Northwest Collector

Collecting

Barn sale purchase is major find for savvy buyer . . . and what we can learn from it

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Everyone loves a success story, and I believe that’s the biggest reason for the popularity of Antiques Road Show: the idea that a funny ceramic figurine that was the family joke for years is actually a museum piece; that a map rescued from a dumpster is a rare piece of Americana; that a print purchased at a thrift shop for a few bucks is an original Dürer engraving worth many thousands—all of these are retellings of “Cinderella” that few can resist imagining happening to themselves.

Needless to say, there are way fewer Antiques Roadshow segments—and many more Roadshow tour appraisals that are not filmed—in which the hopes of an item’s owner are crushed: the item is not rare or valuable; the condition is so bad as to make it almost worthless; the amount the owner paid is pretty much the market price, or even more; or—worst of all—the damn thing is a fake!

Unfortunately, a litany of bad news makes for lousy TV programming. Still, that’s what happens in most cases. Not everyone is a winner.

Which is why I offer a doff of the hat to Allen Treibitz of Heritage Gallery Auctions in Patchogue, Long Island (HeritageGalleryAuctions.com)—by coincidence, less than 15 minutes from where I grew up. Allen went to a barn sale in the Hamptons and had the good sense to shell out all of $50 for a painting by an artist named Emily Carr titled Masset Q.C.I. 1912, seen here:

Emily Carr, Masset, Q.C.I. Image used by permission of Heffel Fine Art Auction House, www.Heffel.com.

Now, if this raises lots of questions in your mind, you’re not alone. Who was Emily Carr? What is that object in the painting? What does Massett Q.C.I. mean? And are there really still barns in the Hamptons with things you can buy for $50? (I didn’t think you could get a Caffè Americano at a Starbucks in the Hamptons for fifty bucks!)

If I can pat myself on the back, when I read about Allen’s find, I recognized Emily Carr’s name, but it took me a moment to place her: when I was about to move to the Pacific Northwest twenty-five years ago, I briefly considered applying to the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, BC.

Then everything fell into place: Emily Carr (1871–1945) was an eminent Canadian artist who was much influenced by the Northwest First Nations peoples. The object in the painting is actually a mortuary totem pole (the coloring threw me off), and Massett Q.C.I. refers to the Haida village of Massett, Graham Island, in the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia—something I learned through a simple Google search, which also turned up this oddly familiar image:

Mortuary totem pole at Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, BC, October 1913. Photo by Archdeacon W. H. Collison (1847–1922). Postcard by J. D. Allen Photo Co. Image used by permission of University of Northern British Columbia Archives & Special Collections, UNBC Accession No. 2009.7.1.080, https://search.nbca.unbc.ca/index.php/mortuary-totem-pole-at-masset-queen-charlotte-islands-bc.

For a bear on a pole, he gets around. But I digress . . .

Allen Treibitz made international headlines not just for his smart purchase (there’s gold in them thar barns) but for consigning the piece to Toronto’s Heffel Fine Art Auction House (www.Heffel.com), whose savvy publicity people knew exactly what to do with it. The auction—which was held in November of last year, was a Major Event, not just for the Emily Carr painting but also for others by Canadian artists James Hart, Frederick Varley, Marcelle Ferron, and Kenojuak Ashevak—and Massett Q.C.I., which was estimated to fetch roughly US$70,000 to $140,000, fetched just over US$242,000, including the buyer’s premium. (Some of the work by the above-mentioned artists realized much, much more—but they didn’t come with the cachet of being found in a barn on Long Island.)

I couldn’t help asking Allen some questions about his decision to purchase the piece and his buying process in general:

Me: What attracted you to the painting?

Allen Treibitz: The painting had a look that stood out from most of the works that I see.

Me: Did you recognize the image as a totem pole before you researched the artist?

AT: I recognized that it was an animal on a pole in a rural setting. Having the title as Masset, Q.C.I. helped pinpoint the site and that it was an Indigenous work. 

Me: Have you made other great finds like this in the past?

AT: I have had many great finds, but this one is the most significant and valuable in my career as a dealer/lover of art. 

Me: Do you always research items before you buy or bid?

AT: Research always depends on the situation at hand. Sometimes it’s research on the fly or could be that it’s a feeling I have from doing this most of my life. 

Me: Any advice for other “treasure hunters”?

AT: These great works are out there to be discovered, but it’s very rare to find something this important. 

So what’s the takeaway here?

