J. Russell Jinishian Gallery, Inc. 1657 POST ROAD, FAIRFIELD, CT 06824

(203) 259-8753Specializing in 19th, 20th, and 21st Century Marine and Fishing Art from Europe and America.

Accepting artwork on consignment from collectors throughout the year.

Wick AhrensDimetrious AthasJohn AtwaterAnthony BlakeRobert BlazekChristopher BlossomLou BonamartePeter BoweBernd BraatzJames ButtersworthMarc CastelliScott ChambersTerry CulpanSteve Cryan

R.B. DanceWilliam R. DavisDon DemersLouis DoddWilliam P. DuffyWillem EerlandWilliam EwenJames FloodFlick FordPaul GarnettWilliam GilkersonJames GriffithsGlen HackerJames Harrington

Cooper HartAndré HarveyGeoff HuntJames IamsMichael KeaneLoretta KrupinskiRichard Dana KuchtaRobert LaGasseGerry LeveyPatrick LivingstoneIan MarshallVictor MaysLloyd McCafferyJoseph McGurl

John MecrayJerry MeltonStanley MeltzoffLeonard MizerekWilliam G. MullerRob NapierWilliam Oakley Jr.Julia O’Malley KeyesRoberto OstiYves ParentEd ParkerCharles PetersonJames ProsekRandy Puckett

Keith ReynoldsMarek SarbaArthur ShilstoneKathy SpaldingRobert StickerJohn StobartDavid ThimganTim ThompsonKent UllbergPeter VincentWilliam WalshPatricia WarfieldRobert WeissBert Wright

HOURS: Tuesday - Saturday 10-5 p.m. and by appointment.We invite you to stop by and visit the gallery located just 1 hour from NYC just off I-95 at Exit 21.

Visit our website: www.jrusselljinishiangallery.comE-mail: rjinishian@optonline.net

19th, 20th and 21st Century Marine Art

Michael Keane J-class Yachts SHAMROCK V and ENDEAVOUR Oil on Canvas 24” x 40” $135,000

VOLUME 5 NUMBER 6 - 7 PUBLISHED by J. RUSSELL JINISHIAN © FALL/WINTER 2005-2006 / $12.00

What’s Inside:• Latest News from Today’s Premier Marine Artists, Learn What they’re Working on in their Studios right now• Latest Marine Art Sales & Prices

• Marine Art Exhibitions Across the Country

• Upcoming Auctions

• Book Reviews

™

Special Double Issue

2159 RT. 129 SOUTH BRISTOL, MEJust up the hill from the Swing Bridge towards Christmas Cove.Look for the leaping fish. Summer only. 207-644-1102

Information on purchasing the Artwork pictured in the MARINE ART QUARTERLY may be obtainedby contacting the Publisher, J. Russell Jinishian at (203) 259-8753 or rjinishian@optonline.net

News From the ArtistsAs usual, there have been a great many

marine art events, exhibitions and projects undertaken by individual artists across the

country and around the globe this past quarter. So let’s get right to the news.

Let’s begin with the American Society of Marine Artists, who in October held its annual meeting in Charleston, S.C. where 35 artist-members assembled for a chance to break the solitude of their normal routines and paint together, discuss aesthetic concerns and generally talk shop. Among the artists in attendance were David Bareford, Christine Diehlmann, Peter Egeli, Michael Karas, Bob Lagasse, John Roach, Bob Semler, Don Stone, Society Vice President Ian Marshall, and President Kim Weiland. The featured speaker for the weekend was not an artist, rather the former curator at the Maine Maritime Museum, Robert Webb, who spoke about the subject of his brand new book, the sailor turned painter, Charles Robert Patterson (1878-1958), and his remark-able life and career. (See our book page for more detail) The Society also reaffirmed its com-mitment to furthering its edu-cational mission by formalizing its commitment to the Lyme Academy in Old Lyme, Connecticut where it is spon-soring workshops for aspiring marine artists led by Society members, the first being held June 10-11 with instructor Len Tantillo. They’ve made a similar arrangement over the next three years with the Maine College of Art in Portland, Maine, where workshops will be held on the weekend of June 9th and 10th with instructor Don Stone, and October 6th and 7th with instructor Ian Marshall. To sign up for the workshops, call the Maine College of Art at 207-775-5157 ext. 232 or the Lyme Academy at 860-434-5232 ext. 120.

