a wonderful sense of undulant movement to the exterior. Not only did the projecting passages appear at once to thrust forward toward the viewer but they also channeled the energy of the design upward.

  The photograph I held in my hand was amateurish and poorly composed, but I still felt the impact of the design. The outer ends of the case piece seemed to jump out from the glossy picture plane, luring me with their tightly crafted perfection. Every line and curve was crucial to the overall unity of the design—a delicate balance that gave the piece its power. To create such an effect required more time, materials, and skill than a traditional chest of drawers. The raised areas were carved from solid slabs of highly figured mahogany, which, given the tight grain of the wood, was no easy task. Furthermore, the swells in the façade were an extravagance that did nothing to increase the holding capacity of the piece, and thus spoke only to the mind-set and natural dexterity of the carver and the taste and wealth of the client who had originally commissioned the piece.

  With those issues in mind, I finally turned to the owner’s letter, which was lying open on my desk, and smoothed it flat across the crowded top. I quickly learned that the bureau had a history of descent in a prominent family that could trace its roots to eighteenth-century Newport. Its first owner, George Gibbs, Jr. (1735–1803), had been a senior partner in the Newport shipping house of Gibbs and Channing, which owned one of Rhode Island’s largest merchant fleets. Gibbs’s rank in the community made him a model candidate for such an elaborate and elegant piece of furniture. Moreover, the letter detailed the location of the Gibbs shipyard in Newport, right on the wharves of Easton’s Point, a waterside enclave that was also the site of most of the Goddard and Townsend workshops. This was a thrilling bit of news, because the design of the shell-carved block-front bureau reached its apex with the genius of that close-knit clan of craftsmen, and from the moment I saw the photo of the Gibbs example, I was certain it could be traced to their collective hands.

  At that point in my life, I had never actually seen a shell-carved bureau table, outside of New York’s Metropolitan Museum, so beyond my responsibilities to the auction house, I was extremely eager to see and touch this incredible object. The last time a bureau like this had come up for auction was at Sotheby’s much-celebrated on-site sale of the contents of Pokety Farms, the elegant home of Col. Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. That example had born a later coat of white paint and had for y
ears stood on an outside porch, but it still won pride of place on the cover of the May 1980 auction catalog (and was in fact purchased by the comedian Bill Cosby, who is a keen collector of American furniture). The only other block-front example that I could think of that came close to the Garbisch piece in importance was a three-shell chest of drawers from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Walter B. Robb, which sold at Sotheby’s in 1980 for $360,000. Now, some three years later, that price was still the standing world record for American furniture.

  With the images and statistics of those two objects in mind, I scanned the rest of the letter, looking for a phone number. There was none. My heart rate quickened. I scanned the page again, this time flipping it over to check the back side, then the reverse of the photograph, and finally the envelope itself. Still no phone number. Now I was concerned. Due to the long weekend, the mail on my desk was a few days old, and I worried that the owner might have been anxiously awaiting a response. Also, I knew full well that clients often approach more than one auction house with a query, and I hated to think that Sotheby’s had missed an opportunity to handle this incredible item because we hadn’t responded promptly. Eventually, having tried Ticonderoga’s directory assistance, police station, and post office, I finally found a phone number for the woman who had written the letter. Naturally, the line was busy. But when I eventually got through, she very graciously invited me up to her home to see the bureau, which I arranged to do within a couple of days, accompanied by my boss, Tom Lloyd.

  Ticonderoga is a sleepy resort village in northeast New York, set on a spit of land in between Lakes George and Champlain (the name is an Iroquois word meaning “land between the waters”). Tom and I had arranged to meet the desk’s owner on the grounds of nearby Fort Ticonderoga, the site of a number of battles of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution because its location was so strategic to the main inland water route to Canada. The reason for this unusual point of rendezvous was that the woman's family had a long-standing involvement with the place (one of her ancestors, William Ferris Pell, a wealthy New York merchant, had once owned the ruined fortress and its surrounding lands, and his great-grandson, Stephen, had spurred its early-twentieth-century renovation) and she had related work to do there that day.