Bidding Fever

Learning about auctions at New College of Florida.

By Carol Tisch

So there we were at Charles and Edith Ringling’s marble mansion, a beautiful structure, and hallmark of the New College campus. The bayfront lawn was decked out with tents for Sunday’s fifth annual Exceptional Florida Estate Auction, a production managed by Bruce Crissy, local antiques dealer. New College gets a percentage of the gross, Bruce says, and there’s a formula that adds on more.

The Charles Ringling mansion.

The day was glorious, the view of Longboat Key spectacular, and if you peered to the south, you could see Cà d’Zan, the home of Charles’ brother, John Ringling, just a stone’s throw away. A lot of the pieces auctioned off were English (style), not as pedigreed as the furniture the Ringlings bought for this home in 1926 (their antiques were built by Hepplewhite and Sheraton themselves and hand-picked by decorators from Marshall Field).

Circus art was big at the auction.

But the dark wood pieces gathered from estates across the country looked great against all that pink marble and the home’s English architecture. Crissy and William A. Smith, the auction house from New Hampshire responsible for putting on the show every year, are aware that the grand setting makes the stuff all the more desirable for auction rookies, like me. But not so for the dealers, who came out in full force this year. I’ve watched them before, and it’s amazing.

Dealers at an antiques auction are a lot like high-stakes poker players. They have no “tells.” In fact, they’re so laid-back, it’s hard to tell who they are. They never get emotionally involved with a piece (or hardly ever). They review the catalogue, set prices, and when an item is bid out of their budget (which has been strategically calculated to include a predetermined profit margin), they walk away. Ho-hum, on to the next piece.

I, on the other hand, have been cursing myself all year for not buying the grandfather clock I wanted in last year’s Exceptional Auction and the clocks in the auction the year before. And the jewelry, the paintings. Good stuff that goes really cheap is infuriating. So I came prepared. My plan was that when the dealers stopped bidding, I would go head to head with the rookies, but only 10 percent over the last dealer bid.

Who knows if my plan was smart or totally stupid? I know I got my c.1790 English clock for the same price as a new middle-of-the-road Howard Miller model would cost me. And this is so much classier— more Ringling-esque.

This grandfather clock has a new home at the Tisches'.

Thankfully, the clock was No. 30 in a catalog of 420 items. And after my trembling subsided, I began to enjoy the show. I watched the Roskamps buy a great American Impressionistic painting by Emile Albert Gruppe for about half what it was worth, according to the auctioneer. I comforted my friend Jane, a collector, who was positive the dreaded dealers were going to outbid her on a 19^th-century KPM yellow tureen—which she got. And I saw the subjects of one of my Sarasota Magazine articles, former New York antiques shop owners Mario Morghesi and Thomas Purbs Jr., studying a dessert cart adorned with angels. Mario says they didn’t buy it because they collect decorative arts with cupids, nto angels. The experts are single-minded at an auction, that’s for sure.

But the calm turned to frenzy over the auction’s pièce de résistance: a 19^th-century sideboard from the “Ex-Montgomery Ward Collection.” The ebonized and bronze mounted piece with mosaic inset signed (R.F.S.P.V.—the Vatican shop) was expected to go for $190,000 and fetched $290,000 after Crissy announced the discovery that morning of a paper attached to the piece indicating it had belonged to Kaiser Wilhelm.

From the Montgomery Ward collection, a sideboard went for $290,000.

Still, Crissy says there were bargains to be had. “A lot of things sold for much less than we paid,” he said. “Absolute auctions are risky to us but the fairest type of auction for the customer.” I was going to ask him what they paid for my clock, but I don’t want to know. The adoption is official, and it’s mine.

Posted: 4/2/2008 8:46:48 AM | 0 comments

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