Hidden Treasures

by Leigh Keno

  Though I desperately wanted to spend some more time with the secretary, both Alexandre and the secretary's two owners had other engagements, so the conversation soon turned to the specifics of consignment. From the way in which the owners were talking, I suspected we were not going to get into a competitive situation with another auction house over the piece. To my mind, it wasn't a question of if the secretary would go to Sotheby's, but when.

  I told the owners that I would conservatively estimate the secretary's value at between $500,000 and $800,000, but I hoped it would go higher. Thankfully, the men never questioned my judgment. Very often, I get into a situation in which the consignor will push for an aggressive estimate (New York City consumer laws stipulate that an object's reserve cannot exceed the low estimate—a fact that unnerves some sellers). To explain why a conservative figure is better, I often use the analogy that nobody likes a braggart. Prospective buyers start looking for the problems when the estimate is too steep. A lower estimate provokes the opposite response and encourages people to examine the piece in a positive, hopeful way. As such, estimate levels can really affect the success of a sale.

  When I returned to New York, I stopped in to see Kevin Tierney, the head of Sotheby's silver department, to ask him about the name S. Casey. “Samuel Casey,” he replied in his sharp British accent. “He was one of the greatest Colonial silversmiths, next to Paul Revere.”

  I was thrilled by his words. Some additional research for the catalog note revealed that, despite his vast talent, Casey (circa 1724–1779) had led a colorful, if not tarnished, life. After apprenticing to the great Boston silversmith Jacob Hurd (1703–1758), he moved to Exeter, Rhode Island, around 1745 and later to South Kingston, where he went into partnership with his brother (who was fined for passing false money in Philadelphia). Casey later lost his house and shop in a fire that started in his forge. An item that ran in the Boston News Letter of October 1, 1764, noted that the “valuable Dwelling-House … was entirely consumed [by the fire] with a great Quantity of rich Furniture.” (More silver-tipped secretaries perhaps?) In 1770, a bankrupt Casey was arrested for counterfeiting dollars and sentenced to be hanged, but on the night of his scheduled execution, he was rescued from jail by a group of townsfolk “with Faces black'd.” In September 1779, Casey's wife petitioned the Rhode Island General Assembly to pardon her husband. She wrote that he had “wandered in exile nine years forlorn and forsaken and destitute of every means of support to make his life even desirable, separated from his wife and offspring.” A few days after his wife's plea for mercy, Samuel Casey received a full pardon.

  I wanted the Appleton secretary for my all-important January sale (the preview exhibition was scheduled to open Saturday, January 9, but for tax reasons, the piece could not leave France until after the first of the year). Furthermore, the secretary had to be reviewed by a museum committee before it could leave the country—to certify that it wasn't French. The secretary passed inspection, as expected, and on the Thursday before the exhibition opened, it arrived via airfreight in New York.

  The secretary's French passport, and unwrapping the treasure at Sotheby's.

  It took a small team of workmen about half an hour to extract the pieces (the secretary had been separated into two parts for the trip) from their custom-made boxes. I couldn't stop pacing around the workers throughout the entire process (I was almost ready to pick up a hammer myself), because I knew what sort of masterpiece was hidden behind the boards.

  The lower section was the first to be freed. At my request, the movers immediately turned the case on its back so that for the first time, I could see the undersides of the bracket feet. I immediately noticed that each foot contained a small square peg hole (formed from the bracket facings themselves and the glue blocks). My early suspicions about the height of the piece were not without merit: The secretary had lost some height through the years—but not because it had been cut. Some additional feet had once been attached beneath those brackets. And from the way the holes were constructed (square rather than round), it seemed clear that whatever had been affixed would not twist. My mind went into overdrive as I thought about the possibilities. What could have been there originally? Ball feet were the traditional form—I had seen the combination of a short bracket paired with a ball foot on a number of English pieces. Claw feet and pad feet were also remote possibilities. In light of the grandeur of the rest of the piece and the square peg holes, could the missing feet have been faced with silver?

