Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  “We're antiques dealers,” said Margaret, an eminently practical woman. “We have to take a look.”

  So the next day, Ed hired a car and driver and headed out to the shop in Acassuso with Margaret in the hope of seeing an American secretary. The two of them watched through the car window as the broad boulevards and high rises of Buenos Aires gave way to more sprawling neighborhoods and lower buildings. Forty minutes later, the car drew up in front of a two-story white stucco building at the end of the tidy commercial district of affluent Acassuso. Ed and his wife stepped out of the car and immediately walked over to the storefront to survey the scene. A thin beige curtain that hung across the shop's plate-glass window prevented any possibility of a sneak preview. Ed allowed himself a small degree of cautious optimism as he pushed open the front door, which he held open for Margaret.

  The gallery's interior was far more formal and stylish than the shop Ed had visited the previous day in Buenos Aires. There was a large selection of attractive highly polished French and English furniture interspersed with some nice porcelain, carpets, and Oriental art. Everything he saw was tasteful, although clearly geared to decorator-type clientele. In one corner toward the rear, two men were busy examining a large chest of drawers, but they quickly broke from their conversation at the sight of Ed and his wife. The men were, in fact, the store's proprietors, and as they came forward to greet the American couple, Ed spotted a tall secretary standing along the right-hand wall, which he was certain was the piece he had come to see.

  The secretary-bookcase on display at a Buenos Aires antiques show.

  As he later described to Morgan, “The owners were walking toward me with warm, welcoming smiles, but all I had eyes for was this piece of American Federal furniture that leapt out at me amid all those gleaming European things. Of course I didn't want to show my excitement, but there was no denying it was a wonderful thing. Streamlined, perfectly proportioned, mahogany veneers with a satinwood trim—simply a fantastic-looking object.” And then he added, “Most incredibly, the secretary had an enormous amount of églomisé incorporated into its facade. I've been in the business a long time, but on first impression, this was the greatest piece of Baltimore furniture I had ever seen. Clearly no expense had been spared in its execution.”

  Ed jumped to the conclusion that the secretary was from Baltimore based upon the appearance of the églomisé panels he had mentioned. Églomisé is a method by which the back of a piece of glass is used as a surface for drawing decorative designs in paint or gilt. A coat of varnish or a piece of paper is then applied to protect the image before the entire package is set into the fabric of the furniture, much like a decorative veneer. The technique itself dates back to ancient Roman times but reached a heightened level of popularity in the United States during the Federal period (meaning the first few decades following the signing of the Constitution of the United States in 1787), particularly in the city of Baltimore, although it was certainly used elsewhere. Such was the logic behind Ed's rapid judgment call as to the origin of the secretary.

  With all these issues swirling in his head, Ed managed to look away from the secretary long enough to introduce himself and his wife to the two antiques dealers, who immediately invited him to examine the piece more closely. So while Margaret chatted quietly with the men, Ed began to give the object a more careful run-through. He started at the slender pediment, which featured an arched églomisé panel in the center, flanked by two narrow rectangular panels, or plinths, with two smaller plinths at the ends. All four of these pediment plinths displayed a gilded pattern of a mask entwined with vines, set against a luminous pale blue ground. Ed marveled at the way the colored glass appeared to gleam from within like reflectors on a bicycle.

  The pediment with its inset polychrome églomisé panels (the center one is a replacement).

  Then he shifted his gaze down to the bookcase, which was fronted by two glazed doors. Ed hooked a forefinger into one of the two ivory keyholes at the center and pulled the door toward him (meanwhile, one of the two dealers broke from his conversation with Margaret to sift through a nearby desk for the original key). In the wake of that opening arc came the faint but distinct scent of red cedar, the wood used for the shelves. Ed stood still for a moment, breathing in the pungent aroma, and then gently began to test the swing of the door, which moved on its hinge without so much as a tremor. Eventually, he returned the door to its closed position and stepped back to admire the geometry imposed by the overlay of the glazing bars on the doors. There were two counterrhythms at work here: first, the dominant tone provided by the large rectangular panes of clear glass, and then the lighter, staccato beat of the small upended squares of églomisé that marked each of the cross sections. Every one of these hand-painted squares featured a vivid, highly stylized sunburst design painted in black, gold, and white.

  Next, Ed's concentration shifted to the secretary proper, which was momentarily shielded by its retractable roll top. He grasped the two round brass pulls located on either end of the curved mahogany board and drew it back into its narrow sleeve. The entire unit moved smoothly and evenly out of the way, revealing a writing area lined with a series of pigeonholes and small drawers, each one bordered by a delicate inlaid pattern of alternating light and dark wood (called stringing), which shimmered brilliantly in the strong gallery light. The bright beam also bounced off the face of the prospect door located at the center of this small stage. It was marked by an oval-shaped églomisé medallion featuring the gold-painted figure of a woman in Greek dress playing a lyre, set against a rose-colored ground. Ed touched his hand briefly to the cool surface of the glass. When he pulled it back, the warmth of his palm left a light impression on the glazed exterior and then it slowly faded as his study shifted to the baize-covered writing surface.

