American Antiques: High Prices, Passions
Four decades have passed, but Albert Sack still remembers the late-afternoon phone call that sent him running for the next train to Philadelphia.
A dealer was offering to sell an extremely rare carved mahogany pie crust tea table. When Sack saw it, shivers went up his spine. Standing before him was a perfectly proportioned American masterpiece, created in Philadelphia shortly before the Revolutionary War. The dealer wanted $10,000. Sack bargained him down to $7,000, and wrote a check.
All the way home, he worried. The nation was recovering from a recession and so was his company, Israel Sack, the premier American antique furniture firm founded by his father in 1903. The firm only had $1,500 in the bank. Unless money could be raised quickly, the check would bounce and Sack would lose the table.
The next morning, he called his brother Harold, who had gone into the plastics business. “You want to keep me out of jail?” he asked half-seriously. Harold sent over enough to cover the check.
Israel Sack Inc. eventually sold the table to a collector for $15,000--a handsome profit in the early 1950s. In the early 1980s, a new owner decided to sell the table at auction. Applause broke out when the gavel slammed down. It brought $1 million--the first piece of American furniture to reach that lofty level.
A decade later, the table appeared at auction again. The winning bid: $2.4 million by a private collector. The losing bidder, at $2.3 million, was the firm of Israel Sack.
The table’s almost full-circle journey says much about the money that has poured into antique furniture in the United States, and maybe more about the firm at the pinnacle of the trade, Israel Sack.
More than $12 billion worth of antiques of all kinds is now sold each year in the United States by tens of thousands of dealers and hundreds of auction houses. Much of that business is done by small shops or antique malls or by interior decorators trying to create a special look.
But the very top of the market in American furniture is dominated by collectors and investors who are not faint of heart or thin of wallet. While sales are not in the league of some Impressionist paintings and old masters, which have commanded $50 million or more, they compare more than favorably with furniture and accessory markets around the world. Passion for Colonial American furniture is fueled by multimillionaire collectors, a handful of well connected dealers and auction houses, all scrambling for an increasingly limited pool of merchandise.
“Finding that treasure at that garage sale is a less and less frequent event,” said Allison E. Ledes, editor of the magazine Antiques. “These days, the little old couple sitting on the front porch know what is in their house.”
To understand how far American antiquing has come, there is no better place to be than in New York this week. Dealers, wealthy collectors and museum curators have gathered for auctions, symposiums, exhibitions and one of the most prestigious shows in the nation, the Winter Antiques Show at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, which began Friday. The show’s $500-a-ticket preview party, which benefits the Eastside House Settlement in the South Bronx, is a high point of the New York social season.
Today, Sotheby’s will hold one of the most important auctions of American furniture and accessories in years. Across town, Christie’s will also be auctioning masterpieces next Saturday, including an extremely rare hairy-paw-foot Chippendale tea table that the auction house estimates could bring $900,000.
The Imprint of Sack
And at the heart of it all is Israel Sack, which is holding an exhibition through Feb. 3 of virtually priceless American furniture gathered from museums, private collectors and the reception rooms of the U.S. State Department, which have been furnished in many cases by donations or loans from collectors. Among the pieces at Sack’s exhibition are a pair of New York Chippendale card tables that George Washington gave to the New Jersey judge in whose home he wrote his Farewell Address.
“The line is not even dotted between the Sacks and everybody else,” said William W. Stahl Jr., senior vice president of Sotheby’s. “Every major collection, both public and private, has had their imprint.” One need not look further than Sotheby’s Auction catalog to see what he means. Of 66 pieces of furniture being offered today, 18 were at one time sold by Sack.
An antique can be anything over 100 years old, according to the definition of the U.S. Customs Service, which imposes no import duty on objects of that age. But it is a definition that has little to do with what is on display at Sack’s and Sotheby’s and the armory. These are objects that were made in America and for the most part stayed in America. And the most valuable of them are frequently more than 200 years old.
The finest furniture produced in Colonial America rivaled in quality the best workmanship of Britain and continental Europe, in effect becoming one of the first expressions of American independence.
Ordering the pieces from top cabinetmakers and carvers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore and Newport, R.I., was the way wealthy Colonial families “expressed their station in life,” said Albert Sack. “They didn’t have Cadillac cars. They didn’t have yachts. They expressed it in their homes. If they were wealthy, they had the finest cabinetmakers.”
Craftsmen working in walnut and mahogany produced simple and beautiful tables, secretaries, chairs and a variety of cabinets, some incorporating remarkable carvings. At the same time, interpretations of urban furniture were being turned out in rural areas, often in maple, birch or cherry.
Machine Age Arrives
But the handmade-furniture business fell on hard times with the advent of furniture factories at the dawn of the Industrial Age. The pieces that were once so valuable, so evocative of wealth, were supplanted by a new American obsession with machine-made goods.
It took the U.S. centennial of 1876 to spark interest in Colonial furniture as historical artifacts. Later, collectors began to recognize the pieces were an art form. But it took a Lithuanian immigrant named Israel Sack to promote and capitalize on the new interest.