For practical reasons the Society divides itself into geographic regions so it can put together outreach exhibitions like the one held recently for the 12th year at the Coos Art Museum in Coos Bay, Oregon. Originally the brainchild of West Coast artists Dutch Mostert, Mary Holbert and Don McMichael, the show has really taken on a life of its own. This year the featured artist was Austin Dwyer, president of the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Painters, who presented Diana Smith with the Best in Show award. Although the exhibition is now closed, you can still view it on the Web at coosbay.com.

Residents and visitors to the Northeast will have an opportunity to see members of the Society’s work at an exhibition sponsored by the Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum, and hosted by the Art League of Long Island at their Dix Hills facility from April 1 to May 14. More information on that can be found at cshwhalingmuseum.org. In addition to these periodic regional exhibitions,

the Society is actively looking to partner on a regular basis with fine art and maritime museums across the country to further the opportunities to experience world class contemporary marine art at local cultural institutions like the Cape Museum of Fine Art in Dennis, Massachusetts or the Vero Beach Museum of Art in Florida, and the Portland Art Museum in Portland, Oregon. We applaud these efforts by the artists to carry the marine art flag as far afield as possible.

If you’re in Galveston, Texas this February you’ll have the opportunity to share in a great marine art program to benefit the Galveston Historical Foundation which currently maintains and oper-ates the tallship Elissa, an active sail training vessel, and whose future plan includes the recon-

struction of the adjoining building to become the new Texas Seaport Museum. It will house a per-manent display of terrific paintings relating to the history of Galveston Bay from 1895 to present by artists like Boyer Gonzalez, Paul Schumann and Julius Stockfleth, donated by local benefactors such as the Mary Moody Northern Foundation. They are kicking off the events the weekend of January 28th with Il Concorso di Macchie which is an Italian term for what they call in the West a “quick draw” competition. This one is geared to young artists ages grouped 8-12, 13-20 and 21 and over, who are given a set period of time (9 a.m. to 2 p.m.) in which to make a painting or drawing based on the site. And at the end prizewinners will walk away with prizes worth $500 and $1,000. Who says art doesn’t pay?

The next weekend the Foundation will sponsor a black tie marine art exhibition and sale to benefit the Foundation and Museum hosted by outstand-ing Houston Astros pitcher and Galveston native Brandon Backe, featuring a collection of over 50 paintings of Galveston and marine paintings for sale from the J. Russell Jinishian Gallery, Fairfield, Connecticut, Marine Arts of Salem, Salem, Massachusetts and the J. Bangle Gallery, Galveston. Artists represented will include Dimetrious Athas, Chris Blossom, Don Demers, James Flood, Mark Myers, Robert

Sticker, A.D. Blake, Tim Thompson and John Stobart, Antonio Jacobsen, Roy Cross, William Stubbs and others. On hand will also be artist-in-residence Anthony Blackman and painters Richard Loud and Ed Parker, who’ll be signing prints of his new painting of Galveston Bay. The exhibition was spearheaded by Galveston Foundation Board of Trustee members Bill and Pat Broussard. Local supporter George Mitchell has donated adjacent space to serve as a print gallery for the museum, making available for purchase prints of a number of the historic Galveston paintings. For more information on attending the event or sup-porting this great regional museum please call 409-765-7834 or email foundation@galvestonhistory.org or visit tsm-elissa.org.

If you are in Minnesota, Winona, Minnesota to be exact, along the banks of the Mississippi in June of this year you will be able to attend the grand opening of the brand new Minnesota Marine Art Museum which, as noted in our last issue, will feature the Burrichter-Kierlin Collection of outstanding marine paintings which includes those by Thomas Hoyne, James Buttersworth, Tim Thompson, John Stobart, William Muller, Jack Gray, Keith Reynolds and others, the 19th and 20th century pho-tographs and maps of the Upper Mississippi by Henry Bosse, 400 works of art from the Leo Smith Folk Art Collection, an actual 1937 Army Corps of Engineer’s river dredge, the

William A. Thompson, and a one thousand volume reference library. Outstanding! What a great addi-tion to America’s maritime museums. To learn more visit minnesotamarineart.org. Who knew that the New Year would feature the opening of two brand new museums devoted exclusively to marine art!

