American Paintings, Furniture & Decorative Arts to be Offered at Doyle on April 18

On Wednesday, April 18 at 10am, Doyle will hold an auction of American Paintings, Furniture & Decorative Arts. The sale showcases 18th and 19th century American furniture and decorative arts, including silver, ceramics, mirrors, folk art, Chinese Export porcelain and rugs.

This auction category is Doyle’s premier venue for 19th and early 20th century American paintings, with the current sale showcasing over 90 examples. Included are Hudson River School landscapes, Western and Regional art, still lifes, portraits, nautical scenes and Folk paintings.

The daughter of a Quaker family with roots in the Shenandoah Valley, Mary Elizabeth Price (1877-1965) is best known for her highly decorative paintings of floral panels, often with metal leaf backgrounds. For much of her adult life, Price lived in a cottage on the banks of the Delaware River and was an active member of the vibrant artists community in Bucks County that also included Daniel Garber and John Folinsbee. The sale offers two works depicting peonies, poppies, hollyhocks and delphiniums; they are exceptional examples, apparently conceived as a diptych (est. $60,000-100,000).

Samuel S. Carr (1837-1908) immigrated to the United States from England in the early 1860s. Although he spent most of his life in Manhattan and Brooklyn, he developed a special feeling for American rural life, particularly the pleasures and anxieties of childhood. In Caught in the Art, from 1885, two truant farm boys are scolded by an older girl on her way to school (est. $10,000-15,000).

In the late 1930s, Roger Medearis (1920-2001) studied under Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Institute and embraced the medium of egg tempera. The current landscape, Milking Time, from 1946, was executed egg tempera on board and incorporates stylized forms and undulating lines reminiscent of his teacher (est. $4,000-6,000).

Other artists represented in the sale include William Michael Harnett, Edward Moran, Thomas Hill, Hermann Herzog, Thomas Worthington Whittredge, George Inness, Edward B. Gay and Johann Berthelsen.

From the Estate of Eleanor Johnson is a circa 1850 three-piece coin silver coffee service and a circa 1845 coin silver monteith, both by Garner & Winchester of Lexington, Kentucky (est. each $5,000-7,000). Due to strife and economic hardship during the last half of the 19th century, silver from the antebellum South is rare, and rarer still is the fact that this silver has descended through seven generations of the same family for which it was made.

Property from the Rhinelander Stewart Family offers furniture, decorative arts and silver, including a Tiffany & Co. sterling silver child’s bowl and stand engraved for William Rhinelander Stewart Jr. with the date 1889 (est. $600-800) and George II sterling silver salver by Denis Langton, London, 1732 (est. $1,000-1,500).

Property of a Long Island Estate features a Chippendale mahogany tilt-top tea table, New York, circa 1770 (est. $1,500-2,500). From a different collection is a circa 1810 inlaid mahogany Pembroke table bearing an inscription indicating it was made in Poughkeepsie, 85 miles up the Hudson (est. $1,500-2,000). Pembroke tables, like this refined example, were very popular in New York in the early 19th century.