Defense Articles

Hardin’s cousin by marriage, James Miller, known as “Killing Jim,” had requested legal assistance in a case involving armed altercations with Sheriff G.A. (Bud) Frazier. In two shooting incidents, Miller had survived being shot by Frazier, thanks to a steel plate insert placed by Miller in his clothing. Their feud, which began in 1891, eventually resulted in the death of Frazier, murdered by Miller in 1896.

Hardin had responded to requests from Miller to prosecute Frazer in court, having been shot by the latter in April and in December, 1894. Trial was scheduled for April of 1895, in El Paso; Frazer had been arrested that December. Tiring of the wait, Miller eventually killed Frazer.

Miller was known as “the most dangerous man that ever lived,” according to an acquaintance, Dee Harvey. In 1908, Miller would be the prime suspect in the murder of Pat Garrett, killer of Billy The Kid. In 1909 Miller was lynched, after he killed a rancher in Ada, Oklahoma.

Court records show John Wesley Hardin was carrying a Colt Lightning Model 1877, serial number 84304 and an Elgin watch, serial number 4069110, when he was shot and killed on August 19, 1895. The revolver and the watch had been presented to Hardin in appreciation for his legal efforts on behalf of Miller in his trial for murdering Frazer. That trial lasted from April 8 to 14, 1895, ending in the jury being deadlocked.

The Colt, (with a .38 caliber, 2 1/2″ barrel) is nickel-plated, with blued hammer, trigger and screws. The back-strap is hand-engraved: “J.B.M. TO J.W.H.” It wears mother-of-pearl grips.

The Lightning is recorded in Colt factory ledgers as shipped on July 16, 1891, to Hartley & Graham, New York City, with five like guns in the shipment.

The Colt is accompanied with a tooled leather holster, marked with a barely visible stamp of an El Paso maker. The hunting case pocket watch by Elgin is a 14 karat, gold-filled, lever set, inscribed on the front: “April/7th/1895.” The inscription on the top of the inside lid reads: “J.W. HARDIN/From/J.B .MILLER.” There is also a gold-plated brass chain, with a fob of a liberty head penny, with the date 1853 (the year of Hardin’s birth).

The set includes a mounted photograph of Miller and Hardin, likely at the time of the presentation of the revolver and watch. The photograph is marked: “Simpson/602 Main St./Ft. Worth, Tex.”

The original John W. Hardin, Esq. business card and, “The Life of John Wesley Hardin From the Original Manuscript, As Written by Himself” (1896) rounds out this rare and historically significant bit of Americana.

Our thanks to Greg Martin Auctions for supplying photos and information. Phone: (800) 509-1988; www.gmartin-auctions.com

Note: Property documented in inventory of Jon Wesley Hardin estate, recorded at the time of the outlow’s death in 1895. To quote: “1.38 Colt Pistol (84304), While handle./1 watch, Elgin, on movement (4069110)

Condition: Revolver excellent, with 75-80% finish remaining; some flaking on frame and cylinder, 75% blue on trigger and hammer. tiny nick on toe of left panel of pearl grips. Minor wear on holster.

Six years ago, Sotheby’s entered the online auction market. One hundred million dollars later, it stumbled out, bruised and beaten. While it didn’t work for the big gun, several startup specialty sites–and one powerhouse–are working to refine the online art auction game.

Surely, if any other company were to have a shot at online art auction success, it would be eBay. In the words of Lara Bridges, the company’s category manager for art and antiques, the San Jose, Calif.-based site can open up a showroom to 80 million people.

On a typical day, eBay has a quarter of a million pieces listed under “art” alone, (and another quarter million under “antiques”). What kinds of pieces are up for sale? A recent search revealed that 43 percent of the works of art on offer are prints and another 9 percent are posters. When asked about the median value of the pieces sold on eBay, Bridges said that while “it is difficult to say” there is “a huge number in the $5 to $20 range.” Yet, she said there is considerable activity all the way up to the $500 mark, and, she added, this range is “the sweet spot for dealers on eBay.” She wants galleries to view eBay as “a great place to increase liquidity,” and she may attend this month’s Artexpo show to investigate potential alliances.

