NEW YORK—There were a few bright spots in an otherwise lackluster American and European art sale at Shannon’s in Milford, Conn., on April 26, including the $96,000 final price paid for New York street artist Paul Cornoyer’s undated painting A Spring Day, New York, which exceeded its $60,000/80,000 estimate.
Other positive results included William Glackens’s ca. 1924 oil Brewster’s Creek, which realized $60,000, compared with an estimate of $40,000/60,000; F. Luis Mora’s ca. 1908 American Gladiators, which sold for $52,800, compared with an estimate of $50,000/75,000; Arthur Wesley Dow’s ca. 1905 Yellow Flowers, Ipswich, which sold for $50,400 on an estimate of $40,000/60,000; and Nicholas Krushenick’s untitled 1965 acrylic on canvas, which sold for $43,200, well above the estimate of $6,000/8,000.
Similar to the Krushenick, some lots more than doubled their estimates. Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam’s untitled, five-part, colored sand on canvas paintings, sold for $21,600, on an estimate of $7,000/10,000, and James Renwick Brevoort’s undated A View from the Farm, sold for $16,800, compared with an estimate of $6,000/8,000.
Auction house president Gene Shannon noted that the strength of this sale was in the $10,000/50,000 area, with interest particularly coming from online bidders.
In all, the sale earned $1.6 million, falling below the presale estimate of $2 million/3 million, and 119, or 77 percent, of the 156 lots in the auction found buyers. However, it was the unsold lots, such as Thomas Cole’s ca.1820s Landscape with Two Figures at Sunset (estimate: $150,000/250,000), that cast a shadow on the day.