Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  As it turned out, Chris was calling on behalf of a man named Nate Wallace, who was the nephew of the present owners of the chair. Nate was a former antiques dealer but had left the field to attend business school and had since become a banker. Sometime after that career change, Nate's aunt and uncle, who lived just outside of Wilmington, Delaware, asked for his opinion on a large easy chair that they owned and had loaned to a local school, the Upland Country Day School. Apparently, the chair, which had found a home in the school's library, had caught the eye of another antiques dealer, Kenneth Lindsey, who had been called in by the school to evaluate recent loans and gifts to the institution. Lindsey suspected the piece was American, and he was particularly impressed by its hairy-paw feet. The character of the legs and feet on the chair reminded Lindsey of the Cadwalader card table by Thomas Affleck that he had seen at the Philadelphia Museum: It had similar distinctive hairy-paw feet. With the permission of the school and the owners, he was allowed to take the chair over to the nearby Winterthur Museum for a consultation. That seemed a smart idea, since Winterthur houses one of the country's most significant Americana collections (including a number of Cadwalader pieces).

  But when Lindsey opened his van doors to the curator who greeted him, he was told not to bother unloading the chair. After eyeballing the piece in the dark confines of the vehicle, the curator had quickly concluded that the chair was not an eighteenth-century piece. Disappointed, but no less determined, Lindsey then enlisted the help of a well-connected local dealer, who in turn told him about a man who advised two of the most active collectors of Americana in the field at that time, George and Linda Kaufman. From him, Lindsey learned that the Kaufmans already owned two Cadwalader hairy-paw side chairs and a matching fire screen, which made them potential buyers for the easy chair. So following this convoluted series of introductions, the piece was brought into their home.

  Seeing the easy chair sitting so close to the other Cadwalader furnishings in their living room convinced the Kaufmans that the piece was authentic. (George Kaufman would confess to me years later, “I should have grabbed that chair by the ankle and never let it go!”) Their interest was conveyed to the chair's owners, but when the owners' nephew, Nate Wallace, heard of the Kaufmans' interest, he grew concerned. Nate figured that if the chair—which he had yet to see—intrigued these top-level collectors, despite its rejection by the Winterthur curator, there must be something more to it. Nate advised his aunt and uncle not to do a thing—yet.

  It was a few months before Nate finally had an opportunity to visit his aunt and uncle's Delaware home and view the chair himself. When he did, his first thought was that it might be English. But as he began to look more closely, he recognized what he believed were American woods on the frame, and he began to suspect that he was standing before something of great importance. Like Kenneth Lindsay, Nate was familiar with the legend of the Cadwalader furnishings because of his background as a dealer. Still, the carving on the easy chair struck him as a bit too gutsy and dramatic and he decided the best way to resolve any lingering doubts about the piece was to take it to the Philadelphia Museum for an examination. So Nate, in the company of his aunt, took the piece to the museum, where presumably a number of pieces that had been made en suite with the chair were housed. Unbeknownst to the museum, the family had already decided that if the chair turned out to be historically significant, they would donate it to the museum's permanent collection. But such a donation was not meant to be, for once again the family's expectations were thwarted—this time by a museum curator who insisted that the chair was English and not American, and also out of period (meaning it postdated the style in which it was made).

  Following this second rejection, the owners of the chair lost patience with the entire issue. Nate later told me that his family thought the chair was too valuable to be returned to the school but too ugly to be used anywhere in the house, so they placed it in a loft space above their unheated garage. Nate's aunt died within the year, but fairly soon after, his uncle asked him to renew his efforts with the chair and have it evaluated once again. This time, Nate decided, it was important to nail down the chair's provenance before proceeding any further, so he called upon his old friend Chris Machmer for some advice. Chris soon enlisted John J. Snyder, Jr., a scholar of Pennsylvania furniture, to document the chair's line of descent over the past two centuries. Amazingly, Snyder was able to trace the chair from Nate's relatives all the way back to Thomas Affleck's 1770 receipt of sale. He found that after General Cadwalader's death in 1786, the chair had descended through three generations of the family (one estate inventory of 1875 indicated it was kept in an attic and valued at fifteen dollars) before being taken north by one of the general's great-great-grand-daughters, who married a New Yorker. The couple had one child, Beatrix Cadwalader Jones Farrand, who became a notable landscape architect. Mrs. Farrand took the chair to her home in Bar Harbor, Maine, but she eventually gave it to a friend, who later bequeathed it to her daughter, Nate's aunt. Armed with Snyder's research, Nate decided the time had come to consult with a New York auction house. With Chris acting as a liaison, the family contacted Sotheby's, which is how I came to have that astonishing phone conversation with Chris on that bright fall morning in 1986.

