It was Grandma Moses, however, who generated the real excitement. The famed folk artist’s busy rural scenes had inspired practically all the action at Bonhams on May 20, although that session’s top price, $1,274,000, went to Frederic Edwin Church’s 1874 Twilight in the Tropics (A Tropical Moonlight). Bonhams offered four works by Moses at modest estimates, and three of them sparked heated bidding wars, with Richard Lynch and Howard Shaw, of New York’s Hammer Galleries, chasing nearly all of them and managing to bag just one: A Fine Gobbler, 1948 (est. $30-50,000), for which they paid $64,050.

At Sotheby’s, Moses was represented by Country Fair, 1950 (est. $700-900,000). That estimate seemed rather ambitious, considering that her paintings typically fetch less than $500,000. The salesroom was tense as the bidding opened at $450,000, but anxiety gave way to breathless excitement as the bids climbed past the lot’s reserve, with two contenders — one in the room and one on the phone — vying for the painting. Ultimately, it sold to the phone for $1,082,500. The underbidder — who had earlier lost out on Walter Ufer’s The Red Moccasins (est. $400-600,000), which sold for $752,500 — was a white-haired gentleman rumored to be buying for the flag-waving wind-power booster T. Boone Pickens.

"American Paintings" originally appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's July/August 2009 Table of Contents.