The Gallery at Mystic Seaport Museum held its 26th International Marine Art Exhibition in the fall where awards were selected from among the entries by Reese Palley, author of Wooden Ships and Iron Men, the Maritime Art of Thomas Hoyne and Thomas Wilcox, the director of the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, Maine. This year’s recipients included The Rudolph J. Schaefer Award for Preserving Maritime History to Geoff Hunt’s painting of “John Paul Jones’ Ranger.” The Stobart Award for painting from life to Robert Blazek. Yachting Award to Neal Hughes. Marine Environmental Wildlife Award to Jack Garver. Museum Purchase Award to Douglas Purdon’s “Tugboat Alley.” David Thimgan Award to Louis Dodd. Five Awards of Excellence went to Australian Ian Hansen, Jeff Weaver, H. Gray Park, Canadian Dusan Kadlec and Austin Dwyer. Thomas M. Hoyne Award for Gloucester Fishing Art went to Don Demers—his third Hoyne Award and 12th award overall at Mystic International Exhibitions.

3Continued on page 4

Just Off The Artists’ Easels...Still Wet...

Joseph McGurl Drifting, Buzzards Bay Oil on Canvas 18” x 36” $18,000

William R. Davis Cutter off Nantucket Oil on Panel 10” x 16” $9,000

William Duffy Alierons at Anchor in Nantucket Harbor Oil on Canvas 16” x 26” $7,000

Don had a busy year which included guest stints as an instructor at the Plein Air Painters of America in Laguna Beach, California, lead-ing a week-long workshop on the west coast of Ireland and participating in the Plein Air Masters Program at the Chateau Des Artistes in the Burgundy region of France. Greenwich Workshop also released a new large giclée on canvas of Don’s painting “The Windswept Coast” (see an image in our Fall/Winter 2004 Quarterly), which is in an edition of only 50 and measures 28” x 42” and sells for $950. They also released Christopher Blossom’s first giclée canvas—his first new print in years, “Afternoon Arrival, Gloucester,” showing a fishing schooner arriving under sail in the late afternoon with the city of Gloucester aglow in the background. It measures 20” x 26”, is another small edition of 75 and sells for $595. (To order either print call 800-243-4260 or visit greenwichfinearts.com)

Don’s winter projects include a commission paint-ing of John Nicholas Brown’s yacht Bolero cur-rently owned by Ed Kane to be placed in Brown’s own house, the New York Yacht Club’s Newport Station Harbour Court, and preparing a new collec-tion of paintings, large and small, of his 7th one-man show at the J. Russell Jinishian Gallery in May. (See our exhibition pages for details)

Mystic Seaport Museum also has plans for two exhibitions of special interest to fans of contempo-rary marine art next year. One is tentatively sched-uled to open in the fall of 2006 on the maritime paintings of the Gloucester fishing fleet by Thomas Hoyne. The other is set to open in May 2007. It’s a retrospective of the paintings of John Mecray, spanning his career from the late 1970s right through to the present. John, as many people know has a personal passion for the great racing yachts of yesterday and today, which he has trans-lated into his remarkable paintings. He’s also been very active in the limited edition print market since the release of his first two prints in the early

1980s of sloop Providence and fishing schooner L.A. Dunton. While those prints were released at $395 and $80 respectively, they are now trading on the open market for $3,000 and $2,000. Not bad. John has really embraced the new printing giclée technology, which is a fancy French word for a computer-generated print either on canvas or on paper. John has chosen to follow the canvas route. And heck, the whole idea of prints from the very beginning was to make it look as much like the painting as possible, so that the natural evolution for many artists is to use canvas. John has been releasing about one new print a year for the last few years, corresponding to the completion of his meticulous paintings. Earlier this year it was the print of a J-boat Ranger taken from a painting John had done on commission for a Texas collector. The beauty of the computer generated print is that once the image is scanned in and the color is cor-rect, a print can be made into to virtually any size that the printer can handle. So we’re seeing pub-lishers releasing the same image in a number of different sizes. In John’s case his Ranger was made available by his distributor Mystic Seaport in two sizes: one 17” x 35” on stretch canvas, which is selling for $1,500 in an edition of 250; and in a smaller edition of only 25, the exact size of the original painting 22” x 40” which sold out rapidly at $2,000 each. As you can see, not only is the giclée printing method giving a publisher more freedom in terms of size, it’s also elevated the initial release price to a whole new bracket.