(1) Great finds are out there, although you may not be able to buy a second home with one. Allen Treibitz is an art expert and dealer who presumably sees a lot of artwork for sale, in barns and elsewhere, and even he hasn’t scored this big before. But it does happen.

(2) Do your homework! It amazes me whenever I see overpriced stuff on eBay (it’s always “extremely rare!” when it actually isn’t) or with a high starting bid in another auction. You just have to check the prices. If you are registered with LiveAuctioneers.com or Invaluable.com, you can see what an item sold for on their platform if it ever came up there. Or you can subscribe to WorthPoint or one of the other websites that tell you past auction prices over many platforms. Some auction houses also allow you to see past auction prices. If you are flea market frequenter or estate sale enthusiast, use your cell phone to do your due diligence “in the field” and download any apps you need beforehand. A little solid research can save you a lot of money—as well as expose sellers who wildly exaggerate the rarity and value of their stuff.

(3) Know your collecting area! The more expert you are, the better your instincts will be, and the more likely you’ll make a smart purchase if you can’t adequately research a super-rare or one-of-a-kind item beforehand.

(4) Don’t turn up your nose at barn sales . . . or library sales or garage/yard/rummage sales or church bazaars or thrift shops. Some of the best finds come from those venues.

Happy hunting!

Study your auction catalog!

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I love auction catalogs: Even if I can’t afford to bid on what I really want—and how many collectors can?—the catalogs make for fun reading.

Catalogs are also a great resource for collectors. Over time, they can give an idea of what’s out there on the market and—if you bother to check the hammer prices afterwards, which I strongly advise—what certain items may fetch. The operative word is “may,” of course; more on that in a moment.

The catalog for the 2023 Western Art and Wine Auction at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, WY. The cover art by Tucker Smith (TuckerSmithArt.com), Morning on Ditch Creek, is a signed artist’s proof giclée print on canvas made from one of Smith’s spectacular oil paintings. “All art is donated specifically for the auction, mostly directly by the artists, to be auctioned to benefit the museum collection, and all proceeds go to the museum,” according to Clint Gilchrist, the museum’s executive director. “The cover art is always one of the pieces donated for the auction.” See all the catalogs at https://museumofthemountainman.com/artauction/. The next auction will be on July 11; the catalog will be online on June 1. Catalog cover image used by permission of the Museum of the Mountain Man.

If you collect within a narrow field, you may even see an item come up for auction more than once over a period of a few years. If it’s a rare or one-of-a-kind piece, it can help you to know what it sold for the last time it went on the block.

Lot descriptions are also informative, both for what they contain and what they don’t. A really good auction house with knowledgeable experts—Heritage Auctions in Dallas, say—will publish beautiful catalogs with insightful descriptions that contain valuable details about an item’s uniqueness, provenance, condition, etc. But don’t let that stop you from doing your own research: If you collect Theodore Roosevelt memorabilia, for example, and a letter from Teddy to a Mr. Joe Blow comes up for auction, do your homework and try to find out who Joe Blow actually was, if the auctioneer hasn’t done so already. Special associations often go unnoticed and only add to an item’s worth.

Hard-copy catalogs are relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book . . .

Here’s an example: Some years ago, a short 1909 Christmas greeting written by legendary 19th-century boxer/Civil War veteran Mike Donovan to a Captain Jack Crawford came up for auction. Donovan’s handwriting wasn’t so legible, and the lot description querulously noted that Donovan referred to Crawford as “the Poet Scant.” “Scant”? I was confused too.

So I Googled “Captain Jack Crawford, Poet Scant.” It turned out he was Captain Jack Crawford, known as the “Poet Scout,” who was a lot more famous than Donovan (at least, outside of pugilistic circles). Both men had been born in Ireland and served in the Union Army, so they obviously had some common bonds. Crawford became a cavalry scout in the Indian Wars and was among the first to arrive at the site of the Little Bighorn fight after Custer’s 7th Cavalry were killed. Crawford was also famous as a frontier poet, hence the moniker: He used to pen his verse at campfires—while his compatriots were drinking, eating beans and farting, one imagines—published several books (pretty avidly collected today) and was active on the public reading circuit. And he was a pal of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he later worked the Wild West show circuit.

All of this evaded the writer of the lot description, but it greatly enhanced the note’s value—both to your humble correspondent and the guy who outbid me!

Hard-copy catalogs are also relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book—in addition to being great reference material and useful as “provenance” if you acquire something that has been auctioned off in the past. Here’s a great 2020 movie poster auction catalog from Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions (HA.com).

