Agnes Pelton (1881-1961), Purple Star Icon, ca. 1939-40. Oil on canvas, 23½ x 14½ in., signed lower right: ‘Pelton’; signed and titled on the reverse: ‘Purple Star Icon, Agnes Pelton’.  SOLD: $525,000

The 91-lot auction achieved $4.3 million, with a sell-through rate of 93 percent, and was led by the sale of a newly surfaced work by modernist Agnes Pelton, which sold for $525,000. The source of quite a buzz, Pelton’s Purple Star Icon, is among the artist’s rare desert transcendental abstractions; only four of which have come to auction in the last 29 years. Until recently, Purple Star Icon was only known by archival records.

Rembrandt Peale (1778-1860), Portrait of George Washington, 1857. Oil on canvas, 36 x 29 in., signed lower left: ‘Rembrandt Peale’; inscribed on the reverse: ‘Painted by: / Rembrandt Peale / 1857 / from original / portrait of Washington / 1795 / Copy from original canvas and / relined by G. Anton, / 1932’. SOLD: $425,000

“With nearly 500 clients bidding on 91 lots, our outstanding results further establish Heritage as a leader in American art,” says Aviva Lehmann, Heritage’s senior vice president of American art. “We are delighted to place these remarkable works, spanning over a century of artistic achievement, into new collections.”

Rembrandt Peale’s 1857 oil-on-canvas Portrait of George Washington followed the Pelton sale, fetching $425,000, well above its estimate. A Heritage representative notes, “Here the artist intentionally rivaled the work of fellow portraitists John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart and his own father, Charles Willson Peale, as he made it his professional mission to render ‘the national portrait and standard likeness’ of George Washington.”

Works from the Golden Age of Illustration also saw positive results, with two works by Joseph Christian Leyendecker totaling $500,000. Both made for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, Marbles Game, 1925, sold for $300,000, above its high estimate, and Caught in the Rain, created for a 1914 cover brought $200,000. Also of note in the illustration sector, and achieving well above their estimates, was a 1910 watercolor by Jessie Willcox Smith titled A Child’s Book of Old Verses, which sold for $200,000 and his Scribner’s Magazine interior watercolor from 1903 titled Five O’clock Tea, The Child in a Garden which sold for $112,500. Two more covers for the Saturday Evening Post, this time by the great John Ford Clymer, also landed among the event’s top 10 sellers: His Rustic Daydreams (Abandoned Equipment), South of Jackson, Wyoming, from 1959, sold for nearly twice its high estimate at $200,000, and Putting Up Birdhouses, from 1951, sold for $187,500.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker (1874-1951), Caught in the Rain, Saturday Evening Post cover, April 25, 1914. Oil on canvas, 30 x 21 in., signed lower left: ‘JC Leyendecker’. SOLD: $200,000

Also among the top 10 was a 1918 painting for a Red Book illustration by Dean Cornwell titled The Den of Iniquity, The Valley of the Giants, which realized $125,000, nearly double it high presale estimate.  

A rare Augustus Saint-Gaudens marble, Psyche of Capua, 1873-74, which was exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and came from the Estate of Princess Maria Romanoff, also surpassed its estimate when it sold for $100,000. 

The sale also broke two artist auction records for Thomas F. Laycock whose 1886 oil Crossing the River sold for $12,500, and William Ashby McCloy, whose Agricultural Lassitude, 1936, sold for $10,625. 

Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907), Psyche of Capua, ca. 1873-74. Marble, 36 in. high on a 44 in. plinth. SOLD: $100,000

“From George Washington to Agnes Pelton, May 15 was a truly stellar event,” says Lehmann. “The growth and strength of our category are a testament to the exceptional quality of our offerings and the high level of connoisseurship accompanying each lot.” 

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