From the point of view of the collector, the beauty of the next step is that when the print needs to be framed, it can be framed just like an oil painting, no glass or matting and with much less labor, which cuts down on the final framing costs. In addition, the inks which have been developed recently are light-fast inks, which the same could not always be said of the traditional lithograph on paper. So if all the research holds out, you’ve got a fairly stable, permanent art

print to decorate your walls as a result.

John is just formulating his next painting (which will be released next year as a print, as I write). It is interesting how he’s approached it. He says he’s not sure what vessel it will be but he woke up at 2:00 a.m. with an idea for particular angle and view of the vessel, and a particular style of light-ing. That’s where is starting point is. Then he’ll find a vessel he finds visually interesting. The original paintings will sell for over $100,000.

John is one artist who’s artistic passion is carried over to other areas of his life. He’s one of the founding members of the Museum of Yachting in Newport, Rhode Island. He’s also one of the founders of the International Restoration School, which is now under the new direction of Terry Nathan. It is really taking off in the midst of a large fundraising campaign spearheaded by John to complete the restoration of the country’s oldest surviving yacht Coronet. John said they’ve just completed phase two, getting the boat out of the water, secured and documented. They are now turning their attention to a $7 million project to raise funds to restore the 1831 Aquidnick Mill Building on their property to begin to use it to its full potential. The 30,000 sq. ft. building, which is on the National Register of Historic Buildings, will be fitted out to expand their workshop and class-room space (their enrollment for their programs training future traditional shipwrights rose a whopping 50% last year!), house an auditorium for lectures and continuing education, and a refer-ence library and display gallery. They’ve just been awarded a $100,000 grant from the State of Rhode Island. They’ve also just received a tremendous donation from collector Bill Combs of 18, count ‘em, 18 scale ship models by the two undisputable kings of miniature ship model making American Lloyd McCaffery and Englishman Donald McNarry. The opportunity to view one or two models by the masters is rare, so future visitors to IYRS will really have a unique experience in store.

McCaffery models include HMS Bounty, Colonial Schooner Sultana, Boston, Captain James Cook’s Endeavour and Coronet. McNarry models feature Mary Rose, Royal George, HMS Atalanta, Young America and the Royal Brig Pilgrim. The models come with an incredible amount of complimentary printed material, including a leather bound first edition of Richard Henry Dana’s classic voyage aboard the Pilgrim Two Years Before the Mast. How big a gift is this? Well, it will make IYRS the home of the largest collection of these modelers work anywhere. In monetary terms, models by these artists, sell when you can get them, for $40-60,000. So, you do the math. Bill has really set a new stan-dard for marine art donations. More information on IYRS and its ongoing projects can be found on their Web site iyrs.org.

John is also a long way through preparation for a book on his work entitled The Art of John Mecray, which will include 68 paintings from throughout his career along with a myriad of sketches. Look for that perhaps towards the end of this year or early next year. John is doing all the design work on it, and says, “I’m not going to hurry it.” If you’re in Essex, Connecticut on February 12 you’ll have a chance to see a terrific slide presentation by John Mecray on his painting, philosophy and methods, to be sponsored by the Connecticut River Museum. They’re expecting such crowds that they’ve scheduled the meeting to be held at the Essex Town Hall. For more information call 860-767-8269 or ctrivermuseum.org.

Visitors to the third floor of that Museum will see a scale train layout of marine artist and tugboat buff Steve Cryan. He’s ridden tugboats so often in New York that captains all know him by his first

name. When he is not riding tugs or painting, he creates elaborate custom train layouts for individ-uals on commission. Nice work if you can get it.