Anyway . . . bear in mind that while hammer prices may provide an indicator of an item’s fair-market value, nothing’s written in stone. Just as on eBay when two goons get in a bidding war and drive an item’s price ski-high up five days before the end of the auction, people in an online or live auction can get crazy and bid far beyond what they reasonably should. (Figure in the buyer’s premium as well.) So take hammer prices with a few grains of salt.    

Conversely, you may get lucky—as I have more than once—and find a great item BURIED in an auction catalog among unrelated items: for example, an uncommon film star autograph hidden among sports memorabilia. Not only will other collectors of that film star miss the autograph (unless they collect sports memorabilia too) but the sports people will probably ignore the film star as well. Then you have the opportunity to nab a great item far below what it would ordinarily sell for.

In a nutshell: Look hard for those hidden gems among the other lots!

A final word . . . I originally wrote a version of this story about 15 years ago. Catalogs, for the obvious reasons of lower cost, speed, and convenience, are nowadays often sent out only as pdfs or links to web pages. Occasionally you can find them online on Google Books. If you don’t want to download and keep the pdfs on file, you may be able to view past sales on an auctioneer’s website.

Starting your first collection? Here are a few tips . . .

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A couple of months ago, I received an interesting letter, apparently mass-mailed to collectibles dealers, from a gentleman whose father is a paralyzed U.S. Army veteran suffering from PTSD. The father had collected various things in his youth—“cards, stamps, games, etc.”—all of which had been destroyed by flooding, and the son hoped to put a new collection together for his dad. The son concluded the letter asking for “information and/or samples.”

This piqued my interest for two reasons. One, I know the rewards of collecting—as most readers of this blog also do—and can well imagine it providing therapeutic value for someone coping with anxiety (with the caveat that competitive collecting, such as bidding at auction, can be another source of stress).

The second thing that interested me was that the son seemed not have ever collected anything himself: Why else would he have mailed a bunch of collectibles dealers to ask for information? It seemed like a noble but misguided effort to help his father by “casting too wide a net,” so to speak.

Naturally, I was eager to offer encouragement and advice. Here’s my reply:

Dear Mr. ———

Please convey my gratitude to your father for his service and tremendous sacrifices for our country.

Your letter did not sound as if you have ever collected anything yourself, so I want to urge you: First off, please do not build a collection for your father. Instead, ask him what he wants to collect and then offer him any help he needs to create his own collection.

Collecting is a very personal pursuit, and people’s interests change: I collected coins when I was a kid—often by going through my father’s pocket change—and I learned a lot about coins back then, when you could still sometimes find buffalo nickels and Mercury dimes. My father was born in 1906: HIS father’s pocket change might have had coins from the Civil War era! Hard to imagine.

The point is, I don’t collect coins now—or stamps or baseball cards, which I also collected—as my interests have changed. So whatever your dad collected when he was a kid may not have the same meaning to him now.

Second, BUILDING a collection is at least half the fun of HAVING the collection. If you just buy a collection and give it to your father, it won’t be as much fun as building it himself. So let your father do the collecting!

So you really need to talk with your dad and see what really interests him!

Third, unless you have a lot of money, don’t collect what everyone else is trying to collect. When I used to collect rare books when I was in my 20s, and didn’t have much money, someone told me: Don’t plan to collect signed Ernest Hemingway first editions, because you will never have much of a collection. In fact, depending on what your dad decides to collect, you may not need to spend much money at all! I used to collect my favorite ballplayers’ autographs just by writing them letters and asking for their autographs. So it cost the price of a postage stamp, some paper and some envelopes!

Fourth, and this is a big one: Ask other people who collect the same type of thing how to go about it and who to buy from. Don’t buy ANYTHING until you research it, as there are a lot of people who will overcharge you or sell you fake stuff, especially on eBay.

Anyway, I hope this helps. Once your dad decides what he wants to collect, let me know and maybe I can help with more specific information.

So far, no response, but I wonder if readers have anything else to add . . . ?

The Zen of collecting

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The following was originally posted online in 2013 in slightly different form.

  1. Collecting is about restraint, not the lack of it. If you buy selectively, you’re a collector; if you buy reflexively or compulsively, you’re a hoarder. In other words:
  2. Don’t amass “stuff.” Collect something that is meaningful to you. Don’t get locked into a habit. True collecting is much more than just acquisitiveness; it’s about knowing all you can about your subject and, even better, finding out something new that other collectors may not know.

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