Half sales, half show, all treasure. Behind the scenes with Virginia’s fine art auctioneers.
Jennifer clary offers me a carved jade wand. “You can hold it,” she tells me. I hesitate before taking the milky green scholar’s toggle, which dates from the 10th century B.C. It hung from the belt of some imperial court luminary during China’s Zhou
dynasty around the same time David was knocking down Goliath.
“Think of it as their version of a Rolex,” she suggests. “A way for someone to signify their wealth and power.” Three thousand years later, this Zhou status symbol has found its way to Oakridge Auction Gallery in Ashburn, where Clary is an auctioneer and head of the Asian department. It’s not the only treasure here. I’m standing in one of the gallery’s storerooms, in a narrow aisle between shelves full of similar artifacts. Soon, they’ll all be gone, sold at auction to the highest bidder.
Clary is one of Virginia’s 1,020 licensed auctioneers. They preside over the sale of real estate, cars, farm equipment, antiques, livestock—you name it, you can buy it, as long as you’re the highest bidder.
Auctions of fine art and rare antiques are some of the most enduring, largely because they bring together buyers and sellers of unique items. You can’t find a Picasso at Publix, but you can get one at a Virginia auction. It’s a classic image: escalating bids right up until the final call.
“Going … going … gone. Sold!” In galleries across Virginia, I went to explore the world of auctioneers when they’re not in the ring.
Unpacking the Goods
One hundred and seventy paintings have just arrived at the Old Town Alexandria showroom of The Potomack Company Auctioneers. Assistants are carefully cutting away padding from shipping crates to reveal the pieces inside. Some are as small as a postage stamp, others are giants that will refuse to share space on even the widest wall.
Potomack Company owner Elizabeth Wainstein is showing me around the cavernous room. Every inch of wall holds a painting, be it mixed-media contemporary or the dark oils of 15th-century old masters. To look closer, you’ll have to walk a path through marble-topped French tables, old settees, and the serene gazes of bronze statuary. There’s another room here, plus a warehouse next door with 300-odd lots of furniture. It’s like walking through an overstuffed museum—except you could own one of these pieces.
An eight-year veteran of Sotheby’s in New York and London before founding her own gallery, Wainstein is discussing the new arrivals with director of fine arts Anne Norton Cramer. Emerging slowly in front of us is “Equilibrio Espacial” (Spatial Balance), a 1969 painting by Colombian artist David Manzur Londõno. The work is big—about five feet square. Rays of nylon expand outward from a disjointed wooden semicircle near the center of the canvas.
Cramer dubs this an “important” work, meaning that it has special significance due to rarity, provenance, artist renown, marketplace demand, or just a fascinating story. Despite that, two weeks later the painting sells for $27,500—a lot of money, but still about $10,000 less than the estimate.
“Every day you are held to the fire.”
“Calling the bid” is the term for the auctioneer’s performance during a sale. Their fast-talking, rhythmic singsong is called the chant. There’s a split among fine art auctioneers between those that use the chant and those that call bids in more measured spoken word. The chant is designed to provide energy and entertainment, to keep the bidding lively and drive action. Spoken word is meant to give people time to think about their bids and lend the process a more sophisticated air.
Whatever the style, calling the bid is just one part—albeit the most visible—of the auctioneer’s work. Modern auctioneers must be masters of many realms: CEO, historian, lawyer, circus showman, private detective, and psychologist, all in one tidy package.
Auctioneers source items for sale by building a reputation and network, often traveling to collectors’ homes to assess the value of their collections. Then begins painstaking research to gather all the historical and biographical details surrounding a piece—and to spot forgeries.
It’s important to get an item’s history right—if an auctioneer can’t verify certain details, they must be honest with buyers. “You are held to what you say,” says Matt Sturtevant, Potomack’s specialist in 19th-century furniture. “Every day you are held to the fire.”
Sturtevant shows me a pair of chairs and a settee made by François Linke, the most famous French furniture maker of his time (think Michael Jordan, but 19th-century buffets instead of basketball). The chairs’ arms are gold, fashioned in the shape of swans. Sturtevant talks about each piece as if they were alive, with a personality he can discover through historic detail.
