Rare English Regency Hawksbill and Greenback Tortoiseshell Tea Caddy with ivory and pewter stringing, having cut corners and a bowed front panel with pressed tortoise in concentric ovals with fan corners and central inlaid silver oval with leafage border; the bowed lid surmounted by a ball finial and the whole raised on ball feet. Circa 1800-15. (Key). Height, 6”; Length, 8”; Depth, 4.75.”

#573 English octagonal ivory tea caddy with fluted ivory panels with tortoise shell stringing and banding, having a pyramidal lid with silver finial opening to a lidded compartment. Circa 1790. Height, 5”; Length, 4.25”; Depth, 3.25.”

**Regarding the Sale of Items Incorporating Materials from Endangered Species: An export license issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will be required for the export of this pre-CITES item from the U.S. Studio Antiques will not ship this item outside of the USA without proper paperwork, which is the buyer's responsibility.

French Boulle Style Tea Caddy, rectangular with cut-corners and slightly domed lid with all sides and two interior lids extensively inlaid with engraved brass and red and black colored lacquer simulating tortoise-shell in the 17th century manner. Circa 1850.

Provenance: The Cockrell Collection. (Key). (See our #555 for a related example with blue lacquer ground.) See Clark & O’Kelly, p. 109-10 for related boxes. Height, 4.5”; Length, 8.75”; Depth, 4.5.”

#530 Antique Anglo-Indian Tea Chest, sandalwood overlaid with strips of elk horn. The box is rectangular with sloped sides. The elk horn on the top of the stepped, sloping lid arranged in a starburst pattern. The fitted interior is decorated with incised ivory panels, highlighted with lac, a similarly decorated pair of removable caddies and a circular cut crystal sugar bowl and a horn caddy spoon. (The squashed ball feet are later replacements. Lid lack support). Valtair, Vizagapatam, possibly by Chinniah, ca. 1840-50. See: Furniture from British India and Ceylon by Amin Jaffer, #61 for a similar workbox. Exhibited: The 48th Washington Antiques Show, “Inside and Outside the Box.” Height, 9”; Width, 14.75”; Depth, 8.5”.

Johannes Marinus Ten Kate (Dutch, 1859-1896)

Working the Field

Oil on canvas. signed lower right

Painting17" x 24 3/4"
Frame: 28" x 35 1/4"

Ten Kate was known for his landscapes, beach scenes and genre paintings. Born in Amsterdam, he was the son of Johannes Mari ten Kate, under whom he most likely studied. He lived and worked in the Hague and was a member of the Hague Artists’ Society and the Pulchri Studio (latin:"for the study of beauty"), a Dutch art society, art institution and art studio based in the Hague. The countryside around the coastal town of the Hague provided a rural environment and an unspoiled landscape which attracted many young artists of the nineteenth century eager to escape the strictures of academic art guilds.

Exceptional George III Serpentine Chest of Drawers or Commode in the French Manner having a moulded edge serpentine top with overhanging sides above two over three conforming drawers, rounded front corners and bold bracket feet. The drawer sides and bottoms are mahogany which is unusual since it was the most expensive wood during the 18th Century. Brass pulls may be original, escutcheons replaced.

English, Circa 1760.

Top: 42" wide
Case: 37" wide
Height: 37"
Depth: 23"

LATE GEORGE III W.&T.M. BARDIN 18-INCH TERRESTRIAL GLOBE ON STAND 
additions to 1807, dedicated to Sir Joseph Banks, the globe in etched brass frame resting on a corona with months and zodiac on turned support with tapering downswept legs with brass casters

Dimensions: Height: 41 in. (104.1 cm.), Diameter: 24 in. (61 cm.)

