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.

Photo Gallery

The sole Frederic Remington illustration at auction hammered down at $150,000. Titled Apache Signal Fire, it appeared in the March 1891 issue of Century magazine, illustrating a large Apache campground for an article about Gen. George Crook in the Indian Country.

Charles Russell remains hot as ever, with his oil on canvas, Indian Scout on Horseback, hammering down at $250,000.

The White Blackfoot, painted in 1918 by one of America’s foremost illustrators, Frank Schoonover, sold for a $75,000 bid. The artist also created the image of the one-legged, fictional Hopalong Cassidy.

The two top sellers at auction:Charles Schreyvogel’s Saving the Dispatch, 1909, $1.3 million; Henry F. Farny’s Summoned by the War Chief, 1900, $825,000.

A favorite of auction house founder Wes Cowan, Joseph Henry Sharp’s Indian Medicine or Black Robe? sold for a $400,000 bid. It retains the original Taos Society price tag.

Meghan Saar is the former editor of True West, the world’s oldest, continuously published Western Americana magazine. She has worked in niche publication content development since 2002, and she has a B.S. in Journalism and Creative Writing from the University of Arizona—Tucson.

Photo Gallery

Related Posts