The phrase “increased liquidity” reveals Bridges’ MBA background. She has also worked in marketing at Sotheby’s. Thus, she is in a unique place to comment on the ill-fated alliance Sotheby’s formed with eBay before closing its online auction division.

“We thought it was a great relationship from our [eBay’s] end, but it was difficult for Sotheby’s,” she said. Part of the reason may have been the discrepancy between the levels of material typically offered on the two sites. According to an analyst’s estimates, at the time the alliance was announced, the average eBay sale was approximately $60, while Sothebys.com was 20 times higher.

Different Strokes

So, is the eBay model now the only option for auctioning fine art online? First of all, eBay does seem to have fought off its mega rivals, Amazon and Yahoo, at least in the art field. Recent searches of art offerings on these two sites yielded relatively few listings. Furthermore, Amazon once committed an art world faux pas by allowing someone to list a piece of garage-sale-caliber art for $100,000. This is one of the perils of the company’s hands-off approach there is no screening and no editorializing–a painting listing equals a toner cartridge listing equals a house listing.

Such an attitude does not find favor with much of the art world. In the words of Steve Moses, president of fineart.com, a multi-purpose art site with an auction component, “One of the beautiful things about art is that it is not a commodity item.” Thus, a number of online auction sites have sprung up catering specifically to the needs of the art market, and they have tried to set themselves apart from eBay in a number of ways.

First of all, the founders of these sites want to show respect for the works of art. In the words of Kip Walraven, president of online auction site Fine Arts Bid (www.fineartsbid.com), his consignors fear “getting lost ha the mix” on eBay. That is an important concern for some of his sellers, he said, most of whom used to be associated with Sothebys.com. For example, search eBay for the word “oil,” and the hit list may put a 1914 Chagall painting cheek by jowl with a quart of Pennzoil. He added that “you will get nickel-and-dimed if you list free works with eBay.” He fears that the mentality of its typical buyer would be incompatible with that of the typical art vendor.

Specialist art auction sites that have cropped up seem to focus only on highly desirable works. iGavel founder Lark Mason (yet another Sotheby’s veteran) declared that his firm’s watchword is “selectivity.” At Sothebys.com, he worked with the dealer associates who consigned pieces for sale. In time, he recognized that that they were all too often simply reoffering goods that they themselves had previously purchased at auction. They were just recycling the dead stock which had failed to sell in their galleries. He now prefers to work with small brick-and-mortar auction houses and other consignment centers. The goal is to bring to the Internet pieces that have been sitting untouched “in grandma’s attic.”

Not only should the works offered on online auction sites be fresh to the market, but, according to Moses, they should be by artists with name recognition. “Unknown artists do not fare well at auction,” he said, and Mason added that this is not even a proper venue for up-and-coming painters. “Most Contemporary art does not fare well on the resale market,” he said. “It does not have much of a track record.”

Name recognition goes hand-in-hand with premium pricing, and it is therefore unsurprising that online fine art auction sites have targeted mid- to high-value items.

Walraven revealed that he see Fine Arts Bid’s target price range as $500 to $3,000. According to Robert Rogal, director of Long Island City, N.Y.-based Ro Gallery, which sells art online through its site, Rogallery.com, eBay loses ground to the specialist sites because it focuses too much on lower-priced items. He thinks eBay should have a $500-and-up department in order to lend it more exclusivity. When his firm holds Internet auctions, the average price per item is $1,000.

It is becoming ever more important for the photo experts at the top auction houses to persuade important collectors to consign top-flight collections. Last year, in a major embarrassment for Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the upstart Phillips won the right to sell the Seagram’s collection and subsequently walked off with the season’s top honors. This season, Sotheby’s struck gold with two major single-owner sales of its own.

