Go ahead, admit it. Sometimes you dream it could happen to you.
Yes, of course, you understand full well Lady Luck is a fickle mistress, that good fortune is nothing to bank on. They won’t catch you at the casinos or waiting in line for a lottery ticket. Your preferred investment strategy is straightforward indexing and bonds with triple-A ratings.
Every once in a while, though, perhaps while flipping through channels, you pause for a moment on PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. As Edgar and Connie from Damariscotta discover that the strange old tuba they found in their uncle’s attic may once have been the property of John Philip Sousa and may be worth enough to pay their grandson’s college tuition, you recall your last visit to the attic, and the wheels of your mind start to turn.
It does really happen, too. Paul Provost, senior vice president and director of estates, trusts, and appraisals at the international auction house Christie’s, remembers the time someone came in with a painting found at a rummage sale they thought might be worth something. It turned out the painting was by Martin Johnson Heade, an early-American painter, and worth $882,500. And for some Gold Coast residents that jackpot truly has become more than the stuff of dreams.
Bargain (the best I ever had) Mimi Findlay’s most remarkable find wasn’t all that remarkable in one sense: She first saw the 100-year-old cabinet in a photograph in an arts and antiques periodical advertising an upcoming auction. How she managed to land the item at the auction was the remarkable part, something she ascribes to what might be called “bidding fatigue.”
It was September 1987. The place: a tiny auction house in Massachusetts. Mimi, who lives in New Canaan, was one of maybe sixty people there, several like her with their minds set on getting a cabinet built by the Herter Brothers, New York–based interior designers and furniture makers during America’s Gilded Age, from 1865 to 1901.
The Herters had been out of favor for a while, their style so ornate that a previous generation of owners had been known to obscure the Herters’ trademark gilt trim and inlay with dark varnish or linseed oil. Somehow many Herter pieces survived those dark ages. “They were part of what is called the Aesthetic Movement, and they went through different styles as they evolved,” Mimi says. “Early on, they worked in a style called Renaissance Revival. Later, they did more in the Oriental style.”
The Herters were still in their Renaissance Revival period when they worked on the Norwalk manor house of LeGrand Lockwood, a railroad tycoon and
financier who went LeBust after getting caught in the Gold Panic of 1869. Before that Lockwood had hired Gustave and Christian Herter to craft doors, wainscotings and various furnishings in several rooms of his mansion.
Almost a hundred years later, while the Lockwood-Mathews Mansion moldered in quiet obscurity, Findlay was one of many area volunteers who successfully fought to save it from demolition. Later she focused on restoring the house to its former grandeur, collecting stereopticons of the interior and experiencing the Herters’ work in something close to its three-dimensional glory. A love affair began.
That may have helped Findlay land her prize in 1987. A Herter cabinet was brought out, somewhat reminiscent of their later, Asian-inspired period, and after furious bidding, it sold for $30,000. A buzz filled the small room. “Did someone just pay $30,000 for a Herter cabinet?” “Did you catch who that was?” Clearly those Herter boys were getting hot again!
Meanwhile, a new piece was on the auction floor, another Herter cabinet, done in their Renaissance Revival style and similar to what one might find at LeGrand Lockwood’s estate. It was smudged with varnish, though Mimi had taken a look before the auction and seen the bright inlay beneath waiting to be uncovered. She waved her paddle at the auctioneer as unobtrusively as she could, for this was the piece she had traveled to Massachusetts to buy. “I snuck my paddle up while everyone was talking, and I got it for $5,000,” she recalls. “I should have paid $20,000 for it, and I couldn’t, because I didn’t have deep pockets.”
After extensive restoration work, including removing the varnish with a Q-Tip and replacing a missing brass cabinet mount by cloning its twin on the other side of the piece, Mimi had a bravura example of Gilded Age grandeur on her hands, a hand-carved rosewood marvel of gold leaf and exotic filigree. She sold it a year later for $50,000.
Mimi still keeps her eye out for Herter pieces. Last year she found a couple of chairs, made for LeGrand Lockwood himself, which she bought for $11,000 and sold to the mansion’s public-trust keepers at cost. They are now back in the house where they rest in glory.
Standing on the corner from across the street it looked like an old workbench. It had been left outside one spring day to await the trash hauler, whoever owned it figuring it wasn’t worth the trouble of carting to the dump. They left it on the sidewalk instead, where it sat for a week, ignored.
A man from New Canaan found himself gazing at it through the window of the office where he worked in downtown Stamford. He is a man with an eye for antiques, a passion he has shared with his wife for forty years. But it wasn’t until a woman in his office asked for help lifting a Victorian chest left beside the “bench” that the man got a closer look. At that moment, somewhere inside him, a bell went off. It wasn’t a bench after all, but a sideboard table, made with oak and care, the intricately inlaid drawers fitted with teardrop pulls. The table legs were carved in a spiral “barley twist” that bestowed added character.
