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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Huron Expositor, 1938-12-09, Page 6S ,ys lar that: IP Ra,JR E IR • ., Fp G.rtfl.V .r; tJt;. elt�'.v ua 1 Iuggeitiofls For Him: Stationery Fifty Sheets of Note Paper and 50 matching envelopes printed with initials, make a splendid gift for anyone: And what could be more useful? Wide range of papers and type styles from which to choose. As low as.. .$1,255 Business Cards Every man requires Business Cards. Neatly printed with his name, address and business.. In boxes of 50.... $1.25 ASK FOR PRICES ON LARGER QUANTITIES * Memo Pads Guard against Dad or Brother forgetting the errands you tell them to do. Give them individual Memos, print- ed with their name and address. Pocket size. In pads ° of 50 5 Pads for $1.25 For Her : * Stationery Fifty Sheets of Note Paper and 50 matching envelopes printed with initials make a splendid gift for anyone. And what could be more useful? Wide range of papers and type styles from which to choose. As low as $1.25 Book Plates Something different for your book -loving friend. A var- iety of designs' .and type styles. Any quantity or color of paper. Per 100 - $1.75 * Bridge Scores What more appropriate gift could you give the bridge fiend on your list than bridge scores with their name on each sheet? Popular colors to choose from, padded in 25's. Per 100 Sheets. ... $1.50 Per 500 Sheets.:. $2,75 * Calling Cards Mother or Sister would like nothing better than some Calling Cards. Nicely boxed. Many type stylesPer box of 50 $1.25 ✓1, !1' ✓1.: i ; i , 1r ✓l /-4, rj. rl 1 1 1, 1 vj. ; , ✓ ,�j -1 r.t -1. r1 Santa Suggests : A Christmas Present that will live throughout the year— A Subscription to The Huron Expositor Only $1:50 IN CANADA • Write or Phone us and we will forward, a few days •before Christmas, a card announcing the Gift Subscription. Ask about our Special Rates on two or more gift subscriptions. is . 1 r-4 1 -4 ala ,t r1 y1 ✓L w.i 1 r1r 1; ORDER EARLY Beautiful ristmas Cards • DON'T forget that vow of last year to select your Christmas ' Cards early this year, so that you might avoid the last-minute rush. . . . Our lines of Beautiful Christmas Cards are now on display, and if we do suit ourselves, we believe them to be the best and most economical selection we have ever offered. w 2 Printed withyour and Address for 1.00 00 OTHER CARDS AT PROPORTIONATELY LOW PRICES Huron Expositor SEAPORTH Hearst s Treasure House Eight months have passed since it was announced that William Randolph Hearst, to forestall: inthemitlance tax- es, would disperse most of his. accum- ulation of assorted antiques and art. object's, 'says A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker. Curiosity impelled me the &iter day to call on Mr. Macder•- mid ParisieWatson, ,the titular chief. disperser, to ask him ..'how the sale was 'progressing. ' Mi'. -Pain sh-Wafison is a well -tailored, pink -faced, authori- tative little man, Who in ordinary times deals in Oriental, art at 44 East Fifty-seventh Street. His clerks still sell an occasional Ting ,bowl or a set of Mug'.ral miniatures in the street- floar shop, but Parish -Watson him- self is concentrating on the sale of Hearst things, at a commission) which colleagues in the trade enviously and, variously guests at. In Parish -Wat- son's office on the third floor — the second story is rented to a dealer in Americana—the ,dull glazed celradlon vases which custom,arddy surrounded hems have given way to a sales -stimu- lating assortment .of samples from the, Hearst • hoard. The assortment includes two lemall portraits by Palma Vecchio and CGlouet, a good-sized four- teenth -century primitive on wood, the silver maee of the town of Boston in Lincolnsthd.re, and what Parish-Wat- sons affirms to be "one of ,the most famous Chippendale commode -Si in the world, worth. at least $25,000." The dealer is still trying to famil- iarize 'hin self with the extent of Mr. Hearst's possessions. He gets several surprises a day. ,The sheer bulk of the accumulation would fill two ,,or three museums, title the Metropolitan, and it is stored inn. repositories scat- tered from St. Donat's Castle in Wales to Wyth'toon and San Simleem, the great Hearst monuments to flernisoy- ence in California. Besides the ma- terial distrdbuted among half a dozen Hearst residences, there . are enough Hearst antiques to 'fill five warehous- es in California and one in the Bronx and there is a considerable overflow 'of artifacts, in rented vaults Although it may not be the best, repertoire of ebj.ects of art ever gathered by once American, the Hearst collection. is conceded to be the biggest. Parish - Watson himself, for example, had long been looking for a particular 1-intd of Colonial weathervane for his house at Fairfield. He found just what he wanted in the Hearst Bronx w a rehouse. A smattering of Mr. Heanat's