Sotheby’s American Art Auction
New York, NY
Sotheby’s May sale of American art will feature remarkable Western works from the Jack and Bonita Granville Wrather Collection along with other works emerging from private collections.
The Wrather family acquired Charles M. Russell’s When Guns Were the Locks of the Treasure Box at Kennedy Galleries in New York several decades ago. The stagecoach scene is expected to fetch between $150,000 and $250,000 at the May 23 auction.
“The work itself has beautiful movement, the way that the rider is headed toward the foreground, and there’s something very elegant about the way it’s rendered,” says Kayla Carlsen, head of Sotheby’s American art department. “The scale of it is lovely, and the blues really stand out.”
Also acquired by the family at Kennedy Galleries is Frederic Remington’s Western Stage Managers (est. $60/80,000). The other Western work from the Wrather Collection is Olaf C. Seltzer’s Wagon Train Across the Prairie, which holds an estimate of $8,000 to $12,000. The collection will be rounded out by a Norman Rockwell work titled Boy Playing Flute Surrounded by Animals (Springtime) (est. $1.5/2.5 million).
Coming out of a different private collection is the Gerard Curtis Delano oil In Bonnet and Paint, Early-day Sioux Scouts. The work had previously sold at the Coeur d’alene Art Auction in 2010 for the third-highest auction price for the artist. The Delano has an estimate of $300,000 to $500,000 and Carlsen notes, “The work is in beautiful, original condition, and it’s a graphically very interesting image with a tremendous amount of color.”
Another prominent work crossing the block is Thomas Moran’s A Showery Day, Grand Canyon, estimated to sell between $800,000 and $1.2 million. The work was last sold at Sotheby’s in 1999, and has been tucked away in a private collection for nearly two decades.
The sale will take place May 23, at 10 a.m., during New York’s spring American Art Week.