Readers of the November-December 2005 issue of Wooden Boat will have seen on page 18 a photo-graph and write up of master modeler Lloyd McCaffery’s cut away hull model of yacht America. This incredible model measuring 46” is framed in poplar with apple timber and deck fittings and is based on the lines taken by the British Admiralty in 1851. Lloyd’s interior view shows the intricacies of its’ unique construction, including the diagonal iron strapping that most people don’t realize was used to give the hull its strength. This model of Lloyd’s most recently sold for $60,000. His latest project is a 1/8”=1 scale model of the U.S.S. Constitution measuring 11” long. Look for photo-graphs and articles on Lloyd’s Constitution model in future issues of Miniature Collector and the Nautical Research Guild Journal. Lloyd’s been invited to be keynote speaker at the Nautical Research Guild annual convention in October of this year, which will be held at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. (see our events page for details)

An artist with Lloyd’s skills has a ready list of proj-ects that present unique artistic and aesthetic challenges for him. He’s just waiting for the right collector to come along with interest matching his project list. When I asked him recently what he has in mind next, he responded with a model of the clipper ship the Great Republic which at 335 ft. on deck was the largest clipper ship by far (most clip-pers measure 200-220 ft.) ever built. She was built by legendary builder Donald McKay in East Boston, and towed to New York to be rigged. She was fitted out, loaded with cargo and on the eve of

what was to be her maiden voyage was set aflame by a fire in an adjacent bakery and burned beyond repair right at the dock. A smaller cut-down ver-sion of the ship was then built which was itself a record breaker. But as Lloyd mused, one can only speculate on what great things the original Great Republic would have accomplished.

In addition to the poignancy of her history, what makes this project appealing is that her construc-tion was so well documented and her lines, plans, construction drawings, builders half model, even McKay’s notes are all preserved at the Hart Nautical Collection at M.I.T. so that unlike other historic re-creations, which often involve specula-tion, the Great Republic could be brought back to life in all her glory. Lloyd observed that she was so large that at even a relatively small scale, say 1/8”=1’, the model would measure 44” long. The price tag is in the neighborhood of $120,000.

Massachusetts modeler and former editor of the Nautical Research Guild Journal Rob Napier reports that he’s working on a 1/64 scale of a Downeaster and has made his own discoveries during his research like any good modeler or painter. Where he assumed that the catheads aboard her were constructed with two or three sheaves and a big block to help hoist the anchor, in fact, he found there were no blocks and no sheaves. This information he will incorporate into his 32” model. A model with this kind of detail of Rob sells for $60,000.

In addition to building models, Rob, like other professional modelers, is involved in repair and collection maintenance. In his case for the collec-tions of the Museum of Fine Arts, and the

Christopher Blossom East Wind off Seguin Oil on Canvas 22” x 44” $35,000

Continued from page 3

Continued on page 16

4 John Stobart Detroit, A View of the City in 1838 Oil on Canvas 23” x 40” $250,000

resources to give them a stronger position in the marketplace. They are Dorotheum in Vienna, Brokowski in Stockholm, Poro & Company in Milan, GMAI in Madrid, Gallerie Koller in Zurich, Kunsthaus Lempertz in Cologne and Swann Galleries in New York.

But like every other industry in the world all the auction houses are looking to China as the next emerging market. While Sotheby’s has already had an informal partnership with the Chinese auction house, Forever, on December 11, China has offi-cially opened its doors to foreign auction houses as part of its membership in the World Trade Organization. They must still operate under the country’s cultural protection laws, which for exam-ple empower the Minister of Culture to restrict dealings in works of art, books, etc. dating before 1949, the year of the Communist Revolution. It remains to be seen how this plays out. But there’s no question that the auction houses see this is a huge untapped market.

Of course, the key to success in the art business is not just where you offer something, and under what circumstances, but it’s really the quality of your offerings. And while the art business looks from the outside like a genteel place that operates under gentlemen’s agreements and a high level of civility, you don’t have to peel back the layers very far to find out that it can be as rough and tumble as any other free market business. In fact, it’s amazing the lengths that the auction houses will go to in order to acquire a major estate to sell—from literally reading the obituaries and sending priests to a bereaved household to elaborate win-ing and dining, travel perks, and the publication of extravagant catalogues of an owner’s collection. Spending several hundred thousand dollars to land a collection that can net tens of millions of dollars is just good business.

Ah! But there’s more. The latest trend has been to offer guaranteed monies to prospective con-signors, often well into the millions of dollars. In the first quarter of this year, for example, Sotheby’s had already awarded $112 million in guarantees. It’s obviously a risky double-edged sword. It’s almost the tale of the two gas stations across the street from each other, lower and rais-ing their prices as they watch their competitor to make their first move. It’s now become an estab-lished and expected part of the business. There seems to be hardly anything auction houses won’t do, including employing the children of prospec-tive consignors. Sotheby’s financial services for example, will even lend collectors money up to 50% of the low estimate of an item based on the guarantee they (Sotheby’s) would have the right to auction it in the future.

