NEW YORK—A June 7 auction at Stair Galleries in Hudson, N.Y., of furniture and garden statuary from the bankrupt Salander-O'Reilly Galleries will move forward as scheduled, after an attempt to stop it by Salander's father-in-law was rejected, Bloomberg reports. Donald S. Dowden, the father of Lawrence Salander's wife, Julie, petitioned a U.S. bankruptcy judge to stop the sale on the grounds that the estimates were too low. He wrote that the sale "will unfairly transfer profit to alerted dealers," and that buyers will get "inventory for much less than its fair market value," asking it to be moved to a more established auction house in a major commercial center. Judge Cecelia Morris overruled the objection, saying that Dowden's speculation that a bigger auction house would attract more competitive bidders is unfounded.

Dowden said he owns a 20 percent stake in the lots of 17th- and 18th-century European and American furniture and garden decoration. Pre-sale estimates for many of the pieces are far below what Salander originally paid for them; an England art-deco wrought-iron gate for which the dealer paid $32,317 at a Christie's London auction in 2004, for example, is assigned an estimate of $10–15,000. Stair Galleries has given the auction a high estimate of just over $1 million.