  The underside of each foot was constructed with two shaped mahogany glue blocks forming a rectangular peg hole—probably to receive a removable ball foot.

  My colleague John Nye has a great visual memory for objects and he and I often bounce ideas off of each other. Together, we tried to think of an American case piece on which bracket feet had been used in conjunction with a second foot form—particularly ball feet, which still seemed like the obvious choice, given the understated aesthetic of the secretary (and the ubiquitous dome theme). Between us, we could come up with three Philadelphia slant-front desks, including one that we had sold from a Long Island estate some years earlier. Another object that came to mind was a small valuables cabinet in the collection of the Chipstone Foundation in Milwaukee, a piece signed by John Townsend. The cabinet stands about forty inches tall on delicate ball feet and had been a favorite piece of the collection's founder, Stanley Stone. (He once told me he considered it one of his greatest prizes.)

  Of course, when I found out that the secretary was missing its feet, I placed a call to the consignors in France and asked them to check around the house. “Look everywhere,” I said. “Perhaps you have some other furniture with feet that look out of place—either because of the style or size? They are probably ball-shaped.”

  A London-made pewter-inlaid secretary-bookcase, circa 1710 and attributed to G. Coxed and Thomas Woster, of the type that may have influenced Christopher Townsend. The ball feet are original.

  Unfortunately, the owners came up empty-handed, but at the end of the day, I received a phone call from John Nye, who at that point was already on his way home to New Jersey. “Why don't we have a set of feet made for exhibition purposes?” he said.

  “You read my mind,” I said to John with a laugh, for the same thought had begun percolating in my head as soon as I got back the negative report from the consignors. After I hung up with John, I called Colin Stair, who heads up Sotheby's Restoration Department, and asked him if it would be possible to produce four ball feet for the secretary before the exhibition opened on Saturday. Colin said it could be done, and, sure enough, at 9:50 A.M. on Saturday, the Appleton secretary stood for the first time on its new ball feet. Suddenly, it all made sense. The five or six inches added by the feet really unified the design. As the early crowd of collectors and weekend browsers began to stream into the gallery, I stepped back to enjoy their awed reactions to the piece. I felt very much like a proud parent.

  Because auction previews are such hands-on events, new information about an object can often come to light, even at the preview stage. The Appleton secretary was particularly ripe for new discoveries, since it had shown up only two days before the preview opening, which left me next to no time to reexamine it (remember that when I saw the piece in Paris, it was packed with books and papers).

  For instance, I was convinced that somewhere in that secretary there was a maker's signature or mark. The piece was simply too grand and unusual for there not to have been. In the catalog note, I had attributed the secretary to Job Townsend, Sr. (1699–1765)—based upon the similarity of the secretary to a labeled slant-front desk at the Milwaukee Art Museum and a related dressing table at the Chipstone Foundation—but without a signature or documentation, it could never be proven. Cabinetmakers usually signed their work in graphite or chalk during the mid-eighteenth-century, and experience has taught me that there are a few spots that were typically used for this purpose. These include the backboard, the drawer bottoms or sides, and the top board
of the lower case (onto which the bookcase was fitted). To satisfy my own curiosity, I decided to capitalize on the few remaining days that the secretary would be available for public scrutiny.

  Further fueling my search was the fact that when furniture consultant Luke Beckerdite viewed the piece during the opening weekend of the preview, he suggested that the secretary was the work of Job's brother, Christopher Townsend (1701–1773), the father of the great John Townsend (who is widely considered the greatest craftsman in the entire Newport clan).

  So when there was a lull in the inspection, I brought out a handheld high-intensity light and began to poke around for a signature. On the bottom of the first long drawer, I found what I was looking for—a large letter T, written in graphite and with great conviction.

  I gasped excitedly and quickly motioned to John Nye and Amy Coes (the researcher who had written most of the catalog entry for the secretary), who were both standing just a few feet away.

  “Look at this,” I said to them almost breathlessly as I raked the light across the dark mahogany board. “It's a T!”