Sotheby’s strikes gold while Christie’s sales are off.

On April 27, Sotheby’s held a sale entitled “Important Photographs from a Private Collection.” Of significance is the fact that it held the sale on that night in April, perhaps trying to emulate the powerful Impressionist and Modern paintings department. (Their top sales are ticket-only evening events comparable to glitzy Hollywood movie openings.) When the auction houses try to woo collectors away from each other, the promise of such an over-the-top production is a powerful lure.

Evidently, the ploy worked. It lured a standing-room only crowd that bid very aggressively–so aggressively, in fact, that nine out of every 10 pieces sold over-estimate.

Each and every one of the 43 pieces sold, and the auction brought in $3.9 million, 60 percent more than the estimate. The top lot at the sale was the disquieting Diane Arbus masterpiece, “Identical Twins (Cathleen and Colleen), Roselle, N.J.”

“Disquieting” might be an understatement; according to Sotheby’s, it served “as inspiration for the recurring motif of twin girls that appears throughout Stanley Kubrick’s film, ‘The Shining.’” Originally expected to bring $250,000 to $350,000, it ultimately sold to an anonymous private collector for $478,400, a new auction record for Arbus.

Another record was set when Walker Evans’ “Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta,” sold to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York for $198,400. This price is somewhat baffling, as this very work had sold just two years earlier at Sotheby’s for only $95,600. This represents a 100 percent increase in two years–quite an enviable return on investment. The last of the three records set that night was for Robert Frank, when an image of his 1956 photograph “Chicago” realized $131,200; more than four times its high estimate of $30,000.

The second single-owner sale held at Sotheby’s this season carried the following unwieldy title, “The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins ‘New Series’ Photographs of Yosemite.” The set is remarkable in that it comprises 40 125-year-old mammoth photographs in “superb condition.”

In fact, finding any Watkins pieces at all is difficult, according to the head of Sotheby’s photographs department, Denise Bethel. “He lost his life’s work twice,” says Bethel. Once, when he was forced to turn over his entire stock of negatives to I. W. Taber, a rival photographic publisher, and then when the fires following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed his ‘New Series’ views.”

The 40 photographs were purchased by Gordon Bennett in a rare book store in San Francisco in 1967. He found them hidden on the store’s bottom shelves. One might hope that the shop’s owner, who had priced them at $25 each, or less, is not around to read that the set brought $2 million, far exceeding its high estimate of $1,406,000. The top lot was “Aggasiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point,” which sold to the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for a record price of $310,400.

As for the main mixed-owners auction, the results were somewhat less extraordinary.

The sale totaled $2,795,200, (below the high estimate of $2.9 million), and approximately 20 percent of the 179 works on offer went unsold. Frankly, this may be a more accurate gauge of the general state of the photo market. It seems that when exceptional collections appear, so do exceptional buyers, which explains the phenomenal success of the two Sotheby sales. For those in the real world trying to sell typical items, the reception is not quite as enthusiastic.

Four works in the sale broke the $100,000 mark, and, interestingly, three of them were taken by the lovers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. The one Modotti, “Bandolier, Corn, and Guitar,” which sold for $120,000, is a politically charged piece intended to evoke thoughts of the Mexican revolution. The other two $100,000-plus pieces, still lifes by Weston, are far less radical: “Pepper (3P)” (which also brought $120,000) and “Shells” (which brought the highest price at the sale, $232,000).

It is, however, a tribute to Weston’s genius that, at one time, he could make even a still life appear revolutionary. When the arts journal “Forma” published Weston’ still life of a toilet bowl entitled “Excusado,” the Mexican government was so incensed that it ceased funding the publication, causing it to close down. In general, Weston featured quite prominently this season. In all, he was responsible for more than $900,000 of the Sotheby’s total this spring. Furthermore, over at Christie’s, four of this works earned spots in the top 10. Yet, even their success could not keep Christie’s from being trounced this season.

