The Call of the Sea

Courtesy Christie's

A life preserver thought to be from the Titanic that brought $68,500 at Christie’s in June.

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On the morning of August 16, a crowd gathered at Northeast Auctions, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to inspect some 600 maritime pictures and objects from the collection of J. Welles Henderson, a Philadelphia admiralty attorney who died last May. Laid out before them were objects from “sailor’s valentines”—the ornate shell collages that seamen gave their port-side sweethearts in the 18th and 19th centuries—to carved whale’s teeth known as scrimshaw. Richard Kahn, a Cape Cod dealer, calls Henderson one of the preeminent figures in the history of maritime art and antiques—a broad collecting category that encompasses ship fittings, models, folk-art objects made by sailors and nautical paintings. “I’ve been a maritime dealer for 30 years, and he bought things that I had never seen,” says Kahn.

The sale’s audience members, in their leather docksiders and polo shirts, embodied the sketch of a collector outlined by Gregg Dietrich, the maritime specialist at Christie’s, the market leader in nautical art: “He is somebody who has a summer house, enjoys being by the water and probably owns a boat, if not a significant yacht.” One amply bearded gentleman even wore an old-fashioned captain’s hat. Sipping iced coffee in the back of the sale’s tent, he looked like a less-afflicted Captain Ahab.

Alan Granby, the co-owner of Hyland Granby Antiques, in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, spent more than $1 million at the Henderson sale and was blown away by its triumphant $3.5 million total. “Given the economy, I was shocked to see that many marine antiques sell for so much money across the board,” he says. “Whether it was a painting, a piece of scrimshaw, a ship carving or a navigational instrument, prices were high.” Granby, who is the only maritime dealer to participate in top-tier New York fairs like the Haughtons’ International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Show and the Winter Antiques Show, attributes the sale’s success to a general rise in prices across the marine category driven by an influx of new buyers, such as hedge-fund managers drawn to the glory of the sea. He notes that 12 years ago, he sold a Jack Tar—a life-size ship’s figurehead named after the common sobriquet for sailors—to Henderson for $100,000. On the day of the auction, Granby bought it back for $337,000.

Kahn, who considers that particular Jack Tar the ultimate prize for a maritime collector, says that 2008 was an exceptional year for figureheads, with about 20 coming up at auction. Since the large carvings of mermaids and sea captains that were fastened to the prows of ships are rare, the top of the market in the maritime category is typically dominated by paintings. In January, for instance, Christie’s kicked off the first of its four annual maritime art sales with two oils of ships by the 20th-century British artist Montague Dawson, which brought a combined $470,000. The more valuable a painting with a nautical theme is, the more likely it is to be placed in another category. You won’t see a moody watercolor by J. M. W. Turner, for instance, in a maritime sale. Even pictures by somewhat less celebrated artists, such as the 19th-century nautical painter Thomas Chambers, canvases often go for upwards of $40,000, and are featured in a survey on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art through December, are often put in Americana sales.

What you will consistently find in a maritime or a marine-paintings sale is work by figures like Antonio Jacobsen, a prolific turn-of-the-20th-century painter who documented vessels for shipping and insurance companies. Jake Dowling, of the Dowling Walsh Gallery, in Rockland, Maine, which offers Jacobsen’s richly colored canvases for between $9,000 and $30,000, explains that “with marine paintings, how accurately the ship was depicted is often just as important as how well it was painted. Jacobsen is fairly reliable, because he was painting a commissioned piece.” But, Dowling adds, “his really good paintings are when he decided to get artistic and paint the landscape.”