There’s a war brewing over a Peaceable Kingdom. The art world was taken aback in September when Halsey Minor, founder of the technology news Web site CNet.com, reneged on payment for Edward Hicks’s painting The Peaceable Kingdom with the Leopard of Serenity, 1846–48, won for a record $9.6 million at Sotheby’s in May, as well as for two other works. The auction house is suing Minor for breach of contract in Manhattan Federal District Court for $16.8 million. The entrepreneur told the New York Times that he didn’t pay because Sotheby’s failed to reveal its financial stake in the painting, as is customary. Sotheby’s denies that allegation and claims that Minor told the house he came up short because he was owed money by other parties. Minor is countersuing as the lead plaintiff in a class action against Sotheby’s. This is just the latest example of bad karma swirling around the bankrupt jewelry magnate Ralph Esmerian. The prominent collector owes the auction house $11.5 million and had pledged the Hicks—whose famously cozy menagerie had once hung at New York’s American Folk Art Museum as a promised gift—as collateral for the loan. That leaves Sotheby’s herding those animals toward a new buyer—and Esmerian’s debt largely unpaid.

"Minor Qualms" originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2008 Table of Contents.