Inside the drawers he found a few nails and screws and some pumice, suggesting it had done time as someone’s basement junk drawer. When you looked past the blue paint spilled over one half of the table surface, the crack on the other side, a missing lockpiece above the center drawer and the gouge in one of the side drawers, it was clear to this self-described treasure hunter that here was something special.
It turned out to be a refractory table dating back to England’s Jacobean period, a period running roughly from when Shakespeare penned his last plays to the English Civil War. A few years ago, an appraiser at Sotheby’s put its value at $7,500. “All I really knew when I brought it home was that it was something we would like,” the man says. “That and the price was right.”
Since he and his wife still have the table at their house, the man prefers anonymity. Let’s call him Deep Drawer. He notes that the table represents something he loves about antiquing, “the potential thrill that you might find something.” Certainly the table is that. He has no plans to sell the piece or even restore. “A lot of the charm is in the wear and tear,” he explains.
It’s not the only remarkable find in his possession. Some twenty years ago, his mother went to an auction at the First Congregational Church in Old Greenwich and picked up a five-piece cruet set with custom-made tray for a total price of $10. “It was at five in the evening, and no one else was bidding,” he recounts.
Knowing that silversmiths customarily left their mark on their works, he checked his well-thumbed edition of The Book of Old Silver and found out that two of the pieces, the pourers, had been made in London in the 1790s by John Bridge, while the tray and the other three pieces had been made by Bridge of London around 1807–1808. The whole set is worth a couple of thousand dollars.
“My wife and I go to tag sales and estate sales all the time looking for a bargain,” he says. “You could say we’re addicted to them. You can never tell where your next find will come from.”
Sticker shock
John Reznikoff pulls the tarpaulin off the car he has parked in a Westport garage, revealing a bone-white 1963 Lincoln Continental. A few years ago, he bought it for $17,500 from the inventory of a defunct establishment in Florida called the Museum of National Tragedy; now he expects to sell it for $1 million.
Though a fine-looking period piece in its own right, what’s tragic about the car is what accounts for the sticker shock. On November 21, 1963, its top down, the Continental glided through the streets of Fort Worth, Texas, while President John F. Kennedy waved to sight-seeing throngs from its backseat. The following morning the car carried him; his wife, Jacqueline; and Governor John Connally to the airport for a short flight on Air Force One to Dallas’s Love Field. With typical macabre whimsy, Reznikoff dubs the vehicle “the last ride Kennedy survived.”
“You can see the upholstery is original,” he says, pointing through the window. “Burgundy leather, and you can see it’s worn. I purposely didn’t touch it. I wanted it to be exactly what he sat on that day.”
A lot else about the car was touched, or retouched, as it were, to the tune of more than $60,000, several times what he paid for it. “It was in rough shape,” he says.
Remarkable find? Reznikoff thinks so. A professional seeker and seller of historical curiosities ranging from hair follicles of the dead and famous to presidential correspondence, the Wilton resident claims a fierce affection for all things Kennedy. He still can’t believe he got the car for what he paid. But the vehicle came with a fuzzy provenance and was priced to go at an auction Reznikoff likened to a cattle call. “I thought it was something good, but I didn’t know how good,” he said. “I thought, If it turns out to be true, great. If not, I rolled the dice.”
Long research followed, including amassing sales slips, car registrations and letters of authentication. Footage Reznikoff found from a 1964 documentary on the assassination, Four Days in November, clearly places Kennedy inside the Continental on the morning of the day he died, as do news photographs.
Reznikoff has been collecting historical items for fun and profit since 1979. His Westport office contains such notable objects as a typewriter used by Hemingway and a wine glass Washington drank from, both of which Reznikoff points out with startlingly offhand casualness. He is often in the news, like last year when an Ohio barber tried to sell him hair clipped from the head of Neil Armstrong.
Fascination with the first Kennedy assassination has hardly abated more than forty years on, and anything that can be firmly connected to it carries value well beyond its original worth.
Reznikoff has marketed his JFK auto aggressively, even putting it on eBay in 2003. Though a seven-figure buyer remains as elusive as that figure on the grassy knoll, Reznikoff is not especially concerned.
“It is a great calling card to have, something that puts me on the map,” he says, running his hand across the car’s shiny hood before putting the tarp back on. “Even the Secret Service was down here once to take a look at it.”
Trapped in the closet
For years it lay in a closet, a painting of a scowling, hirsute man covered in soot and candle grease. Jan and Clare White’s Westport home features plenty of original art, but mostly brighter works that have the additional advantage of being discernible with the naked eye. This piece, Jan recalls, was “sort of dark and bleak.”
