Word: gainsboroughs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Gettysburg & Gainsborough. Though Hiram Parke now does little auctioneering himself, he still has a quick eye for the furtive lapel-clutching, pamphlet-waving, nose-pulling signals that can mean a bid. And he has not lost the ability to keep bidding at the fever pitch that he first showed more than 50 years ago in his first auction, when he sold a $20 gold piece for $100. In his galleries the hammer has swung on such fabled items as the fifth and final manuscript of the Gettysburg Address ($54,000), the Bay Psalm Book, first book published...
Waterloo Road (Gainsborough; Eagle Lion), made for British home consumption some four years ago, is just being released in the U.S. A warmly entertaining little picture, it proves that a good director and a sound story can make an unpretentious production gleam with humanity, humor and sharp characterizations. Director Sidney Gilliat has proved this point before (in Green for Danger, The Adventuress, etc.). This time he manages it with the tale of a young couple (John Mills and Joy Shelton) in wartime England...
...cheery studio on London's Tite Street, he worked doggedly at his portraits, muttering behind his easel when things didn't work out the way he wanted, "Gainsborough would have done it! ... Gainsborough would have done it." Sometimes he held his sitters' attention by painting his own nose red or pretending to eat his cigar...
...first six years after acquiring the Raeburn, Huntington spent $6,000,000. By his death in 1927, he had assembled the finest collection of 18th Century British portraits in the U.S. (among them: Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy). And his purchases of 100,000 rare books and 1,000,000 precious manuscripts made him, in Bibliophile A.S.W. Rosenbach's judgment, "without doubt the greatest collector of books the world has ever known." In the judgment of Englishmen who hated to see their treasures taken off, he was one of history's colossal despoilers...
Christie's first paintings brought absurdly low prices. At his first picture auction, a Holbein went for ?3 18s. and a Titian for two guineas. But Christie's friends, Painters Reynolds and Gainsborough, taught him the value of "stained rags"; Christie's descendants and their successors (the last Christie in the firm died in 1889) have never forgotten the lessons. Paintings now comprise the bulk of their sales. In 1876 Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire was auctioned for 10,000 guineas, then a record price. For almost a century each successive Christie sale was described...