Month: September 2017

SOLD! The First Published Account of a Successful Wright Brothers Flight Commands $5,000 at Swann

The cover of the January 1, 1905 issue of Gleanings in Bee Culture, from an early 20th-century group of 14 issues of the specialist magazine.

What you see: The cover of the January 1, 1905 issue of Gleanings in Bee Culture, from an early 20th-century group of 14 issues of the specialist magazine. Swann estimates the group at $1,500 to $2,500.

What is Gleanings in Bee Culture, and why is it important? It is a specialist magazine, founded in 1869 by Amos Ives Root, a god of the beekeeping world. It published the first eyewitness account of a successful airplane flight by the Wright brothers. Root died in 1923, but his magazine still publishes under the name Bee Culture.

Wait, back up. The first published account of a successful Wright Brothers flight was in a beekeeping journal? Yes. Yes, it was.

How did that happen? Root was a fan of technology, and the Wright brothers’ experiments in aviation represented the cutting edge of technology at the turn of the 20th century. Root befriended the brothers, who were fellow Ohioans, and he witnessed a successful flight in September, 1904 at Huffman Prairie in Ohio (he was not present for the first successful flight, which happened on December 17, 1903). Protective of their invention and stung by a badly garbled press account of a previous test, the brothers did not invite any reporters to watch them work. But they were comfortable with Root writing about the first flight for Our Homes, a column he included in Gleanings in Bee Culture. “They probably recognized Root as a kindred spirit, and felt he wouldn’t leak anything they didn’t want leaked,” says Rick Stattler, director of printed and manuscript Americana for Swann.

How skilled an observer was Root? “He was an extremely curious and interested amateur. He did his best to understand the mechanism and asked a bunch of questions,” says Stattler, who adds that Root was 65 at the time of the September 1904 flight. “He understood about five percent of what they said. My impression is he probably understood it better than I’d have been able to.”

How many times did Root write about the flight that he saw? Twice. The first article ran more than three pages and had no illustrations. The second, which appeared two weeks later, was shorter and included a photograph of a Wright plane without its engine. “I suspect they didn’t want him publishing a picture of the full machine,” Stattler says. “I don’t get the impression that his account was instantly recognized as important around the world. Gleanings in Bee Culture had a very small, specialized readership. I get the impression that it was not taken especially seriously.”

How often do these issues of Gleanings in Bee Culture, which contain the first published account of a successful Wright Brothers flight, come up at auction? This offering at Swann is the first. Stattler reports that Sotheby’s offered a group of issues in 1968, but it did not include the columns that describe the flight.

Why offer 14 issues? Why not offer just the ones with the columns that talk about the flight? Stattler explains that the issues come from a home that had several years’ worth of Gleanings in Bee Culture squirreled away.  “I thought it would be interesting to have a few issues from before the columns and after, as context,” he says. Stattler describes the Our Homes column as being an Andy Rooney-style celebration of the quirks of the world, but Root definitely realized he’d seen something world-changing. “He strongly emphasized it. He realized he was privileged to witness an extremely important event, and he recognized that his platform was not the typical for disseminating that information.”

Do you have any favorite passages from the columns? Stattler cited this paragraph from the January 1, 1905 entry:  ‘Imagine a locomotive that has left its track, and is climbing up in the air right toward you—a locomotive without any wheels, we will say, but with white wings instead, we will further say—a locomotive made of aluminum. Well, now, imagine this white locomotive, with wings that spread 20 feet each way, coming right toward you with a tremendous flap of its propellers, and you will have something like what I saw. The younger brother bade me move to one side for fear it might come down suddenly; but I tell you, friends, the sensation that one feels in such a crisis is something hard to describe.’

These issues have never come to auction before, so they’re guaranteed to set a record when they sell. What do you think will happen? “I’ve got interest from clients already,” he says. “It’s such a quirky publication. It will probably go beyond its estimate, but how far beyond, I don’t know.”

How to bid: The group of issues of Gleanings in Bee Culture is lot 42 in the Printed & Manuscript Americana sale at Swann Auction Galleries on September 28, 2017.

How to subscribe to The Hot Bid: Click the trio of dots at the upper right of this page. You can also follow The Hot Bid on Instagram and follow the author on Twitter.

You can follow Swann Auction Galleries on Twitter and Instagram. Bee Culture is on Twitter and Instagram as well. Root Candles, another entity founded by Root that survives to this day, devotes a page on its website to Ames Root and the Wright Brothers. And you can read the full text of all of Root’s writings on the Wright brothers’ flight courtesy of the website for the PBS program NOVA.

Image is courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.

Would you like to hire Sheila Gibson Stoodley for writing or editing work? Click the word “Menu” at the upper right for contact details.

SOLD! M.C. Escher’s Day and Night Fetched $40,000

M. C. Escher's Day and Night, a 1935 print.

Update: The M. C. Escher print of Day and Night sold for $40,000.

What you see: M. C. Escher’s Day and Night, a 1935 print. Swann Galleries estimates it at $20,000 to $30,000.

Who was M.C. Escher? Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist and printmaker who gained fame for his complex, precise, mind-boggling, and delightful images. He captured the imaginations of sages such as Martin Gardner and Douglas Hofstader, author of the classic Gödel, Escher, Bach. In 1922, he took trips to Italy and Spain that forever shaped his visions. In particular, he fell under the spell of the tessellations that decorate Alhambra, the fourteenth-century Moorish palace in Granada, Spain. Surprisingly, Escher took no formal mathematical training. He died in 1972 at the age of 73.