  As the three of us leaned into the drawer, another letter revealed itself.

  “W!” we said, nearly in unison. And then as I cast the light at a different angle across the board, two more letters—an N and a D—seemed to emerge from the swirled grain.

  Without the strong raked light, the writing was invisible. I was certain the signature said Townsend, but the question was, Which one? Centuries worth of wear from clothing and papers and whatever else had filled those drawers had worn the letters of the first name away.

  Proof that auction houses are really a place where scholarship and commerce can splendidly merge materialized in the figure of Michael Moses, author of the definitive work on the Goddards and Townsends, who just happened to enter the gallery while John and I were trying to decipher the signature. When Michael looked at the drawer-bottom, he thought he detected a large letter C scrawled about a foot and a half to the left of the T. “It could stand for Christopher,” he said slowly as he squinted at the faint lettering.

  A detail of the graphite inscription “Made by Christopher Townsend” on the drawer bottom.

  Further supporting that notion was Michael's observation that the size and placement of the signature on the drawer bottom were strikingly reminiscent of the handling of John's signature on a well-known bonnet-top high chest once owned by the early New York collector Richard De Wolf Brixey. Like his father, John signed the Brixey piece (which is now at Yale) in pencil on the inside of the bottom of a wide drawer. “It's an early piece, dated 1759,” said Michael. “John was probably imitating the manner of his father.”

  I knew of only one other piece bearing the signature of Christopher Townsend. It was a flat-top high chest of drawers with slipper feet, and it offered little direct precedent for the Appleton secretary. In addition, there is very little surviving documentation of Townsend's shop practice. I could recall, however, a wonderful letter of 1738, written by the cabinetmaker to his wealthy client and fellow Quaker Abraham Redwood. In it, Townsend discussed some costly furniture, whose description seemed quite similar to the Appleton example. He wrote, “According to thy Request In thine I indevoured to finish a Desk and Book Case Agreeable to thy directions to send thee by Brother Pope…. The Desk and Book case amounts to Sixty Pounds, this currency; includeing the two Ruf cases [or shipping containers].”

  He then added for good measure, “I may let thee know that I sold such a Desk and Book Case without any Ruf cases, for £58 in hand this winter. Brother Job, also sold one to our Collector for £59. I mention this, that thou may know that I have not imposed on thee.” (Christopher Townsend to Abraham Redwood, February 4, 1738, Library Special Collections, Newport Historical Society.)

  Linking the Appleton secretary to Christopher Townsend, I knew, could open up a whole new avenue of research with regard to his work (to say nothing of enhancing the desirability and rarity of the object). If he had made the Appleton secretary, then in it's commanding presence and perfectly finished solid-mahogany interior lay the promise—the very bloodline—of John Townsend's genius. As such, the piece could stand as a prototype to some of the shell-carved secretary-bookcases that his son would execute nearly a quarter century later.

  To help clarify matters, I called Leslie Jean-Bart, one of the in-house photographers at Sotheby's, and asked if he could shoot the drawer bottom with infrared film, which might pick up on the signature. It took three days for the film to be developed, but when I opened the manila envelope, I was stunned to see—as clear as day—the inscription: Made by Christopher Townsend. I let out such a whoop, they could hear me over in the French Furniture Department. As if in response to my cry, the phone on my desk rang. It was Leigh, calling, in an act of eerie twindom, just in time to share this glorious moment with me.

  Later in the week, we detected a second signature by Townsend in another drawer (and sometime after the sale, a third signature would be found). Clearly, Christopher was extremely proud of this piece. I thought he must have viewed the secretary as the culmination of his life's work—which was, in fact, not far from the way I was feeling about selling the piece. I never doubted the Appleton secretary would sell but my deepest wish was that it would sell in the millions. The question in my mind was whether or not it would reach a world record. In order to help that process along, part of my job at the auction house is to build the type of interest in a piece that generates competitive bidding. That means that in addition to drawing in the ultimate buyer, I also need to find an underbidder—a person whose passion for the piece will ostensibly drive the price up.