Geor- gian and Early Amentean silver as been sold to John D. Rockefeller, Jr:, for ddspl•ty in the Governor's Palace at Williasmtsburg—for $110,000, Parish Watson saddle -and several famous Gothic tapestries, have been bought by Sir William Burrell, a British ship- ping milll'aonaiee, for "six , figures." (Hearst bought one sect of six tape- stries from Sir Joseph Duveen, now Baron Duveen, in 1921 for $575,000 and another of four for $400,000). There thieve been many :lesser sales to purchasers Wham the dealer didn't feel at liberty to mention. He has been Scutes 'single objects and small lots every day. Mast ,purchasers nowadays are sensitive to publicity, tearing reactions from, their- el:000Y- ees or shareholders!. Trying to pin Parish -Watson down, I asked him i f he -thought ane per cent of , the col- lection Chad as yet been marketed. He pondered a while and then said, "db, yes, fully one per cent." With the possible exception of Mr. Hearst him- self, nobody knows the total amount of his investment in antique art. The executives highest in his present or- ganization were unborn 57 years ago, when he began collecting. Fifty eel - lion dollars is a papular guess among art, dealers, 1Jet it might be fifteen million out of the way in either di- rection. Parish -Watson, when I saw him, had just got back from a three-month stay in England, partly* spent in in- specting Hearst's possessions there, partly in selling objects that would bring more in London than in the New York 'market. The 'happiest in- cident of the trip, he felt, was the sale of two nineteenth century Ger- man paintings of a Tyroliran dance. This is a type of genre 'painting long out 'of favor ,here, but Mr. Hearst knows what he likes, to use a con- ventional phrase, and had not bought the pictures with a view to resale. A Louden dealer got them from Parish - Watson for a good price—probably, Parish-Wattson thought, for the ac- count of Field Marshal Goring. He said, "It just goes to show that there's a market for everything if you can only find it." The dealer has never seen most of the Hearst thongs he is in, the process of selling, and a good third of the ob- jects have never been seen' by Mr. Hearst himself, except in photographs. A diminutive English leather euitcase filled with pictures has become as muoh a part of Parish-Wlatston's street costume as his cane, bowler hat and spats., He is a drummer in Gothic mantelpieces, a commis voyageur. in Flemish tapestries of the sixteenth century. The ousttomers buy on ap- proval from photographs), No large art coltlectiron' in the world, probably, is once hundred per cent authentic, but Parish Watson says that almost all of the thongs Mr. Hearsti bought are what Alley were purported to be. This, of course, does not mean, tlhnt all the things will bring what Mr. Hearst paid' for them. "When you're Oa the hook, yeti have to get off it," art deafen; sometimes slay with a cold disregard of aesthetic Spiritt, Event when Parish -Watson bas ar- ranged) a, deal, he occasionally encoun- ters ncountars difficultless. He must obttains,•,a- final release from Mr. Hearst through Mr. Thomas Justin 'Whine, chairman of the board of American Nevas•pa- 'rers, Inc.,'wthep igehe Publisher's pro- oonsul in the • East,. Until ttiteree months ago, a comrhittee of flee, iu 61'11.11* one Of Hearst's swans, 'Metl.to Paige on all offers', butt Met wens fund tiliVfr ly. While Mr. White sbmet xis f g les nt NNeese 1 tr,. Heltrgt A r;ofli tte pain et. parting *141% lin .p tdOte 'h'.., . a:c- Ira quttessoed in the liquidation of his artifacts as well as this real estate and. radio statons. But this reaction to any particular proposition is 'like- ly to be, "Not that mae, for God's sakes!" Parlsth-Watson and White sometimes, , feel Jtilce ' a !team of sur- geons with an nnnaessthetized patient. Theoretically, all of the objeetsr. Mr. Hearst owns were completely record- ed in the files of his art -holding sub- sidiary, the International Studio Art Corporation, et 387 Southern Boule- vard, the Bronx, even before the liqui- dation began. Each record included a photograph, measurements, date and source of 'acquisition, price, and remarks, as twetll as a nitration of de- livery to some residence or ware- house. But the publisher's appetite for ownership had outstripped the re- corders by several thousand items. The files are being brought up to date now. The complete photogra- phic inventory will comprtise about two hundred and fifty volumes. Par- ishrWhatson had thirty-one volumes at his office on the day of my call. Of these, eleven were devoted to furni- ture and four to .panelled roams: Mr. Hearst owns fifty of • the latter, in- cluding a suite of sit from Hamilton Castle. I asked to Hook at a few vol- umes and a clerk led me through a doorway into the adjoining building. 