Sotheby’s New York Highlights Release FINE EUROPEAN FURNITURE Exhibition opens: 27 March INCLUDING TAPESTRIES, SILVER, CERAMICS AND CARPETS 1 April 2010
head of a king from the Ptolemaic Period, a fine Egyptian limestone relief of a princess dating to the reign of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, a monumental Roman marble torso of a Julio-Claudian emperor wearing richly embossed amour, and a remarkable Roman marble group of three fauns battling a writhing serpent, carved in the style of the Hellenistic high baroque, and known to have been in the collection of Lorenzo de'
Medici in 1489.
IMPORTANT 20TH CENTURY DESIGN Exhibition opens: 12 June
16 June 2010
THE JAMES S. COPLEY LIBRARY Exhibition opens: 12 June
ARTS AND SCIENCES, INCLUDING THE MARK TWAIN COLLECTION
17 June 2010
The second auction of the Copley Library to be offered in June focuses on Mr. Copley’s love for arts and sciences. In additional to the important Americana materials, The Copley Library also contains significant first editions and original letters by many of Mr. Copley’s favorite authors, principal among them is his fellow California newspaper man, Mark Twain. The Mark Twain Collection is rich in letters, both to Twain’s publishers and family and friends. A number of manuscripts relate to some of his more famous publications and the collection also includes an unpublished autobiographical manuscript entitled A Family Sketch. Other literary and artistic luminaries featured in the collection include Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, T. S. Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, James Joyce, George Gershwin, Julia Ward Howe, and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, among many others. Achievements in science and the minds behind them also fascinated Mr. Copley, and among the offerings from the Library is a significant group of letters and two speeches by Albert Einstein. Other noteworthy names acquired by Mr. Copley include Sir Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Louis Pasteur, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.
A JULY 1776 BROADSIDE PRINTING OF Exhibition opens: 12 June
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
17 June 2010
Also from the James S. Copley Library, Sotheby’s will offer in June one of a few surviving broadside Declarations of Independence printed in the weeks after July 4, 1776 (est. $600/800,000), which will be featured in a stand-alone catalogue and sale. The Salem, Massachusetts, edition of the Declaration of Independence is one of the scarcest printings of the Declaration, and the present example is the only Salem copy to be sold at auction – it appeared at Sotheby’s in 1981 and was purchased by Mr. Copley at that time.
FINE BOOKS AND MANUSCRIPTS INCLUDING AMERICANA Exhibition opens: 12 June
18 June 2010
PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE POLAROID COLLECTION Exhibition opens: 16 June
21 & 22, June 2010
In June, Sotheby’s will offer Photographs from the Polaroid Collection –a group of more than 1,000 works that provides unique insight into the influence of Polaroid’s revolutionary technology - which all but eliminated the distance between inspiration and realization – on the history of photography. The collection was begun by Edwin Land, the inventor and founder of Polaroid, and is vast in its breadth and ambition. Works by many