This terrestrial globe is supported on a wooden tri-pod pedestal, surrounded by a wooden horizon circle, and it is equipped with a brass meridian . The cartouche in the Pacific Ocean displays a seated female figure of Britannia, a seated woman holding an astronomical quadrant, and a small portrait of Joseph Banks. The text below reads: “To the Rt Honorable / SIR JOSEPH BANKS, BART K. B. / This New British Terrestrial Globe / containing all the latest Discoveries and Communications, from the most / correct and authentic Observations and surveys, to the year 1798 / by Captn Cook and more recent Navigators, Engraved on / an accurate Drawing by Mr Arrowsmith Geographer / Is respectfully dedicated / by his most obedient hble servants / W. & T. M. Bardin / 230” A text below reads: “Manufactured & Sold Wholesale & Retail by W. & T. M. BARDIN / 16 Salisbury Square Fleet Street London”

William Bardin (fl. 1730-1798) was a London artisan who began making globes around 1780. Ten years later, now partnership with his son, Thomas Marriott Bardin (1768-1819), he began trading as W. & T. M. Bardin. The 18-inch globes, their most ambitious, were introduced in 1798, and remained in production, by successor firms, for a half century.

Similar globe is in the collection of National Museum of American History

William Aiken Walker (American, b. c.1838-1921)

Man in a Cottonfield

Oil on board, signed lower left.

$16,500. Painting Size: 8.25” x 4.25”
Frame Size: 12.5” x 8.5”

A lifelong artist, Walker exhibited his first painting at the age of twelve and continued to paint until his death 71 years later.

In the 1860’s Walker traveled to Dusseldorf for artistic training and remained for several years. Returning to Charleston, he joined the Confederate Army and served as a cartographer. At the conclusion of the war, Walker moved to Baltimore where he had spent a portion of his childhood. Until 1876, Walker split his residence between Charleston and Baltimore. However, on a visit to New Orleans in that year, he fell in love with the city and spent the next 29 years, calling it home.

Best known for his genre scenes of African Americans in the post Civil War South, Walker is listed in numerous references including Who Was Who in American Art by Falk and Art Across America by Gerdts. He has also been the subject of several monographs.

William Aiken Walker was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on March 11, 1839. He had an artistic bent at a very early age; he exhibited his first oil painting at the South Carolina Institute in 1850 when he was 11 years old. The first known still life by Walker was produced in 1858. Animal and fish portraits followed, along with a few portraits and landscapes.

During the Civil War, Walker served as a private in Charleston's Palmetto Regiment of the South Carolina Volunteers. He was given a medical discharge in August 1861. He continued to serve as a volunteer draftsman in the Confederate Engineers Corps.

When Charleston was decimated in a great fire in 1861, Walker recorded the resultant ruins. In 1863 Charleston was shelled by Union troops; Walker recorded that event too.

In 1864 Walker created perhaps the most collectible of all decks of American playing cards. Sixteen of the cards carried miniature paintings, ranging from the bombardment of Fort Sumter to portraits of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Stonewall Jackson as kings.

What Walker did between 1866 and 1868 remains a mystery, but by the latter year he had settled in Baltimore. He visited New York and Cuba but was back in Baltimore by 1871, when he began the series of paintings that would capture the attention of present-day collectors.

Walker's Gathering Herbs, 1871, depicted an African-American woman at the herb garden, a basket in her arms, and another on her head. The depictions of what would be later known as "The Sunny South" had commenced. Although he painted scenes depicting Anglo-Saxon citizens and landscapes, it would be the African-American scenes that would come to be recognized as Walker's seminal body of work.

He traveled extensively in the South, from South Carolina to the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, to Florida, to New Orleans, and wherever he traveled, he painted. The focus of his energy from the early 1880's to the mid-1890's was the cotton trade. Walker was fortunate in many ways, not the least of which is the fact that his paintings were collected and sold during his lifetime. Major paintings sold in the $70 to $100 range while he still was alive.

By the time Walker had reached his sixties, he returned to landscapes and still life subjects, though his bread-and-butter work was still the genre scenes of the Old South. Walker died on January 3, 1921, just two months shy of his 82nd birthday.

