Gold Rush Sale for Art Collectors

Marge Schott was the primary owner and CEO of the Cincinnati Reds for nearly 15 years, after purchasing controlling interest in the team in 1984.

She had married Charles in 1952 and inherited his automobile dealerships when he died 16 years later. Marge was a controversial figure, as she sometimes uttered racial slurs about former players of the team and even told The New York Times that Adolf Hitler was initially good for Germany. Marge died at age 75 in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2004, and the collection amassed by her and her husband was sold by Cowan’s Auctions on June 17 for nearly $4.5 million in bids.

The loudest buzz surrounding the sale was reserved for a painting by Charles Schreyvogel, whose interest in the West brought him from Hoboken, New Jersey, to the Ute Reservation in Colorado in 1893. In Saving the Dispatch, he paints a horse at full gallop, with all four hooves in the air, suggesting that the artist was aware of Eadweard Muybridge’s 1887 photographic study, Animal Locomotion, which included the first successful representation of this equine movement. This sale has beat the auction record set for Schreyvogel by Sotheby’s in 1998 when it sold his 1908 painting, The Silenced War Whoop, for a $1.15 million bid.