Art: Antiques Sideshow

ON A WEDNESDAY in early October last year, the most exceptional piece of 18th-century Philadelphia furniture to be sold in decades — arguably the most exquisite piece of antique American furniture ever to come up for sale — was ready to be bid upon at Christie’s in New York City.

Well-dressed bidders and furniture experts were crowded into Christie’s lofty, brown-walled salesroom at 20 Rockefeller Center as auctioneer John Hays held forth at the podium. Hays’s gavel moved briskly: An Audubon bird engraving sold for $61,000; a carved 19th-century figure of a sailor brought more than $500,000; even a tiny antique wooden whirligig yielded 500 bucks. But watching these early lots was akin to watching Hayden Panettiere give out a cinematography award on Oscar Night, when you’re really just watching to see who wins Best Picture. This auction was all about Lot 94, a.k.a. The Table.

Lot 94, which carried a presale estimate of $2 million to $3 million, was a sort of Holy Grail of Americana. Dubbed the Fisher-Fox Table, it is a so-called piecrust tea table, made of mahogany in exquisitely detailed Chippendale style. Small in stature — just 29 and a half inches high and 31 and a half inches wide — the table features scalloped edges around its tabletop (the “piecrust”), is supported by three gracefully arched legs that end in ball-and-claw feet, and has detailed floral carving on its pedestal, which is crowned by an elegantly etched “canopy” of gadrooned wood. Though it hasn’t been thoroughly cleaned — to the relief of experts — since it was made in the early 1760s, its dark wood glowed, as did its gorgeous carvings of plump acanthus leaves and C-scrolls, though they were topped with a thin film of grime.

To experts, these carvings are what earmark Lot 94 as the work of a mysterious Colonial craftsman known as the Garvan Carver, a man spoken of with a reverence bordering on obsession in the world of Americana-collecting. For the handful of serious buyers of fine American antiques — an eclectic bunch that includes Texas oil billionaire Robert Bass and Bill Cosby — to own a Garvan Carver piece is to reach the pinnacle of collecting. Fewer than a dozen Garvan tea tables as elaborate as the Fisher-Fox example are known to exist, and they almost never come to the market.

Very rich people who love old American tables wait for years for this kind of opportunity. And for the Christie’s regional office in Villanova, which had acquired the rights to sell the piece, the day represented a triumph. Staffers there had genteelly vied for the table with Sotheby’s — which also has a Main Line branch office. Here in Philadelphia, as they do internationally, the two auction houses wage an ongoing contest for Who Gets the Best Stuff — in a discreet and refined way, naturally.

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