  Within days of that talk, I met Nate Wallace for the first time at his uncle's Delaware home just outside of Wilmington. It was a large early-nineteenth-century white stucco and stone house, filled with a number of significant pieces of modern art. After introducing me to his uncle, Nate led me out to the back porch, where the chair was being stored. My heart was racing. I had heard enough during my phone call with Chris to think that the object I was about to encounter had the potential to make auction history. The reading I had done prior to my trip further fueled my anticipation. I recalled the oft-quoted words of Silas Deane, a Connecticut member of the Continental Congress, who wrote on June 3, 1774, “I dined yesterday with Mr. Cadwallader [sic], whose furniture and house exceeds anything I have seen in this city or elsewhere.” I also thought of the wording of Affleck's original bill, “to an easy chair…£4.10,” and of the “1 large easy chair” listed in the general's estate inventory. As we pushed open the screen door to the porch, I felt as if I was about to throw the lid off a chest that I knew for certain was filled with gold.

  The 1770 Cadwalader bill of sale.

  As accustomed as I am to looking at American easy chairs, I was nevertheless struck by the massiveness of this particular example when I stepped through that door and saw it for the first time. It was nearly the size of a love seat and had been almost completely stripped of its upholstery and underupholstery due to the many examinations it had been subjected to over the past year or so. Traditionally, easy chairs, with their sheltering backs and coved side wings, were built to protect the sitter from chilling drafts and hopefully capture the radiant heat of a nearby fire. But my first impression of the chair brought none of those cozy qualities to mind, because most of its internal wooden framework had been laid bare, save for a few broad swatches of twentieth-century blue-and-white-striped mattress ticking wrapped along its arms and seat—all remnants of what was probably a 1950s reupholstery job.

  Regardless, it was a thrilling sight. Take a walk across the preview floor at Sotheby's before any American furniture sale and you are bound to see a number of easy chairs in similar states of dishevelment. That is because removing the fabric of an easy chair allows collectors and dealers alike to analyze the wood of the frame and see what damage or repair, if any, the piece has sustained over time and, more important, whether or not the woods are American or English. Of course, if a chair maintains its original upholstery, then the fabric and internal stuffing must be preserved at all cost. But this was not the case with the easy chair before me; it sported multiple tack histories (a term used to describe the nail holes left by the upholsterer's work), which indicated it had been re-covered a number of times. Among those many holes, however, I was able to distinguish those that had been made
by eighteenth-century nails. In a few instances, the shank of the iron nail had survived the wrenching tug of a later reupholstery stripping and was still visible, although deeply buried in the wood. Occasionally, the wood around these nail holes had acquired a dark halo, indicating that the metal had been embedded in the wood long enough to react with it. These clues were all vital to my analysis of the piece. Had the work not already been done for me, obviously I would have had to strip the chair myself in order to see the bones of the object and answer the family's burning question: Was this chair an authentic eighteenth-century American masterpiece or merely an English version or nineteenth-century American copy (as others before me had deemed it)? The question was a big one; if it was English, it was worth between eight and ten thousand dollars, but if it was American, it was worth significantly more. Why this huge discrepancy in price? Rarity is, of course, a tremendous factor; more than that, however, is the fact that Americana collectors think of Colonial furniture as a symbol of the uniqueness of the nation's experience. Such furniture was created as our country—the world's greatest democracy—was born.