  That led me to think about the roster of potential buyers. The Appleton secretary was a piece for someone who had not just the means but also the passion to pursue something that simply had no precedent in American decorative arts. Harold and Albert Sack were, of course, obvious contenders for the secretary because, for one, they represent the out-of-state billionaire, who had bought the Nicholas Brown secretary at Christie's for $12.1 million in 1989. Because that piece had set a world record for American furniture, it generated a lot of unshakable publicity. But the Sacks' client is actually a quiet collector. He avoids the press and is rarely spotted on the Americana circuit. In fact, it is commonly known in the industry that their client has purchased some major pieces of furniture—multimillion-dollar items—sight unseen, so even though he'd yet to surface at Sotheby's during the exhibition preview, I knew better than to eliminate him as a possible buyer. Adding fuel to this thought was the fact that when Harold saw the secretary for the first time at Sotheby's, he exclaimed to Bill Stahl and me, “That's a ten-million-dollar piece.” Harold has never been one to throw out such praises, and the comment was later printed in the trade papers.

  Also on my mind were Ned and Lillie Johnson, who came to the preview exhibition the day it opened. The Johnsons are veteran collectors, true connoisseurs, and have one of the strongest American collections in the country. They also live in Boston, so I thought the fact that the piece had descended in a local family might strike a personal note with them. Though the Johnsons often place their bids with the Massachusetts-and Ohio-based dealer, Bill Samaha, they visited Sotheby's alone that day.

  I was with another client when they arrived, however, so it was some time before I went over to greet them and talk about the sale. I have to admit that I was surprised by the Johnsons' lukewarm response when the conversation turned toward the secretary. My obsession with the piece aside, this was an object that, quite honestly, I felt they should own. I knew it would really complement their already vast and exceptional holdings (their collection is particularly strong in Boston and Newport examples).

  I offered to go through the secretary with the Johnsons, and we ended up spending about forty-five minutes together. I wanted them to absorb its beauty on their own terms, without seeming to oversell it. I didn't want them to draw any wrong conclusions—for example, about the use of mahogany throughout
the case, which might cause some people to question the authenticity of the piece.

  And, in fact, while we were going over the object, another one of the secretary's many wonderful secrets was revealed. As I was discussing the intricate design of the silver lopers, I noticed the right-hand eye on one of the birds appeared to be loose. I fished a paper clip out of the nearby reception desk, wrapped it in a bit of tissue, and gently pushed the green-colored stone back into its place—or so I thought. Instead, the opposite eyeball moved. Contrary to what I had assumed, the eyes were not formed of two individual beads. Rather, they were made of a single cylinder of semiprecious stone—possibly agate—which had been whittled down to about the size of a matchstick and then passed through the head of the bird.

  The Appleton secretary as it appeared in the auction catalog, prior to the addition of the missing ball feet.

  The Johnsons and I were all astounded by this detail (talk about jewel-like precision!), and I reminded them of a similar pair of bird-shaped lopers on a desk once owned by Thomas Mellon and Betty Evans, which had sold at Sotheby's the previous year, in June 1998. On that desk, which in overall form resembles the lower half of the Appleton secretary, the lopers are made of less expensive brass, rather than of silver, though they also have stone eyes. Because the feet on the Mellon-Evans desk had been replaced, it had been modestly estimated at between $10,000 and $20,000, though it ended up selling for a highly respectable $48,875. In retrospect, I would say that the collector who bought the Mellon-Evans piece owns a real treasure—one possibly made by Christopher Townsend. Indeed, I would later learn that the staircase in Christopher Townsend's home (which still stands in Newport, on the corner of Bridge and Second streets) features a decorative frieze of birds in profile, and these birds greatly resemble the lopers' model. I'd stop short of declaring it a signature device of the craftsman, however, because a quick survey of other Newport furniture turns up two slant-front desks by John Goddard with carved mahogany bird-shaped lopers, as well as a third one, this associated with Job Townsend.