Sack was a talented cabinetmaker who acquired a quick appreciation for the simplicity, strength and form of early American furniture. He opened his own antique shop near Charles Street and Beacon Hill in Boston in 1903. With an immigrant’s pride, he realized that American history often was written in the grain of many of the finest pieces he bought and sold.
“I immediately got very fond of the real old honest-to-goodness antiques,” Sack once said in an interview. “. . . You have to get attached to American furniture.”
He rapidly built an expertise that made him an arbiter of taste. “I started to deal in the things that belonged to the most important families in America,” he said. “Naturally, I had the most important things and I sold to the most important people. . . . It’s just plain and simple.” One day in 1923, Henry Ford walked into his shop and introduced himself. He had just purchased the Wayside Inn in Sudbury, Mass., and he wanted Sack to fill it with the finest American antiques. Sack obliged, and later sold Ford a highboy (a chest of drawers on legs) that belonged to Mary Ball Washington, George Washington’s mother.
Prices were going up, and Sack was at the center of the market. He moved to New York, and his sons joined him in the business. He played a key role in the redecorating of the White House and the public rooms of the State Department. Museums in Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., the Du Pont Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, obtained much of their collections of American furniture through Sack.
‘Good, Better, Best’
In 1950, three years before he got on the trail of the Philadelphia pie crust tea table, Albert Sack defined the qualities of the best American furniture in a book that became the bible of the trade. He critiqued the early craftsmen and divided their work into categories of “good, better, best.”
“The Sacks as a firm have been a tremendous focus. They have influenced multiple generations of collectors,” said Stahl of Sotheby’s. “. . . It is the only firm of American dealers that when you say the name Sack in London, Paris or Rome, it is immediately recognized.”
When Sack’s name appears in the provenance of a piece, “you don’t worry about it,” said one top collector of Americana. The Sack imprint means “trust, confidence, integrity,” she said, “a nice backup to your own judgment.”
She, like most other major collectors, prefers not to be named in print or when they bid at auction for security and other reasons. Some buyers are well-known anyway. Barbra Streisand, Bill Cosby and Harrison Ford have all been recent buyers of top pieces.
Israel Sack died in 1959 at the age of 75, and his three sons--Albert, Harold and Robert--formally took over the business. By then, American antique furniture pieces were becoming among the most expensive in the world.
“A Queen Anne table that was several hundred or a thousand dollars in my father’s shop in Boston might be $250,000 now or $300,000,” said Albert Sack, now 80.
The most expensive item in Israel Sack’s current inventory is a rare sofa attributed to the great Massachusetts carver Samuel McIntire, who produced fewer than 10 of the pieces. The asking price: $375,000.
The least expensive item--at $3,800--is a mirror made between 1810 and 1820.
Several items at the Sotheby’s auction are expected to sell for more than $1 million. Among the consignments are some outstanding pieces from the collection of Dearborn industrialist Adolph Henry Meyer, who bought extensively from Sack.
When Albert Sack entered the gallery to view items last week, dealers, curators and collectors crowded around him. By his own estimate, he has examined 100,000 pieces during his more than six decades in the antique business. Other dealers say he is generous with his knowledge, eager to help others fascinated by the heritage of early American craftsmanship.
But their interest wasn’t purely social. As Sack--nattily dressed in gray slacks and a gray houndstooth sports jacket--moved through the gallery, many were trying to discover where he planned to bid.
Sack gave no clues. Top antiques dealers have the detective skills of Sam Spade and the poker faces of Mississippi riverboat gamblers. Sack is no exception. His firm also is no stranger to high-stakes auctions.
Harold Sack set a record for American furniture on June 3, 1989, when he paid, on behalf of a private collector, $12.1 million at Christie’s for a secretary made between 1760 and 1770 by the great Newport, R.I., carver John Goddard. The Sacks will not say who owns the piece.
For its auction today, Sotheby’s put its best ball-and-claw furniture foot forward, arranging several of the most prestigious pieces at the head of a heavily trafficked aisle in its showroom.
Under the Spotlights
One of the pieces from the Meyer collection--a Queen Anne-style block-and-shell carved mahogany kneehole desk, attributed to the master Rhode Island carver Edmund Townsend--stood behind a brown velvet rope atop a small platform that was illuminated by spotlights. The desk is unique because its original finish has been preserved. Sack checked the desk’s condition, opening a drawer and closing it. He carried a large flashlight--like many of the other dealers--to help him examine the interior wood.
Nearby stood a Chippendale mahogany armchair carved in Philadelphia in 1770. Israel Sack had sold it to the Meyers. Part of the upholstery was deliberately torn away to reveal its wooden frame for inspection. Like the desk, it is a masterpiece. The mate to the armchair is in the White House.
A man came up to Sack while he was looking at a highboy, which Sack noticed had a tiny restoration. “There is a lot of stuff here that has passed through your hands,” he said.
“My father and the Meyers were like family,” Sack replied.
As he chatted, Sack looked around the room. “Incredible quality,” he said softly. “There hasn’t been a collection like it. I lived with those things.”
“The thing I developed from my father was the passion . . . the thrill for me is realizing I can look at a piece of furniture and go back two or three centuries and know that it’s real,” Sack said. “It’s the thrill of recognizing a masterpiece from a mass of mediocre material. To me, great art is inspirational, maybe it is God-given.”