James Pollard (British 1792-1867)

The London to Oxford Coaches at Mile Marker 24

Oil-on-canvas, signed lower right

Painting: 17” x 32”
Frame: 23 ½” x 38 1/4”

Pollard was an engraver and sporting artist noted for his coaching, fox hunting and equine scenes. As the son of Robert Pollard, a painter, engraver and publisher, James was encouraged to become a painter of horses. He was also tutored by his father’s friend, the engraver Thomas Bewick. Growing up in Islington, Pollard lived on a main coaching route which undoubtedly influenced his choice of coaching scenes as his primary subject matter. In 1821 he exhibited a large work at the Royal Academy “North Country Mails at the Peacock, Islington” and by 1825 he was successful enough to leave his father, marry and set up his own studio. He prospered with numerous commissions. With the demise of the mail coaches in the 1840‘s, Pollard expanded his subject matter to include racing, hunting, shooting and angling scenes. Pollard is also known to have collaborated with John Frederick Herring Senior on several racing pictures in which he painted the backgrounds and crowd scenes and Herring painted the horses.

Pollard exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1821-1839, the British Institution in 1824 and 1844, and at the Suffolk Street Galleries. Many of his works were reproduced in prints which were engraved by himself, his father and others.

Pollard’s work is noted for its historical accuracy, attention to detail and in evoking the spirit of the coaching age.

Sources:
Mitchell, Sally. The Dictionary of Equestrian Artists
Wingfield, Mary Anne. A Dictionary of Sporting Artists, 1650-1990
Wood, Christopher. Dictionary of British Art. Vol. IV, Victorian Painters

Adam Emory Albright (American 1862-1957 )

The Valley

Oil-on-canvas, signed lower right and dated 1916

Exhibited: The Art Institute of Chicago, "Pictures of Children Painted in South America and Southern California by Adam Emory Albright, 1920, #29”

Painting: 24” x 30”
Frame: 30 ½” x 36 ½”

Albright, born in Wisconsin, was, according to William Gerdts (Art Across America, Vol. 2), “The finest Paris trained figure painter to emerge immediately before the World’s Columbian Exposition.” He was one of the first students at the newly established Art Institute of Chicago from 1881-1883. From 1883-1886, he studied with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After some training in Munich with fellow Wisconsin artist, Carl Marr, Albright studied in Paris with Benjamin Constant.

In 1888, Albright established his studio in Chicago and became president of the Chicago Watercolor Club as well as a member of the Chicago Academy of Design.

Early in his career, he chose to focus on paintings of children for which he became famous. At first specializing in street urchins and rustic children in outdoor settings, his work became more colorful and sun-filled following his greater exposure to impressionism at the Columbian Exposition.

The birth of Albright’s twin sons in 1897 gave him new models and his subsequent work featured the growing boys posed in rural surroundings. From 1908, many of his finest works were painted during summers at the art colony in Brown County, Indiana.

Albright’s popularity is reflected in his numerous exhibitions and in the extensive contemporary literature about him. Again according to Gerdts, “No other Chicago artist’s work was so widely exhibited at the Art Institute . . .”

Rare American Federal tea caddy in nicely figured mahogany with three sides and stepped lid inlaid with banding and corner fan decoration; rectangular, with shaped skirt and French bracket feet and divided interior. Probably 1800. Provenance: The Cockrell Collection. See Montgomery, American Furniture, The Federal Period, #436-439 for other examples. Height, 9.25”; Length, 12”; Width, 6.5.”

Rare Chester County Pennsylvania Spice Chest in walnut having a moulded cornice above a raised panel door opening to an arrangement of ten small drawers (one replaced) and raised on straight bracket feet. Secondary woods include: poplar, oak, walnut and beech. There is a faint inscription on one of the bottom drawers. Pennsylvania, circa 1760-80.

Spice boxes or chests were a status symbol in colonial America. Only a household that was well furnished and fairly prosperous had a spice box. Spice chests were popular among the Quakers of the Delaware Valley during the late seventeenth and throughout the eighteenth centuries, remaining fashionable in Pennsylvania long after falling out of style elsewhere. The boxes, fitted in the interior with banks of small drawers, were often displayed in the public rooms (not the kitchens) of homes, functioning as both a repository for small valuables, such as spices and silver and jewelry items, and as a symbol of the family’s prosperity.