Escher made Day and Night in 1935, at the end of an 11-year period when he produced many of his most iconic images. How does Day and Night build on what came before? “When Escher was traveling in Italy, he did tour-de-force topographical works of landscapes. This is more abstracted. It’s not a straightforward view,” says Todd Weyman, vice president at Swann and director of prints and drawings. “In terms of his printmaking techniques and procedures, it’s classical. He’s academically trained. The linear aspects of his woodcuts are very clear.”

How does Escher achieve the exceptionally fine and subtle gradations that we see in Day and Night? “You have to imagine very, very fine cutting of the wood block by hand,” Weyman says. “He was a technical virtuoso.”

Did he work alone? “Yes,” he says. “He often signed and inscribed his prints with the word ‘eigendruk,’ which means ‘printed by myself.’ He’s saying he’s the printer. He oversaw everything at a time when it was not uncommon for an artist to work with a printer, who would handle the technical aspects.”

We should also stress that Escher did all this without the aid of a computer, which would not have been available to him anyway, and he had to carve the image into the wood block backwards to create the print that we see. “Yes. Everything is printed in reverse,” Weyman says. “You can see not just his artistry but his technical virtuosity in the medium.”

This Day and Night has no edition number. Do we know how many were made? And how often does it appear at auction? Unfortunately, we don’t know how many Day and Night prints Escher made, though other prints of his are editioned. This is the only version that he produced. Weyman says it has appeared at auction 40 times in the last 30 years, but some of those might represent the same print being consigned again. The record for an Escher at auction belongs to a 1940 print of Metamorphosis II that sold at Sotheby’s London in October 2008 for more than $246,000. The record for a print of Day and Night was set at Christie’s London in March 2013 when one sold for almost $57,000.

What else makes Day and Night special? “It has all the aspects of a great Escher that you would want,” Weyman says. “The yin and yang qualities, the way the landscape morphs into an aerial view, and the patches of landscape morph into birds, the parallel landscapes [under] day and night, the technical virtuosity, the imagination at play in this image–it’s all Escher.”

How to bid: M.C. Escher’s Day and Night is lot 618 in Swann Galleries’ 19th & 20th Century Prints and Drawings sale on September 19.

How to subscribe to The Hot Bid: Click the trio of dots at the upper right of this page. You can also follow The Hot Bid on Instagram and follow the author on Twitter.

You can follow Swann Auction Galleries on Twitter and Instagram.

Image is courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.

Would you like to hire Sheila Gibson Stoodley for writing or editing work? Click the word “Menu” at the upper right for contact details.

SOLD! The Original I Dream of Jeannie Prop Bottle Sells for $34,375

The original prop bottle from the NBC sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). It's hand-painted and stands 14 inches tall.

Update: The original I Dream of Jeannie prop bottle sold for $34,375.

What you see: The original prop bottle from the NBC sitcom I Dream of Jeannie (1965-1970). It’s hand-painted and stands 14 inches tall. Julien’s estimates it at $40,000 to $60,000.

How do we know this is the original prop bottle from I Dream of Jeannie? It comes directly to Julien’s from the estate of Gene Nelson, who directed six episodes of the show’s first season, including the pilot, titled The Lady in the Bottle. At some point, Nelson obtained a letter of authenticity from Barbara Eden, who played the title character, Jeannie. Nelson died in 1996. Eden will turn 86 in August.

Did Gene Nelson create the I Dream of Jeannie bottle? Nelson has the strongest claim on its origin story. He was hunting for something that didn’t look like Aladdin’s lamp, spotted a Jim Beam decanter in a liquor store window, snapped it up, and handed it over to the folks in the prop department, who peeled the labels off the glass and decorated it with paint. “There’s something unique in the fact that he saw this,” says Darren Julien, founder and CEO of Julien’s Auctions. “He was scouting around, found the bottle, and had the vision to paint it. He was a good visionary.”

Was it used on the set? Almost certainly, but coming up with a precise photo match is tough, given that the prop bottles were painted to look identical. But according to Julien, the animators would have referenced photos of this bottle when creating the opening credit sequence, and it’s safe to say it was shown in the early episodes that Gene Nelson directed. He left I Dream of Jeannie after repeated clashes with Larry Hagman, who played astronaut Tony Nelson on the show.

How rare is the original I Dream of Jeannie prop bottle? “It’s very rare. We have not handled one before. Not many survive, and nobody back then would have saved anything like that,” says Julien, adding, “It’s the Holy Grail of the series to have. It’s what the show is about. Provenance is king, and it has such a solid history. It’s an iconic piece that’s going to sell for a lot more than our estimate.”

So, does it come with Barbara Eden? No, but it does include the letter of authentication that she wrote for Gene Nelson. The bottle’s interior is also unfurnished and long since emptied of its whiskey. And neither Julien’s nor The Hot Bid is responsible for the I Dream of Jeannie theme song getting stuck in your head.

Damn you! #SorryNotSorry

How to bid: The original I Dream of Jeannie prop bottle is lot 486 in the Property from the Estate of Patrick Swayze and Hollywood Legends 2017 auction on April 28 at Julien’s.

How to subscribe to The Hot Bid: Click the trio of dots at the upper right of this page. You can also follow The Hot Bid on Instagram and follow the author on Twitter.

Julien’s is also on Twitter and Instagram.

Image is courtesy of Julien’s Auctions.

Da DA dadadadada Da DA dadadadada Da DA dadadadadada. BadadaDA!

Would you like to hire Sheila Gibson Stoodley for writing or editing work? Click the word “Menu” at the upper right for contact details.