Hardin’s cousin by marriage, James Miller, known as “Killing Jim,” had requested legal assistance in a case involving armed altercations with Sheriff G.A. (Bud) Frazier. In two shooting incidents, Miller had survived being shot by Frazier, thanks to a steel plate insert placed by Miller in his clothing. Their feud, which began in 1891, eventually resulted in the death of Frazier, murdered by Miller in 1896.

Hardin had responded to requests from Miller to prosecute Frazer in court, having been shot by the latter in April and in December, 1894. Trial was scheduled for April of 1895, in El Paso; Frazer had been arrested that December. Tiring of the wait, Miller eventually killed Frazer.

Miller was known as “the most dangerous man that ever lived,” according to an acquaintance, Dee Harvey. In 1908, Miller would be the prime suspect in the murder of Pat Garrett, killer of Billy The Kid. In 1909 Miller was lynched, after he killed a rancher in Ada, Oklahoma.

Court records show John Wesley Hardin was carrying a Colt Lightning Model 1877, serial number 84304 and an Elgin watch, serial number 4069110, when he was shot and killed on August 19, 1895. The revolver and the watch had been presented to Hardin in appreciation for his legal efforts on behalf of Miller in his trial for murdering Frazer. That trial lasted from April 8 to 14, 1895, ending in the jury being deadlocked.

The Colt, (with a .38 caliber, 2 1/2″ barrel) is nickel-plated, with blued hammer, trigger and screws. The back-strap is hand-engraved: “J.B.M. TO J.W.H.” It wears mother-of-pearl grips.

The Lightning is recorded in Colt factory ledgers as shipped on July 16, 1891, to Hartley & Graham, New York City, with five like guns in the shipment.

The Colt is accompanied with a tooled leather holster, marked with a barely visible stamp of an El Paso maker. The hunting case pocket watch by Elgin is a 14 karat, gold-filled, lever set, inscribed on the front: “April/7th/1895.” The inscription on the top of the inside lid reads: “J.W. HARDIN/From/J.B .MILLER.” There is also a gold-plated brass chain, with a fob of a liberty head penny, with the date 1853 (the year of Hardin’s birth).

The set includes a mounted photograph of Miller and Hardin, likely at the time of the presentation of the revolver and watch. The photograph is marked: “Simpson/602 Main St./Ft. Worth, Tex.”

The original John W. Hardin, Esq. business card and, “The Life of John Wesley Hardin From the Original Manuscript, As Written by Himself” (1896) rounds out this rare and historically significant bit of Americana.

Our thanks to Greg Martin Auctions for supplying photos and information. Phone: (800) 509-1988; www.gmartin-auctions.com

Note: Property documented in inventory of Jon Wesley Hardin estate, recorded at the time of the outlow’s death in 1895. To quote: “1.38 Colt Pistol (84304), While handle./1 watch, Elgin, on movement (4069110)

Condition: Revolver excellent, with 75-80% finish remaining; some flaking on frame and cylinder, 75% blue on trigger and hammer. tiny nick on toe of left panel of pearl grips. Minor wear on holster.

Six years ago, Sotheby’s entered the online auction market. One hundred million dollars later, it stumbled out, bruised and beaten. While it didn’t work for the big gun, several startup specialty sites–and one powerhouse–are working to refine the online art auction game.

Surely, if any other company were to have a shot at online art auction success, it would be eBay. In the words of Lara Bridges, the company’s category manager for art and antiques, the San Jose, Calif.-based site can open up a showroom to 80 million people.