By and large marine art is not the central focus of the kinds of collections that are getting multi-mil-lion dollar guarantees. It’s more often the Picassos and impressionist paintings that are selling in the tens of millions of dollars apiece. Although a world record which was set recently for a Canaletto (1697-1768) painting “The Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day” for $20,086,024, the big money tends to be in either contemporary art or old mas-ter paintings and artifacts. For example, Sotheby’s will offer a newly discovered work by Rembrandt dating from about 1640 to coincide with the 400th

anniversary of the birth of Rembrandt in 2006. The painting will first be exhibited in the auction houses in Amsterdam, London, Boston and Los Angeles head-quarters before it is sold in New York on January 26. “Portrait of an Elderly Woman in a White Bonnet,” has been in the pri-vate collection of the Walsh family of Fort Worth, Texas. After two years of restoration and pigment X-rays, and yes, as we discussed in the last issue, “dendochronology,” (the science of study-ing growth rings of trees) which revealed that the old panel that the painting had been painted on had been taken from the same tree as three other authentic Rembrandt paintings panels), the painting was given a stamp of approval by Ernst von de Wetering, head of the Rembrandt Research Project, which was founded in 1968 to determine the authenticity of paintings in various museums and collec-tions reported to be by Rembrandt. What they basically discov-ered was that even with all the technology avail-able determining authenticity is still not a science, but an art. Even the experts can’t agree. Of the 611 supposed Rembrandt paintings listed in the first catalogue raisonné in 1935, most experts believe that about half of them may be forgeries. In fact, the Rembrandt Project even changes its own mind on occasion. Of 22 Rembrandt self-portraits supposed painted between 1625 and 1652, four originally thought not to have been by Rembrandt have now been determined to have been by him, and two others supposed by Rembrandt were now rejected. Check in another five or six years and that could be reversed.

How do you determine what is real and what is not? Well these days some artists are actually put-ting a little of their own DNA in the painting in a specific spot so that way, regardless of whether the signature remains (often over the years paint-ings are cut down and signatures removed), the painting can be authenticated in the future. This DNA thing sounds like the new idea, but leave it to old Leonardo De Vinci to be way ahead of his time. The art restorers responsible for the restora-tion of the “Adoration of the Christ Child” hang-

ing

i n t h e

Gallerie Borghese in Rome had long attributed it to Fra Bartolomeo have said that they have uncovered a finger print imbedded in the layers of varnish which they likened to a kind of “digital signature” and something apparently De Vinci used in other paintings as well, understanding that at some point in time the technology would be there to read it. Wow!

Of course, in the contemporary, particularly abstract, world determining authenticity can really be a chal-lenge. Recently 32 “drip paintings” by Jackson Pollock supposedly were discovered in a storage facility owned by an artist friend of Jackson Pollock. The fury that that has created as to whether these are the real paintings by Pollock or not, has really got the modern art world in a tizzy. What you have here is one Pollock expert determining that they are actu-ally Pollocks, and the Pollock/Krasner Foundation saying that they’re not. We’ll let them sort that one out. What is at stake is literally hundreds of millions of dollars. Last year, for example, a small drip paint-ing that had been formerly owned by the Museum of Modern Art sold for $11.65 million at Christies. Obviously the owners of the paintings are going to “go to the mat” and try to prove their authenticity.

A s always, the world art market is a dynamic place with all sorts of things going on throughout the year. Some of these have

direct impact on collectors of marine art, while some developments just shed light on aspects of the art market at large. We are often asked for an assessment of how the market is performing, and while some of the biggest and most important sales take place privately and quietly, and are therefore hard to document, the state of the major auction houses in the art market is a good way to gauge the overall health of the market. Based on sales this year and realignments among the auction houses, by everyone’s account this is one of the best years in a long, long time. The privately held Christies and the public company, Sotheby’s generally tend to point to their major sales of impressionist and modern art in the fall and the spring as a gauge as to where the art market is at that particular point. Christies had started the year with six-month sales of $1.7 billion and really ran the table in their fall sales which brought another $400 million plus. Not bad for a couple of days work. Sotheby’s one day total of their contemporary art sale in London this year was $83.7 million, their second strongest single auction in the last decade. World records were set in both houses for a number of modern artists (see our sales page for some of the actual results), including a record price for a marine painting by Rockport artist Anthony Thieme, entitled

“Evening Light on the Swannee River” which sold at Christies for $144,000, more than quadruple its highest estimate.

