Courtesy Christie's

Milton Avery's "Sketching by the Sea" (1944) more than doubled its high estimate at Christie's, going for $2,210,500.

Courtesy Sotheby's

Grandma Moses's "Country Fair" (1950) was the highlight of the Sotheby's sale, earning $1,082,500.

Milton Avery Albert Bierstadt Edward Henry Potthast Thomas Cole Grandma Moses Thomas Hart Benton Fairfield Porter Thomas Eakins

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With hedge-funders largely out of the picture, price levels at the Christie’s sale on May 20 reverted to where they were in the early ’90s. Of the 141 lots offered, 88 found buyers, resulting in a $16,820,400 sale total that fell far short of the auction’s pre-sale estimate of $20.5 million to $30.7 million. Sell-through rates were 62 percent by lot and 70 percent by value.

The most expensive sale occurred early on in the session, when a modestly sized Milton Avery, Sketching by the Sea, appeared on the block after more than 60 years off the market. The 1944 canvas, which pictures two figures busily drafting their seaside surroundings, more than doubled its high estimate, going for $2,210,500.

The session’s second biggest seller, Albert Bierstadt’s undated Oregon Trail, came up a few minutes later. Though the house had high hopes for the work, which it lavished with the most expensive estimate of the sale, $2–3 million, the frontier scene was settled at $1,762,500.

Holding steady throughout the sale was demand for bronze sculpture. Of the three whip-cracking horsemen by Frederic Remington on offer, two sold. The Cheyenne made $266,500 (est. 250,000–350,000), while the more modestly estimated The Bronco Buster (est. $50–70,000) exceeded expectations, bringing $98,500. Painters’ invocations of the West also fared well, especially works by Henry F. Farny, the only artist whose name appears twice in the sale’s top 10. Farny’s sharply detailed gouaches, Indian Encampment (1892) and Mountain Pass (1894) (both est. $400–600,000), went to the same bidder, for a combined $941,000.

Although art from the Wild West certainly pushed price boundaries, works with Yankee origins were not to be discounted. A lively bidding war broke out over George Bellows’s richly stroked depiction of Maine’s Monhegan Island, Cloud Shadows, which sold for $962,500 (est. $600–800,000). Thomas Cole’s View in Kaaterskill Clove, 1826 — a luminous tribute to the Catskills in autumn — did even better, bringing $1,022,500 (est. $800,000–1.2 million) from Caldwell Gallery of Manulius, New York.

The Mount Vernon Ladies Association continued to satiate its appetite for works rich with the first president’s legacy. For Eastman Johnson’s 1857 painting The Old Mount Vernon, the institution paid $662,500 (est. $600–800,000), a sum that is strangely identical to the amount it laid out for the Charles Peale Polk portrait of George Washington it bought at the Christie’s Americana sale in January.

Pictures that may have been too imitative of modern European styles, like the Nabis-wannabe forest scene by Edward Alfred Cucuel (est. $50–70,000) and Richard Edward Miller’s impersonation of Degas’s Parisian jaunts in Café de Nuit (est. 700,000–1 million), didn’t pique any interest, whereas American Impressionism aroused enthusiasm. William James Glackens’s serene and sunny Wickford Harbor, Rhode Island (1909), for instance, sold for $458,500 (est. $200–300,000), and Edward Henry Potthast’s Wading brought $386,500 (est. $200–300,000) from a bidder in the room.

Many of the buyers, however, did not show their faces on the day of the sale. “No one came to town,” notes Eli Wilner, the antique frame dealer who loaned nearly 50 frames to the Christie’s and Sotheby’s sessions and who did attend the sales. In some cases, absentee bidders even seemed to be rewarded for not being there. For instance, the buyer of Mary Cassatt’s study Two Mothers and a Child in a Boat (1910) got it for $25,000, well under its $30,000 low estimate. And another no-show really hit the jackpot, paying just $338,500 for a rather somber portrait of the 19th-century philanthropist famous for his work in education reform, Robert C. Ogden, that was estimated to go for between $400,000 and $600,000. The work was of three by Thomas Eakins being deaccessioned by Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum. One, Study for William Rush and His Model (circa 1908), made $122,500 (est. $80–120,000). A third did not sell.