Aug. 8
Estates
526 lots sold for $781,563
LAMBERTVILLE, New Jersey—Top lot: Winning high-earner honors in an auction that featured the collection of the English and Continental antiques dealer Joseph Stanley was a piece of furniture originally catalogued simply as a 1760-80 American walnut slant desk with bronze pulls. Subsequently identified by a Virginia scholar as a previously unrecorded work by his fellow Virginian, the renowned furniture maker John Shearer, who is only known to have made 50 pieces, it fetched, $42,700, close to 30 times its modest high estimate of $1,500.

"In Brief: David Rago" originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's November 2009 Table of Contents.