On a typical day, eBay has a quarter of a million pieces listed under “art” alone, (and another quarter million under “antiques”). What kinds of pieces are up for sale? A recent search revealed that 43 percent of the works of art on offer are prints and another 9 percent are posters. When asked about the median value of the pieces sold on eBay, Bridges said that while “it is difficult to say” there is “a huge number in the $5 to $20 range.” Yet, she said there is considerable activity all the way up to the $500 mark, and, she added, this range is “the sweet spot for dealers on eBay.” She wants galleries to view eBay as “a great place to increase liquidity,” and she may attend this month’s Artexpo show to investigate potential alliances.

The phrase “increased liquidity” reveals Bridges’ MBA background. She has also worked in marketing at Sotheby’s. Thus, she is in a unique place to comment on the ill-fated alliance Sotheby’s formed with eBay before closing its online auction division.

“We thought it was a great relationship from our [eBay’s] end, but it was difficult for Sotheby’s,” she said. Part of the reason may have been the discrepancy between the levels of material typically offered on the two sites. According to an analyst’s estimates, at the time the alliance was announced, the average eBay sale was approximately $60, while Sothebys.com was 20 times higher.

Different Strokes

So, is the eBay model now the only option for auctioning fine art online? First of all, eBay does seem to have fought off its mega rivals, Amazon and Yahoo, at least in the art field. Recent searches of art offerings on these two sites yielded relatively few listings. Furthermore, Amazon once committed an art world faux pas by allowing someone to list a piece of garage-sale-caliber art for $100,000. This is one of the perils of the company’s hands-off approach there is no screening and no editorializing–a painting listing equals a toner cartridge listing equals a house listing.

Such an attitude does not find favor with much of the art world. In the words of Steve Moses, president of fineart.com, a multi-purpose art site with an auction component, “One of the beautiful things about art is that it is not a commodity item.” Thus, a number of online auction sites have sprung up catering specifically to the needs of the art market, and they have tried to set themselves apart from eBay in a number of ways.

First of all, the founders of these sites want to show respect for the works of art. In the words of Kip Walraven, president of online auction site Fine Arts Bid (www.fineartsbid.com), his consignors fear “getting lost ha the mix” on eBay. That is an important concern for some of his sellers, he said, most of whom used to be associated with Sothebys.com. For example, search eBay for the word “oil,” and the hit list may put a 1914 Chagall painting cheek by jowl with a quart of Pennzoil. He added that “you will get nickel-and-dimed if you list free works with eBay.” He fears that the mentality of its typical buyer would be incompatible with that of the typical art vendor.

Specialist art auction sites that have cropped up seem to focus only on highly desirable works. iGavel founder Lark Mason (yet another Sotheby’s veteran) declared that his firm’s watchword is “selectivity.” At Sothebys.com, he worked with the dealer associates who consigned pieces for sale. In time, he recognized that that they were all too often simply reoffering goods that they themselves had previously purchased at auction. They were just recycling the dead stock which had failed to sell in their galleries. He now prefers to work with small brick-and-mortar auction houses and other consignment centers. The goal is to bring to the Internet pieces that have been sitting untouched “in grandma’s attic.”

Not only should the works offered on online auction sites be fresh to the market, but, according to Moses, they should be by artists with name recognition. “Unknown artists do not fare well at auction,” he said, and Mason added that this is not even a proper venue for up-and-coming painters. “Most Contemporary art does not fare well on the resale market,” he said. “It does not have much of a track record.”

Name recognition goes hand-in-hand with premium pricing, and it is therefore unsurprising that online fine art auction sites have targeted mid- to high-value items.

Walraven revealed that he see Fine Arts Bid’s target price range as $500 to $3,000. According to Robert Rogal, director of Long Island City, N.Y.-based Ro Gallery, which sells art online through its site, Rogallery.com, eBay loses ground to the specialist sites because it focuses too much on lower-priced items. He thinks eBay should have a $500-and-up department in order to lend it more exclusivity. When his firm holds Internet auctions, the average price per item is $1,000.