46 East Fifty-seventh Street, which Maass been rented for an exhibition of selected Hearsttdanta. The clerk plac- ed date volumes upon a carved French Gothic table—a Henry II, he rather thought—and I sat on a William and Mary needllepodmt chair, the costliest seat 1 ever took. Paintings by Twatchman, Melchers, Frederic Bridg- man and. John W. Alexander leaned against the combl fartrhest from me. One of the Alexanders, I noted, was described in the finst volume I open- ed. It shows "the graceful figure of a girl kneeling to the right with her right arm extended toward a+bri'ght green covered' sofa while she gazes at a yellow butterfly." Mr. Hearst possesses a fine •assortment of big, glassy French paintings by men like Genome and Bougureau, featuring large nudes with pink, gelatinous flesh. He also owns at least a hun- dred Madonnas of varied schools; a Van Dyck of the first rank, and sev- eral fine Fragonards•. The vast, amorphous Hearst agglo- meration is more than a collection. It lmcludes five hundred and four categories, any one of which usually suffices for the operations of an ord- inary collector. Among these five hundred and four departments, at least twenty are outstandingly good, and five of them --armor, English fur- niture and silver`, Gothic tapestry and Hispano - Moresque pottery — rank among the finest private collections in. the world. But even in relatively un- dietinguistred departments there are individual fine pieces, as if the pub - Maher had started out to lead the world in everything and then changed his minas. He was still buying things late in 1936, and Parish -Watson's fel- low -dealers along Fifty-seventh Street say that his .withdrawal tram the market has d'epres'sed, it already. He constituted about 25 per cent of the international market for odds and ends. "Where elee would you sell a mum- mified Egyptian dog or a Gallic cel- lar of pure gold?" one dealer asked me r4hetorically when I talked tho him In his shop. "Who else in the world, tell me, would buy two complete Spanish• monasteries?" The picture dealers remember with appreciative regret Mr. Heart's penchant for buy- in4 large paintings out of show win- dows. Auctioneers' sigh gustily at the recollection of his bide, although the story that nobody ever outbid him is apocryphal. Hearst, when he at- tended+ sales personally, would some- times stop and allow a competitory to take a lot at an inordinately step price. 'Phis was to discourage pee p e from bidding him up out of a spirit of fun. Hearst's agents were stiffer bidders than Hearst. Having this In- structions to buy certain catalogue items• at any price, they would bang on no matter what happened. Some- times the great accumulator would telephone to auctioneers during a sale and order them to buy in certain lots for him. He liked to read catalogues in bed, apd it is the auctioneers' the- ory that on the nights when he used the telephone he was catching up on his back reading and had had no time to send a deputy bidder. It oc- oasional.ly, although infrequently, hap- pened that Mr. Hearst got a bargain. Such was a portrait of Abraham Lin- coln by George Wright, which'. pe bid in for $160 in 1921. Henry Kle-,,,r, nn, the dealer, pair Parish -Watson $900 for this a few weeks ago and prompt- ly resold it to the Chicago Art Insti- tute for $1,250. Kleemann considered the profit a slight compensation for his failure to interest Hearst in con- temporary American . painters. The publisher, has never patronized. living painters except for portraits of him- self. As a book collector, he special- ized in , historical-,aasocia lion copies containing the autographs and book- plates of great men. Leafing over the volumes of photo- graphs, a sort of Seams, Roebuck cata- logue of the antique, I noted that Mr. Hearst thad spent at least two .millions on tapestries during the early twen- ties and about half a million, on stain- ed glass, a notably risky form of In- vestment because of the skill of fak- ers. Among the items I' remember are "probably the !incest Gothic bed- stead in existence," "a magnificent in- laid acajou and tulip -wood commodemounted in cuirre d'or, acquired.>.for' $16,400," and forty-seven Colsola1 warming pants. Parish—Watson's sales- men, dignified fellows selieoled chief- ly in ceramics, are continually aston- i•shed by the variety Of. their new stock In trade. A'ereett i 'Walked tri ane morning and inquired about Ear- ly Ateer•lcan lace handkerchiefs. It turned out that Recut ;;had: a bale of. theme A Mato came itnr, ten Minutes as later ,king a1 ent a Stot`tisli Largs, It detrelopied that therre• were it viortil 1e the titans warredh tt ;, , , fn DEIl.+• • MER "9g t93$ PIC BAC ---....