Doheny Auction a Rousing Success for L.A. Catholics
A four-day auction this week of items from one of California’s most extensive private book and art collections has yielded the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles more than $5 million for the recruitment and education of priests.
The auction, which concluded Thursday at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, netted the archdiocese’s three seminaries $5,347,010--almost twice the amount that had been anticipated by officials of Christie’s, the London-based auction house directing the event.
“We’re delighted with the sale,” said Missy McHugh, a Christie’s vice president. “Initially, there was some feeling we should hold it in New York. We weren’t sure enough interest would be generated, especially among European clients, if it were outside the normal market.”
The auction was the third in a series of sales disbursing the collection assembled over more than three decades by Estelle Doheny, the widow of Los Angeles oilman Edward Laurence Doheny. The Doheny collection’s most valued piece, a Gutenberg Bible, was purchased by a Japanese rare book dealer last October for $5.39 million--a sum greater than had ever been spent on any book.
Prize pieces on the block this week included an unpublished manuscript by Mark Twain, an eight-page fragment of a Gutenberg Bible, the world’s first known printed volume, landscapes by the 19th-Century French painter Jean Baptiste Camille Corot and a tapestry that had served as a backdrop for the coronation of Napoleon’s brother as King of Naples.
The entire collection, which has been housed at St. John’s since Mrs. Doheny donated it to the archdiocese in 1940, has brought in $29.3 million so far, and additional books and manuscripts are to be sold in New York later this year and in 1989. Interest on the endowment will finance seminary training in the 285-parish archdiocese, which last year ordained just seven priests.
Whether this week’s extraordinarily high prices will drive up the values of similar items in other collections “won’t be known until we assess its impact in the quiet of the next few weeks,” said Hillary A. Holland, another Christie’s vice president. But she and other art collectors and dealers acknowledged that the prices could have been high simply because many of the collection’s pieces had been kept off the market and in the respected collection for more than four decades.
“It’s the Doheny name,” said Kamran Hekmat, a Bel-Air investor who successfully bid $66,000 for the Dohenys’ own custom-designed Steinway grand piano.
The piano, with its keyboard flanked by busts of Edward L. Doheny Jr. and a lid painted with a likeness of Mrs. Doheny strolling in front of her Los Angeles mansion, had been expected to sell for no more than $50,000.