Sotheby’s also announced a realignment of its’ stock ownership structure that its’ Chairman of the Board, Michael Sovern, said was designed to make its stock more attractive to investors, improve the corporate governance and increase future earnings. It involved Albert Taubman, who had bought Sotheby’s as a wedding present for his wife in 1983. He sold 14 million class-B shares, each share having ten votes, back to Sotheby’s for $168 million in cash and $7.1 million class-A shares, which carry only one vote each. It essentially eliminated the class-B category of shares, and also eliminated the Taubman control of the voting stock in the company. This current move reduces the Taubmann voting shares from 60% of the total to about 12½%. When William Ruprecht, Sotheby’s Chief Executive, was asked whether the company would be put up for sale now, he replied, “The answer is no. But every company on the New York Stock Exchange can be acquired.” In order to deal with the huge settlement fee for the price fixing scandal of 2002, Sotheby’s had already been forced to sell its’ York Avenue headquarters building (they now lease it) and its international realty division, which is now operated under a license agreement by its’ new owners Cendant. What kind of affect will

this current transaction have on Sotheby’s stock? Well, shares closed at $17.43 the day prior to the announcement of this realignment. they spiked to $18.30 after, and the day after that backed down to $17.85. The stock had been as high as $45 per share early in 1999. So who knows?

Not to be outdone, the third major player in the auction business, which has been coming on strong in recent years, the newly named Bonhams 1793 (Bonhams was founded in London in 1793, making it one of the world’s oldest auction houses) made its own moves. It has aggressively been increasing its market share through purchasing its smaller competitors. In the past three years they have acquired Brooks, Phillips and Butterfield and Butterfield in San Francisco, and opened a new New York headquarters. This year they repur-chased 49.9% of their stock from Louis Vuitton, Moet, Hennessey. This investment had carried them through this consolidation period. They also announced their merger with Theodore Brewster of Adelaide, Australia, Australia’s oldest auction house, dating from 1878, and the establishment of a working relationship with Sydney auction house Stanley & Company. Bonhams held its first auction in New York on November 29 at its new Fuller building headquarters, 595 Madison Avenue at 57th Street.

In Europe several of the smaller auction houses have pledged to work together and pool their

INTERESTING NEWS FROM THE

ART WORLD AT LARGE

76

Fitz Henry (Hugh) Lane View off Thatchers Island, Gloucester with Bark EASTERN STAR c.1853 Oil on Canvas 24” x 36”1806-1866 Sold at auction for $825,000

UPCOMING AUCTIONS

Continued on page 22

February 1Maritime Art

ChristiesRockefeller Center, NY

212-636-2000christies.com

February 25-26Collection of Kathleen & Peter Wick

Paintings includingFitz Hugh Lane &

American FurnitureNortheast Auctions

Manchester, NH603-433-8400

northeastauctions.com

February 28Marine Paintings

BonhamsNew Bond St., London44 (0) 20-7468-8211

bonhams.com

March 3American & European

Paintings & PrintsSkinnersBoston

617-350-5400skinnerinc.com

March 7Asian Decorative Export Art

BonhamsNew Bond St.

March 30Scientific & Engineering Works

ChristiesSouth Kensington

44 (0) 20-7930-6074

April 6Antique Arms & Armour

BonhamsKnightsbridge

April 13Travel & Natural History

ChristiesSouth Kensington

April 26California & Western American

Paintings, Drawings& Sculpture

ChristiesLos Angeles

310-385-2600

May 11-12Civil War & Historic Americana

CowanʼsCincinnati, OH

May 17Marine & Nautical Works of Art

SothebyʼsOlympia

44-20-72935555sothebys.com

May 19Sporting Art

ChristiesKing Street

May 25Maritime Painting & Models

ChristiesSouth Kensington

June 1Oceanliner Furnishings & Art

ChristiesRockefeller Center, NY

212-636-2000christies.com

July 27Maritime Art

ChristiesRockefeller Center, NY

212-636-2000