  That the rectangular swatch of aquamarine cloth that covered the top was a replacement was of little consequence to Ed. Had the baize been original, it would have made a fascinating addition to the piece, but the substitution did not detract from the beauty or value of the object as a whole. He was intrigued, however, by the ingenious mechanism of the desktop itself, which featured hinges at the front and collapsible legs at the back so that it could be raised and lowered to suit the user's needs. Ed tested the mechanism a few times, enjoying the way the slender legs unfurled like the legs of a newborn colt.

  The secretary's lower doors display allegorical figures of Justice and Truth, popular Federal period motifs.

  Finally, he moved to what he considered the highlight of the piece: the lower cabinet with its splashy double doors. Within this tightly organized zone, there were so many grandiose decorative details that Ed had a hard time focusing his viewing. First, there were the slender églomisé bands that ran along the swing edges of the two doors. Each displayed a running pattern of entwined sheaths of golden wheat, drawn against a pale green ground. The richness of the green was a revelation to Ed, much like the pink used on the prospect door and the blue he had noted on the pediment plinths, because color is generally considered a rarity in églomisé. Black, white, and gold were far more commonly used, and there was something so late nineteenth century about the quality of these pastel shades—as if the tone had been inspired by a Monet painting.

  Ed now turned his attention to the two enormous oval panels of églomisé that fronted each of the cabinet doors. Here, black, white, and gold were the colors of choice, but in a lifetime of looking at American furniture, he had never seen painted glass integrated so daringly into the facade of a piece. The time that it must have taken to paint and install them alone must have been tremendous. Ed admired the perfect geometry of the black-and-gold borders encircling both panels and then let his eye travel inward, across their matched milk white grounds to the nearly identical images of two women at their centers. Now he compared the two compositions, which were closely related, although not identical. The right door featured the image of a woman in Greek-inspired dress, gazing into a handheld mirror, while the
left door displayed a similarly tunic-clad woman holding a set of scales in one hand and a sword in the other.

  “They sound like allegorical figures for Truth and Justice,” I said to Morgan in amazement, momentarily interrupting his narrative.

  “That's what I thought, too,” he replied.

  I picked a pen up off my desk and began to draw a quick sketch on a scrap of paper of the secretary he had described thus far. Clearly, the piece made an incredible statement about the Federal period, to which it dated. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the florid designs of the rococo were on their way out; a new taste for things Neoclassical was beginning to work its way into the mainstream of American culture. Having so recently cast aside the symbols of British rule, the nation was eager to embrace a new decorative style, one that might signal its independence, and yet the architects of the age had nowhere to look but back to Europe—particularly England and France—for inspiration and innovative style.

  The Scottish-born architect and designer Robert Adam (1728–1792) is often credited with instigating this stylistic metamorphosis that signaled the end of the rococo. Adam had spent a number of years studying in Rome and eventually produced a book on architecture with his brother James that stressed the aesthetic unity of exterior and interior spaces. His designs for walls and furniture emphasized straight lines over curves, lightness, delicacy, and geometry informed by the measure of classical orders. By the 1760s and 1770s, Adam's designs were all the rage in the arts and crafts of England. Subsequent design books by George Hepplewhite and Thomas Shearer (both published in 1788) and Thomas Sheraton (published in four parts from 1791 to 1794) helped systematize the style for English and American cabinetmakers. The new style relied heavily upon inlaid motifs of things such as garlands, bellflowers, swags, and urns. Within a matter of years, this fascination with things antique would advance again into the more full-blown, “archaeologically correct” patterns of the Classical period, as exemplified by the work of Charles-Honoré Lannuier, which Leslie discussed in the previous chapter.

  When Morgan resumed his story, he began by outlining Ed's take on the mechanics of the piece. Behind the doors of the lower case, he reported, there were three stacked columns of drawers. “Ed says they move in and out of their slots like pistons,” Morgan explained. Today, because of modern technology and diamond cutting blades and lasers, it is not difficult to manufacture drawers with great tolerances, but amazingly, this secretary was completely handmade. Dominating the middle columns of drawers was one large removable document compartment with ledger-size partitions. After Ed had looked it over carefully, he told Morgan, “I slid it back into position and heard a gentle whoosh sound of the air being pushed out of the way as it glided perfectly closed.”

  By the time Ed was through examining the secretary, he was certain he was standing before a masterpiece of American Federal furniture. He did notice there had been some minor patchwork to the mahogany veneers and that the ivory knobs displayed on the interior drawers and the brass knobs of the roll top were probably replacements. The only significant change to the piece was that the central arched églomisé panel of the pediment was clearly done in the twentieth century. Ed quizzed the owners about the glass and they explained that it had been made by their own conservator in approximation of the original, which was missing when they acquired the piece.

  And just how had they come to acquire the secretary? Ed asked.

  Back in 1988, one of the dealers explained, the shop received a phone call from a used-furniture dealer, who said he had just purchased a nineteenth-century English apothecary cabinet that he thought might be of interest to them. He had gotten it off an old estancia (or a private ranch), where it had been stored in a barn.