The wood—old-growth mahogany, probably harvested in Bermuda then shipped back to France for carving—and style help him pinpoint the place of origin and specific craftsman. “You can see where Linke embellished on older designs to appeal to industrialists of the time,” says Sturtevant. “Each artist has their own bent and their own drive.” A pair of Linke pedestals, a buffet, and a serving table sold in a previous auction for upwards of $650,000, so Potomack has high hopes for these pieces.
Once all the items are ready, auctioneers market the sale to the public and structure it with an eye towards maximum bidding activity.
“It used to be, you would build momentum for live auctions,” says Wainstein, starting small and leaving the big showstoppers until the end. With the rise of online bidding and accompanying shorter attention spans, it’s best to frontload an early section of the sale with notable pieces.
Only after all this is achieved can the auction begin. “All these specialties coming together quickly on a deadline is like a duck on the water,” says Wainstein, “you don’t see the paddling underneath.”
Accounting for Taste
In 2004, Jeffrey Evans made the find of a lifetime. From under the stairs in an old Page County farmhouse came a hanging wall cupboard, yellow pine, decorated with a leaping stag by Johannes Spitler sometime around 1800. “Spitler is one of the top Southern folk artists of all time in terms of desirability and value,” says Evans. “Every major collector and museum wanted it.”
Bidding began at $100,000. “I knew it would go to at least $500,000,” says Evans. “The family who owned it told me that couldn’t be true.” The Spitler cupboard sold for $962,500.
Evans knew it would fetch a high price because, like all good auctioneers, he pays attention to marketplace trends. He is the co-owner, with his wife Beverley, of Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates auction house in Mt. Crawford.
He has a special interest in Shenandoah arts and crafts—tin pie chests, painted folk art, Virginia stone and earthenware. Local pieces like these will always be in demand in the Commonwealth, but there are also broader consumer trends that most auctioneers agree upon.
What’s out: Furniture that’s old and made of dark wood. Older generations are moving and selling these pieces, and younger generations don’t want them. Says Sturtevant, “Right now you can own that type of furniture relatively inexpensively because they’re not in demand—sometimes for even less than you’d pay at Crate & Barrel.”
What’s in: Chinese art. As China has developed and its citizens have gotten richer, they’re looking to bring back a lot of the antiques and fine art that left the country in the past. Clary tells me about a Peking glass vase that Oakridge estimated would sell for $5,000 but went all the way up to $240,000. “If porcelain is ratified by the Imperial Court, just add a zero,” she says.
The Internet Changes Everything
Every auctioneer I talked to told me that once they started selling online—simulcasting while calling bids live or going completely virtual—they started making more money. A bigger audience simply means more bids. “For the first time, you’re selling to people all over the world,” says Evans.
The pandemic has only sped the move online. If you’re unloading grandma’s heirloom clocks and you have the choice between an auctioneer selling to a room of 100 or one selling to an internet audience of one million, which would you choose?
What Two People are Willing to Pay
During an auction, the Oakridge Gallery has spotlights trained on the auctioneer’s lectern and the item for sale. The rest of the room is slightly darker—sometimes with moveable screens for the privacy of bidders in the back (the better to protect your plans from rivals). My jade scholar’s toggle is not a particularly important piece. One buyer is interested, but no one seems motivated to put up much of a challenge. It sells for $4,000.
Auctioneers are lots of things. They’re practical: They create successful companies that can find the right price for every item. And they’re romantic: They uncover stories that infuse objects with added significance and help connect collectors with their passions. It’s clear to me that they share a deep appreciation for the collectors that walk away with the things they sell. After all, auctions are about people. The demands of business may have changed, but the people are still what matter.
I walk away thinking of Sturtevant’s updated adage: “Everything is worth what two people are willing to pay for it.” JeffreySEvans.com, OakridgeAuctionGallery.com, PotomackCompany.com
This article originally appeared in the June 2022 issue.
