Skinner to Present the Andy Williams Folk Art Collection The legendary singer’s extraordinary collection of folk art and a silver punch bowl presented to Cass Gilbert by F.W. Woolworth at the dedication of the Woolworth Building in April 1913, will be offer
to $50,000). As the 100th anniversary of the Woolworth building nears, Skinner is pleased to offer the sterling silver punch bowl that F.W. Woolworth presented to the building’s architect, Cass Gilbert, during a legendary dinner that took place when the building first opened. The bowl, which descended through the Gilbert family to its current owner, captures Gilbert’s architectural magnum opus by reproducing selected elements of the building’s neo-Gothic ornament for the bowl’s rim. These details combine with the clean, modern lines of the bowl’s silhouette and surface to create a magnificent effect. The interior of the bowl bears an engraving of the Woolworth building, transforming the image of monumental structure into a beautiful scale model that has the delicacy of a portrait miniature.
A rare and very early silver tankard by Jacobus Van der Spiegel, New York City, c. 1700, (lot 215, $30,000 to $50,000) represents the work of one of New York’s first silversmiths. Similar tankards by this maker are in the collections at Yale University Art Gallery, Winterthur Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Paintings & Patriotic Decorative Arts
An impressive selection of paintings includes a watercolor portrait miniature of A little girl with her cat and dog attributed to Boston miniaturist Clarissa (Peters) Russell (lot 254, $8,000 to $12,000) and a Chinese-school oil painting titled The Waterfront Hongs at Canton, China (lot 228, $15,000 to $25,000), an important record of the busy trade network between China and the West, including the ports of Boston and Salem.
A 19th century American school painting titled The Junction formed in Medford by the Meeting of the [Mystic] River, Canal, and Railroad (lot 68, $20,000 to $30,000) will also be offered. In this painting, the artist draws together a remarkable confluence of the industrial and domestic and imbues them with great charm and enthusiasm. In overlapping the Medford transportation intersection with an anonymous set of observers and their homes, the artist achieves a delicately balanced rendering of the tension between the growing excitement of America's Industrial Revolution and the enduring beauty of New England's domestic landscape.
Decorative objects of note include an American centennial carved walnut and pine box by John Bellamy (lot 91, $30,000 to $50,000). The box displays the Great Seal of the United States; the front carved with a spreadwing eagle grasping a banner inscribed "E PLURIBUS UNUM" over an American shield. Known by Americana enthusiasts everywhere as the "carver of eagles," John Haley Bellamy made his living in the second half of the nineteenth century selling carvings of the American symbol to adorn ships and walls across New England. His body of work is composed almost completely of the iconic "eagle with banner" that appears with some frequency in well-known institutional and private collections. While this box is certainly a departure from his best-known productions, it is nonetheless an example of Bellamy at his best.
A Civil War Pennsylvania 53rd Regiment pieced and gilt-stenciled silk American flag, circa 1864 (lot 164,