  With Nate's help, I carried the chair away from the shadowy recesses of the screened porch and set it down on a sunny patch of lawn. Finally, I was able to begin my hopeful examination. I began with a rapid rundown of the overall frame, which at first glance looked fine. The seat rails were crafted of oak, an obvious wood choice for this load-bearing section, given oak's renowned strength.

  Originally, this area would have been filled first by interlaced strips of canvas webbing, then lined with sacking (or additional canvas), and subsequently stuffed with horsehair. The seat was probably then covered with two additional layers of canvas, a layer of linen, and the final decorative cover. This all would have been topped by a cushion or mattress.

  Next, I turned my focus to the rolled arm supports, which gently angled upward and away from the seat frame before arching into a scrolled C shape. I was pleased to see these supports were cut from tulip poplar, a wood easily identifiable because of its creamy grain and slightly greenish tone. Poplar was indigenous to Pennsylvania and would have been a natural choice for the arms because it is a soft wood and thus easier to cut and shape.

  Like an artist stretching his canvas across a newly assembled frame, the upholsterer would have covered the contours of the arms and high rectangular back with a network of fabric. But since no evidence of the original upholstery remained, it was easy to see the rough-hewn framework of yellow pine, another local wood. Yellow pine is easily identifiable because its dark medullar rings give it a prominent striped appearance.

  Now came the heart of my examination—the lower half of the seat frame and legs. Unlike the structure of raw, unfinished woods above, this area was always meant to be seen. Made entirely of choice mahogany, the surface was elaborately carved and finished to perfection. The contrast between the upper and lower halves of the chair was made even greater because the lower mahogany show surface (or primary wood) bore the telltale signs of an untouched, original finish. On the serpentine-shaped front and side rails, for example, there was a wonderful pattern of lushly carved acanthus leaves, which appeared to spring downward from the point where the original fabric would have met the seat frame. Two centuries' worth of dirt had settled into the shellacked surface, offering added shading, nuance, and texture to the flips and curves of each veined leaf. At the front of the chair, the carving was particularly expressive because the carver had chosen to move the leaf pattern unencumbered toward the ground, rather than restricting it to the line of the rail. The elaborately carved pattern of leaves nearly obscured the bracing lines of the support structure lending an effect of asymmetry and exotic naturalism that propelled the design of the piece to exceptional heights.

  Stripped bare, the Cadwalader chair reveals its oak, yellow pine, and poplar secondary woods—along with some circa 1950s mattress ticking.

  Much of the chair's impact lay in the unusual hairy-paw front feet, so I chose to linger on them for quite some time. Hairy-paw feet, which had precedent in English and Irish furniture, were not an altogether unknown decorative device in America and had been used on some Colonial furniture from the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Still, they were never a common choice, which is what makes the all-encompassing hairy-paw statement of the Cadwalader suite such an anomaly (and perhaps contributed to earlier assessments of the piece as English). Each foot featured a four-toed spread that was awash in a tangle of wavy hair. Nearly buried within the tufts was a large ball that steadied the grasp. The calculated bold statement of this design gave the chair a thronelike presence that was anything but mainstream (especially in Quaker Philadelphia).

  Just then, the wind picked up and noisily tossed the changing leaves overhead as I began to detect a slight misty rain starting to descend. “We'd better get this thing back on the porch,” I said to Nate, who had already positioned himself behind the piece to move it indoors. We just made it back to the porch before the rain swept in.

  When I concluded my examination, I was certain that the chair was indeed from Philadelphia, absolutely intact, and extraordinarily rare. What's more, it came with a well-researched and impressive provenance. Why did I have such confidence in a piece that others had so vehemently rejected? Quite simply, the object spoke to me on every level—and in an honest voice. The various woods used throughout the piece were exactly what I would have expected to see on a piece of Philadelphia furniture circa 1770. The wear patterns on both the primary and secondary woods were clearly authentic. And the design offered an incredibly well-fulfilled expression of eighteenth-century Philadelphia rococo style that well suited its hefty provenance and clearly related to the other Cadwalader pieces I had seen. As far as I was concerned, this was the real thing—the easy chair listed on Affleck's bill.