� PIPE TOBACCO F012 A MILD COOL SMOKE ;! t.:rifi M1a ��s':Rrt rt Mr. Hearst began acquiring thinrge when he was still a student at Hari yard. Until last March he had sold nothing and given nothing away. Hist longevity has as much to do with: the fantastic range of his possesslone as hare his acquisstivp and retentive instincts. A' characteristic of - the Hearst lholdingu is their 'bulk. A man could collect fifty million dollars.' worth of gems, manuscripts, or even paintings in a couple of rooms., But when he eolleegt. mantelpieces, bal- conies, entire rooms', entire buildiugg acid statuary -of heaiolc size, he soon needs a huge expanse of floor space- The publisher has put a great deal of his antique material into use in hie half-dozen thomes, some of which he has not visited for years, but judging by the amount that remains in stor- age, he must once have contemplat- ed a. whole circuit of additional pal- aces. A minor Hearst executive told me that the upkeep of the warehous- es, including payrolls, amounted to a quarter of a million dollars a year. The reputed size of his aeeumula- tiop, has naturally discouraged profes- sional buyers. It is hard for them to get a good price from a dealer for an ivory -inlaid arquebus at any time, giv- en the ordinary limitations of the ar- quebus market," but when the dealer has reason to expect the imminent appearance in other dealers' shops of a hundred similar arquebuses thetask becomes nearly impossible. Mr. White realizing this, has tried to minimize the amount of stock on. hand. He im- plies mplies that. Mr. Hearst, in response to public demand, has reluctantly con- sentedt to sell a few of his posses- sions. But since rumors of the quan- tity of Hearst art have already ex- ceeded the impressive troth, the Hearst proconsul's efforts are not very successful. In any case, the mystery about the Hearst Bronx waneh.ouse ,bras been. pretty well dis- sipated. The interior does not look like Ali Baba's cave or a wing of the Louvre. Most of the material is packed away in crates', each marked with a legend in black paint, like "Mexican stone yoke," "Two Gothic Larges, chipped," "Early English cut - glass lustres," "Marble top for con- sole table," or "Upper part of bal- cony." Somebody, somewhere, has a floor plan of the place and knows where each object is .stored. The only pieces to be seen are those unpacked for appraisal, after which they will be returned to their containers. A miscellaneous lot of Hearst memor- abilia is also in evidence: the orig- inal drawings for Free Milk Fund posters, big pastels of batching girls by Howard Chandler Christy, a large scale relief map of California in white plaster and dated 1896, a scroll pres- ented to Mr. Hearst by a Better Gov- ernment Club when he was running for Governor of New York, and are oil portrait of Champ Clark. Tile warehouse covers a, whole bl ck and used to be a factory .for air lane wings during the World Var. Mr. Hearst bought the building in 1926 and has visited it four times since, usually staying about an hour and a half. He has seen photographs of most of the things, however, ant/ keeps a pretty complete file of ehem always meas trim when in California in case he feels a sudden need of a Louis XV encoignure to make a guest bedroom seem more cozy, or a set of Irish wine foun.tains,and cisterns for an informal supper. In such an em- ergency he wires East for the piece the wants. As each article bought by Mr. Hearst arrived at the warelbouse, in the days when. the was buying, it was unpacked to see that It was in- tact and as advertised. Then it was repacked in a new crate built on the premises and stacked away for fu- ture reference. The European crates were too rickety for efficient stack- ing. A good many carloads of lum- ber have gone into the warehouse to be made into crates. The Interna- tional Studio Art Corporation has a- bout thirty employees, including a full-time armorer and a squad of cit Marines equipped with quite modern revolvers. The Marines roam through the building turning keys in electric signal devices which ring at the Hobbes Protective Company 'office. If once of the devices fails to ring at the scheduled time, the Holmes peo- ple dash to the warehouse. Nobody has ever tried to steal anything from the Hearst warehouse. There are no machine guns there, but it contains What military men used to call a "park" of archaic artillery, including culverias, demi-culvrerins, basilisks, minions, falconets ,sand cannon royal This battery of anachropisms in- cludes even a petrad, which is a fun- nel -shaped iron vase designed to be filled with gunpowder and hitched to the gate of a beleaguered town. Af- ter lighting a fuse to the petard, the engineer would run. Old-timers around the warehouse have bad a few chuckles since the appraising began. Due furniture ex- pert, spert, they say, valued a French table at a thousand dollars. Later the table was moved to another floor and he appraised it again at nix hundred (Continued on Pagel 7) 9/0t1 Wads* RATESN. .(1 W2 5 NO HIGHER ♦ Quiet WELL CONDUCTED. CONVENIENT, MODERN 100 • RO'OW HOTEL --35 WITH BATH 1MitliE FOR FOLDER TAKE A Oit,t% XE F, RR. ,! ibtibirt tut taillAittl;-4.So rt