A piece of US history goes for £150K
Oyez! Oyez! The town crier at Rye town hall has something special to ring his bell about this Christmas. A 19thcentury sculpture by the virtually unknown Italian Francis Vincenti, which had been hidden in its attic for
decades, just sold for £150,000 at Sotheby’s.
Sixteen years ago, Bonhams saw the sculpture and thought it might be of the medieval poet Dante. In spring, specialists from Art UK, the website that is cataloguing all publicly owned works of art in the country, changed the sitter’s description to Aysh-ke-bahke-ko-zhay, or Flat Mouth as he was nicknamed, the Ojibwe chief from what is now Minnesota, making the sculpture of interest to the US market.
Flat Mouth visited Washington DC in 1855 to negotiate the exchange of 10 million acres for $1million,
and sat for a portrait bust by Vincenti, a stonecutter who was working on the decoration of the Capitol. The original bust has since been in the US Senate.
The Rye example is a signed variant. Richard Farhall, the Rye town clerk, said there was no record of how it had arrived in England, and that the sale would help subsidise the Rye Heritage Centre, which costs around £22,000 per year. He was, therefore, delighted when, estimated to fetch £15,000, it sold for 10 times that figure.
The buyer was Daniel
Katz, the London sculpture specialist dealer, whose task now is to discover how chief Flat Mouth found his way from Washington to the East Sussex coast.
It was difficult to know what people were more excited about at Art Basel Miami Beach this month – the claims stacking up against Inigo Philbrick, the British art dealer accused of selling millions of dollars of art to the same people simultaneously, or the banana stuck down with duct tape by Maurizio Cattelan, which Emmanuel
Perrotin, the dealer, sold for $120,000 (£90,000).
While Philbrick appears to have gone into hiding, images of the banana went viral. Comedian sold to Sarah
Andelman, the founder of the Paris concept store Colette, and was replaced by another. It was swiftly taken up as a slogan (“A banana is worth more than us”) for the city’s janitors, who were protesting about low wages, and even became the subject of a performance when another artist, David Datuna, took it down and ate it. Of course, the value was not in the banana, but in the certificate of authenticity that went with it.
Another artist, David Datuna, took the banana off the wall and ate it