18"W x 9.75"D x 22" tall

Harriette F A Sutcliffe (British, fl.1881 - 1922)

Beauty and the Beast

Oil on canvas, signed with monogram and titled on the reverse

Exhibited: The Royal Academy, 1899

Miss Suitcliff was a Hampstead painter of genre and portraits who exhibited at the royal academy from 1881-1899 and elsewhere.

Source:

Christopher Wood, The Dictionary of Victorian Painters

Painting Size: 16" x 20" Frame Size: 24" x 28"

American School, Early 19th Century

Carib Indians Around a Jungle Campfire, with a Piton in the Background

Oil on canvas, signed indistinctly on the stretcher. Mid 19th century carved wood, compo and gilt frame

Painting Size: 9.25” x 12”
Frame Size: 13.5” x 16.5”

Ebenezer Colls (British , 1812-1887)

"The Old Ship Victory off Southampton Water"

Signed lower left and titled on an old label on the reverse.

Painting: 26" x 17.25"
Frame size: 32" x 23"

Colls was a painter of shipping and coastal scenes who lived in Camden Town, London and exhibited at the British Institution from 1852-4. The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has a pair of his paintings. Denys Brook-Hart (see below) comments "Ebenezer Colls' pictures are quite rare although some paintings which are not his are sometimes attributed to him."

HMS Victory is a 104-gun first-rate ship of the line of the Royal Navy, laid down in 1759 and launched in 1765. She is most famous as Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. After 1824 she served as a harbor ship. In 1922 she was moved to a dry dock at Portsmouth, England, and preserved as a museum ship.

Sources:
Archibald, E.H.H. "Dictionary of Sea Painters"
Brook-Hart, Denys. "British 19th Century Marine Painting"
Wood, Christopher. "Dictionary of British Art. Vol. IV, Victorian Painters"

Edmond Darch Lewis (American, 1835-1910)

Schooner off the Atlantic Coast

Watercolor on paper, signed lower left and dated “1896”

Sight Size:13" x 26"
Frame Size: 23.25" x 36"

Lewis was born and died and Philadelphia where he studied with Paul Weber from about 1850-55. According to Peter Falk ("Who Was Who in American Art"), “he was one of the most popular landscape painters of Philadelphia during the late 19th century. His early works were chiefly scenes of the Lehigh, Susquehana, and Wissihickon Rivers of Pennsylvania, and were in great demand. Before 1860 he also exhibited landscapes of New York and New England and even some Cuban scenes. By the mid 1870’s he turned increasingly to shoreline views with yachting scenes, painting prolifically in watercolor from Cape May, NJ to Narragansett, RI. Wealthy and admired, he entertained in a grand style in his opulent Philadelphia home surrounded by an extensive collection of antique furniture, china and decorative arts.”

Impressive large-scale Black Forest carved armchair in walnut with all over carved decoration of bark, branches, leaves and berries. Swiss. Circa 1870-1880. * Provenance: Anniee McCarthy, Newport, RI and NYC (label). Minor loss to tips of leaves on crestrail, caned seat was once over upholstered.

*See “History of Black Forest Furniture”

Height: 39.5”
Width: 25”
Depth: 24”

Henry Perlee Parker (1795-1873)

“On the qui vive” (The Smuggler)

Oil on canvas , titled, signed and dated on the reverse

"QUI VIVE" (A French phrase meaning long live who? (a sentry’s challenge), used to mean a state of alertness or watchfulness.)

Painting: 30" x 25"
Frame: 36.5" x 31.5"

One of the best-known painters working in north-east England during the early nineteenth century Henry Perlee Parker specialized in pictures of marine subjects and smugglers and came to be known as "Smuggler" Parker. He was a leading artist in Newcastle in the 1820s and 1830s, a member of the Northumberland Institution, and a co-founder (with T.M. Richardson) of the ill-fated Northern Academy of Arts. He died penniless in Shepherd's Bush in 1873. There was an exhibition of his work at the Laing Art Gallery, 1969-1970.

See Wiikpedia entry for a more complete biography