It was liberated from its mothball incarceration only when Clare’s mother, the painting’s previous owner, came to visit. Little was known of its origins, except that her mother had gotten it during the 1940s when she lived in Brazil and frequented the country’s wealthiest Catholic social set, where religious iconography was commonly exchanged as presents.
“I thought it was just an oil painting some monk made in a monastery in Brazil,” says Jan, who grew up in a family of painters. A long career as a graphic design consultant further enhanced his eye for fine visual art of all types, but there seemed little to prize in that dingy piece.
In 1995, after Clare’s mother had passed away, Jan and Clare began to wonder about the worth of another painting her mother had given them. They sent a photograph of it to Sotheby’s for a free appraisal, and, as an afterthought, they also sent a photo of the one that had been in the closet.
The first painting was valueless. But the closeted painting turned out to be something else: a work by Masolino da Panicale, who wasn’t Brazilian but rather, Italian and who plied his craft more than half a century before Columbus reached the New World. Masolinos are on display in some of Europe’s finest museums and cathedrals and in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
“I think you can get $50,000 to $75,000 for it,” the appraiser told the Whites.
The appraiser was wrong. When the gavel finally went down after furious bidding, the piece, actually painted with a pre-oil substance made with egg called tempera and by now much cleaned up and restored, fetched $270,000. By then, Jan’s arm was nearly numb from Clare’s constant pinching. “I still have black- and-blue marks there, I’m sure,” he says.
The Whites certainly have something to remember that day by: a tidy nest egg. As a freelancer, Jan no longer has to worry about a pension plan — or the lack thereof. He and Clare now have a full-service endowment plan courtesy of the early Renaissance by way of Brazil. “I don’t know who it was sold to, but after that we settled our bills, sold the two clunkers we had and bought a new car, and put the rest into investments,” Jan says.
He says they never would have thought of keeping the piece once they were informed of its value. “It had no sentimental attachment, except it had belonged to my mother-in-law. By selling it, she posthumously gave us the best thing anyone ever could, a sense of independence.”
I’d be surprisingly good for you
Simon Teakle didn’t know what he was in for when he flew a hemisphere away from his Old Greenwich home in the summer of 1997. “The fax I got just said I would be meeting with a very secretive gentleman who lives outside Buenos Aires, to look at what was called only ‘a very interesting piece,’ and that he knows it will be worth your while,” he recalls.
The unflappable Mr. Teakle didn’t bat an eye. His job then as head of Christie’s jewelry department required frequent travel to distant places. But there was something especially unusual about this errand from the moment he met his mysterious contact. “He was in this room that had this big black table with nothing on it but a piece of white cloth,” Teakle remembers. “I knew immediately whatever was under that cloth was what I was there to see.”
When he finally got a peek at the mysterious guest’s holdings, he saw a sapphire-and-diamond brooch by Van Cleef & Arpels, made with invisible settings to resemble an Argentine flag. Its owner said his father had acquired it years before at an auction, and that it was designed especially for the legendary first lady of Argentina Eva Perón.
The mysterious contact figured on a cool quarter-million dollars for the piece. Teakle wasn’t sure. “In terms of raw, intrinsic value, that was way too much,” he says, noting that national flags are hardly typical evening wear. Still, Teakle knew it was an exciting piece with a unique history. Not wanting to dampen the owner’s spirits, he agreed to terms that seemed possible, even likely. But Teakle suggested they price the brooch more conservatively at auction as a way of drawing more bidders. The man agreed.
Then came the truly amazing part of the story. First, Teakle settled the always-delicate question of provenance while leafing through a tome on Argentine estancias in a San Francisco bookstore, discovering a photograph of Evita with the flag brooch. Then, while showing the piece in South America’s jet-set mecca, Punta del Este in Uruguay, Teakle made the acquaintance of an Argentine celebrity every bit as outsized as the brooch’s original owner: Susana Giménez, a variety-show hostess whose revolving romances have kept gossip writers employed for three decades.
“She looks at the brooch and bursts into tears,” Teakle says. “She said, ‘This is an Argentine national treasure, and it’s my destiny to bring it back for the people.’”
So when it came time for the auction in New York City, there was Susana, camera crew at her side, and a second bidder on the phone. Finally the man on the phone bid $992,500, at which point Susana fled the auction room in tears. Later she confessed her relief to Teakle. Meanwhile, somewhere in the United States, a woman found herself with a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present that works out to about $40,000 for every year of matrimony.
“It was a combination of pure luck, chance and drama,” Teakle concludes. “It just shows you can never put a value on human emotion.