  Within two weeks, after having sent the family a proposal for the chair's consignment bearing an auction estimate of $700,000 to $900,000, I returned to the house, this time in the company of Sotheby's then chairman, John L. Marion. John, who grew up in the auction world, is a towering man and possesses infinite charisma and a marvelously rich speaking voice. His father, Louis Marion, was one of Parke Bernet's founders, and from him, John inherited a keen eye for objects and enviable finesse. What's more, at the time of the chair's discovery, he was considered by many to be Sotheby's best auctioneer. Because the piece was potentially so significant, I had kept John apprised of my negotiations with the family (whom he knew from the auction rooms at Sotheby's, where they had been steady buyers of early-twentieth-century art, among other things). That friendship, coupled with John's personal interest in American furniture, brought him on the trip that day, for which John actually commandeered the Jeep Cherokee of Sotheby's president at the time, Diana Brooks. I was only twenty-eight and really got a big kick out of making the trip down to Delaware to seal the deal on the Cadwalader easy chair in the president's Jeep, accompanied by the company chairman.

  Once we had a signed contract, John and I lingered a short time with the family and said our good-byes before quickly packing the chair into the Jeep and heading off. I always prefer to resolve these matters quickly because a deal is not done, quite simply, until it's done. In other words, I wouldn't want to lose a piece because the owners had a change of heart or tried to use the Sotheby's name as leverage to sell the piece privately. The Cadwalader easy chair was of such great importance that I had decided to oversee the pickup personally. The only other time I had taken such hand-holding precautions with an object was with the record-setting Gibbs desk, which I had driven down from Fort Ticonderoga myself.

  As soon as John and I returned to the city (driving a cautious fifty miles an hour the entire way), the chair was sent up to his office, where big-ticket items were often displayed for top-level collectors and dealers. I then went straight to my desk and began calling both dealers and collectors who I thought might be contenders for the piece. The selling of the Cadwalader easy chair had begun.
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br />   A couple of hours ago, Leslie called to tell me that he just brought back the John Cadwalader hairy-paw wing chair. It is…quite simply, one of the most important pieces of furniture in the world. Undoubtedly, it will set the new world record for American furniture. I have a set of photographs of the chair, which I will send to Richard Dietrich tomorrow by overnight mail. I'll write the letters tonight. The chair belongs with the Cadwalader card table (that Richard owns)….

  When I read over the passage above, written on October 29, 1986, it brings back the details of that day, and of the days and weeks that followed, with startling clarity. Leslie's news of the Cadwalader find was very exciting, not only because it spurred me as a young dealer to make connections and seek out a client but also because the chair was so extraordinary and the story of its discovery so enticing. It's not every day that a rare masterpiece of American furniture turns up at a country day school—particularly an object so renowned and well documented—and I was particularly proud that it was my brother who had helped reel it into the public arena. The double fiasco of its rejection by two museums (rather like taking a lost pyramid to Egypt, only to be told it doesn't belong there) only enhanced its status as a true survivor.

  H. Richard Dietrich, Jr., the man about whom I had written in my diary, is an important client of mine and Leslie's (I first met him on the sales floor at Christie's, where we had established an instant rapport). He is a successful businessman and has spent the better part of the past four decades assembling one of the country's most important and well-rounded collections of American furniture. Richard is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word: a well-mannered, well-educated, and well-dressed individual. Picture Jimmy Stewart with an incredible passion for Americana. When I became a private dealer, Richard hired me to reappraise his extensive personal collection, as well as the holdings of the Dietrich American Foundation, an organization he founded in 1963 to educate the public about Colonial American decorative arts. My work for the foundation had even taken me to Ronald Reagan's White House, where some of Richard's furniture had been on loan since the Johnson administration. At one point, while I was examining a high chest of drawers in the Map Room, the one-thousand-watt quartz lamp that I was using to examine the furniture exploded. Flames and smoke were still spewing from the apparatus as a handful of alarmed assistants and Secret Service men came rushing into the room.