  “I was just on my way to a tennis match and didn't really want to break my game,” the man explained with a laugh, “so I told my partner, ‘It's your call,’ grabbed my racket, and headed out the door.”

  The partner went to look at the “English” piece, which he ended up buying and driving back to the shop, traveling across many miles of cobblestone roads in a blue Ford Falcon station wagon, with half of the piece tied to the roof (a concept that made Ed cringe).

  The dealers kept the secretary in storage until 1993, when they decided to restore it in preparation for an upcoming prominent Buenos Aires antiques show. While the piece was at the conservator's, he noticed one of the horizontal black-and-gold églomisé panels in the front pediment band had loosened. Naturally, he attempted to stabilize the panel, which was when he discovered a neatly folded strip of newspaper wedged behind the glass. Carefully, the conservator extracted the two-inch-wide scrap and unfolded it. What he found was a printed title banner that read “Claypoole's American Daily Advertiser… Saturday, July 26, 1800… Philadelphia.”

  “Philadelphia?” said Ed with some surprise, turning to face the secretary again. He never would have pegged Philadelphia as the object's city of manufacture, simply because he didn't know of any examples of furniture with this much églomisé attributed to that city. It was clear, though, that whoever had produced this piece was a master at his craft. “Interesting,” Ed commented.

  The Argentine dealer continued with his story. Initially, he and his partner had little time to address the implications of an American attribution for the piece because their goal was simply to get it to the show in Buenos Aires. The secretary was easy on the eye and they were certain it would sell (it had been priced somewhere in the range of forty thousand dollars). But for some reason, it didn't sell. So soon after they took the secretary back to their shop, the dealers decided to investigate its value by sending photos of the piece to both Sotheby's and Christie's branch office in Buenos Aires. It was not long before the two auction houses got back to them, each with an estimate in the range of $150,000 to $250,000.

  But even with that encouraging bit of news, the dealer explained, he and his partner were not particularly keen on sending the piece to New York. The fragility of the glass made shipping the secretary north an extremely risky and costly endeavor. If, for example, one of the large panels on the lower doors were to break, the value of the piece would plummet. (Leslie later told me that he remembered receiving the photos but that the owners' reluctance to ship it north had been a significant and eventually insurmountable hurdle to overcome.) Ed's pilgrimage to the shop in Acassuso occurred not long after that decision had been made.

  “So has Ed done anything about the piece?” I asked Morgan, sensing his story was winding to a close.

  “Well,” he replied, “from the start, Ed's made it clear that he is interested in the piece, but the dealers quoted him a price in the range of the two auction house estimates, and at the moment he just doesn't have that kind of cash flow. He wants to see this piece come here, but he needs a partner to make it happen. Back in September, Ed contacted Albert Sack, because he'd worked with him in the past and he felt some loyalty. At first, Albert said he was concerned about the cost of shipping, but then he decided he might have a customer or possibly a decorator who had a customer, but nothing's panned out. Ed's been sitting on the whereabouts of this thing for nearly three months, all the while trying to stay in contact with the two dealers and maintain the impression that he's about to buy it. At this point, everyone's getting edgy, and from the way Ed described the shop, it's pretty busy. Someone could just walk in and snap it up any day.”

  Morgan paused for a moment and then he said, “Look, Leigh, I practically had to strong-arm Ed for pictures of the piece, because he's scared word of this thing will get out. I told him I would show them to only one person, someone I thought could place it quickly, and that's you. If you're not interested in the secretary, then I'm giving the pictures back and this conversation never happened.”

  But there was no question that I was interested in the piece. What's more, I thought I might have a buyer for it, a new client who, from my limited experience with him, seemed to have a voracious appetite for major American Federal and C
lassical pieces. The man I was thinking of was Jack Warner, the retired head of Gulf States Paper Corporation, one of the country's largest privately held forest-product companies. Then in his late sixties, Jack stood about six foot four, had broad shoulders and silver-gray hair, and spoke in a booming southern drawl. He was the type of man who, as my father would say, is as American as the American bald eagle. In addition to fine furniture, Jack also owned an outstanding collection of American paintings (a large part of which hung in his company's Tuscaloosa, Alabama, headquarters), including a fair share of work by Norman Rockwell, which should give an even stronger indication as to the extent of his good old-fashioned values. Federal furniture had great appeal to him because it was quite literally made just after the birth of the nation. Independence expressed through artisanship—that's how he viewed it.

  “Send me the pictures, Morgan,” I said. “I have someone in mind. He's coming to town tomorrow night and we're supposed to have dinner. If the piece is good, I'll discuss it with him then.”

  “Great,” Morgan replied. “I'll send them by overnight mail. You won't be disappointed.”

  Within two days, I had good news for Morgan. “My client is excited,” I told him. What's more, once Jack heard the piece had been found in Argentina, he posed a near-instantaneous theory as to why it might have been sent there. Apparently, soon after the Civil War, a sizable group of Confederate expatriates sought refuge in South America rather than live under Yankee rule. In Brazil, Jack said, there is a town called Vila Americana (American Town) that actually has a Confederate flag incorporated into its local coat of arms. Jack was convinced that the secretary had traveled to Argentina with one of these refugees from the Old South.