The estate of Mrs. "Laurie" Walthal will be sold June 11 in Memphis, Tenn. A major estate auction featuring the lifetime personal collection of Mrs. Lawrence “Laurie” Walthal will be held Saturday, June 11, at the Agricenter International in Memphis, Tenn., at 10 a.m. (CDT).
News-Antique.com - May 23,2011 - (MEMPHIS, Tenn.) – A major estate auction featuring the lifetime personal collection of Mrs. Lawrence “Laurie” Walthal will be held Saturday, June 11, at the Agricenter International, located at 7777 Walnut Grove Road in Memphis. The auction, beginning promptly at 10 a.m. (CDT), will be conducted by Kennedy’s Auction Service, based Selmer, Tenn., not far away. Mrs. Walthal's collection will headline the event, but other consignments will be sold as well.
Mrs. Walthal was a lifelong resident of Memphis and a past president of the Memphis Country Club, of which she was a lifelong member. She was very involved in church activities and local charities. Most of the pieces in her collection were descended to her by her father and grandfather (both presidents of the Memphis Cotton Exchange) and her late husband’s family.
The Walthal family has been in the Memphis real estate business for three generations. In fact, one of the more interesting pieces in the sale is a Walthal Real Estate Companies roll-top desk, built by the Gunn Company of Cincinnati. The desk is massive, at 72 inches wide, and was no doubt witness to many of the real estate transactions that helped shape modern-day Memphis.
“It’s easy to see that Mrs. Laurie held the pieces that made up her collection close to her heart because of the time and effort she spent in preserving and caring for them,” said Mark Kennedy of Kennedy’s Auction Service. “This may just be one of the finest auctions ever held in the mid-South. I encourage everyone to attend live or bid online, through LiveAuctioneers.com.”
Period furniture will feature an impressive, six-piece J. & J.W. Meeks parlor suite in the lovely Stanton Hall pattern. The suite includes a sofa, four chairs (two of them armchairs) and a Recamier (fainting couch). Also sold will be an important 19th century rosewood rococo marble-top pedestal with floral, grape and mask carvings and with a hanging fruit center (42 inches tall).
Another furniture piece expected to generate intense bidder interest is an antique pietre dure (Italian for “hard stone”) center table with porphyry, lapis and other marbles. The table measures 48 inches long by 31 inches wide by 29 inches tall. Pietre dure is a skilled decorative technique in which precious or semi-precious stones are inlaid into marble or other soft stone.
Decorative accessories will include a handsome patinated and gilt bronze clock with cherubs, a fine collection of Royal Vienna and Dresden portrait vases and plates, a large collection of 19th century bronzes by noted listed artists, and a monumental 19th century marble statue of Cupid and Putto wrestling over a heart on original green marble pedestal, artist signed.
Artwork will feature two works by Frederic Tanqueray Anderson (1846-1926), who was a bookkeeper at the Memphis Cotton Exchange, studied under the French Impressionist Camille Pissaro in 1889 and regularly contributed to magazines such as Harper’s Weekly and Leslie’s. Also sold will be an oil on canvas by Edward Lamson Henry (1841-1919), titled Sketch for the