It is becoming ever more important for the photo experts at the top auction houses to persuade important collectors to consign top-flight collections. Last year, in a major embarrassment for Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the upstart Phillips won the right to sell the Seagram’s collection and subsequently walked off with the season’s top honors. This season, Sotheby’s struck gold with two major single-owner sales of its own.

Sotheby’s strikes gold while Christie’s sales are off.

On April 27, Sotheby’s held a sale entitled “Important Photographs from a Private Collection.” Of significance is the fact that it held the sale on that night in April, perhaps trying to emulate the powerful Impressionist and Modern paintings department. (Their top sales are ticket-only evening events comparable to glitzy Hollywood movie openings.) When the auction houses try to woo collectors away from each other, the promise of such an over-the-top production is a powerful lure.

Evidently, the ploy worked. It lured a standing-room only crowd that bid very aggressively–so aggressively, in fact, that nine out of every 10 pieces sold over-estimate.

Each and every one of the 43 pieces sold, and the auction brought in $3.9 million, 60 percent more than the estimate. The top lot at the sale was the disquieting Diane Arbus masterpiece, “Identical Twins (Cathleen and Colleen), Roselle, N.J.”

“Disquieting” might be an understatement; according to Sotheby’s, it served “as inspiration for the recurring motif of twin girls that appears throughout Stanley Kubrick’s film, ‘The Shining.’” Originally expected to bring $250,000 to $350,000, it ultimately sold to an anonymous private collector for $478,400, a new auction record for Arbus.

Another record was set when Walker Evans’ “Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta,” sold to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York for $198,400. This price is somewhat baffling, as this very work had sold just two years earlier at Sotheby’s for only $95,600. This represents a 100 percent increase in two years–quite an enviable return on investment. The last of the three records set that night was for Robert Frank, when an image of his 1956 photograph “Chicago” realized $131,200; more than four times its high estimate of $30,000.

The second single-owner sale held at Sotheby’s this season carried the following unwieldy title, “The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins ‘New Series’ Photographs of Yosemite.” The set is remarkable in that it comprises 40 125-year-old mammoth photographs in “superb condition.”

In fact, finding any Watkins pieces at all is difficult, according to the head of Sotheby’s photographs department, Denise Bethel. “He lost his life’s work twice,” says Bethel. Once, when he was forced to turn over his entire stock of negatives to I. W. Taber, a rival photographic publisher, and then when the fires following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed his ‘New Series’ views.”

The 40 photographs were purchased by Gordon Bennett in a rare book store in San Francisco in 1967. He found them hidden on the store’s bottom shelves. One might hope that the shop’s owner, who had priced them at $25 each, or less, is not around to read that the set brought $2 million, far exceeding its high estimate of $1,406,000. The top lot was “Aggasiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point,” which sold to the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for a record price of $310,400.

As for the main mixed-owners auction, the results were somewhat less extraordinary.

The sale totaled $2,795,200, (below the high estimate of $2.9 million), and approximately 20 percent of the 179 works on offer went unsold. Frankly, this may be a more accurate gauge of the general state of the photo market. It seems that when exceptional collections appear, so do exceptional buyers, which explains the phenomenal success of the two Sotheby sales. For those in the real world trying to sell typical items, the reception is not quite as enthusiastic.

Four works in the sale broke the $100,000 mark, and, interestingly, three of them were taken by the lovers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. The one Modotti, “Bandolier, Corn, and Guitar,” which sold for $120,000, is a politically charged piece intended to evoke thoughts of the Mexican revolution. The other two $100,000-plus pieces, still lifes by Weston, are far less radical: “Pepper (3P)” (which also brought $120,000) and “Shells” (which brought the highest price at the sale, $232,000).

It is, however, a tribute to Weston’s genius that, at one time, he could make even a still life appear revolutionary. When the arts journal “Forma” published Weston’ still life of a toilet bowl entitled “Excusado,” the Mexican government was so incensed that it ceased funding the publication, causing it to close down. In general, Weston featured quite prominently this season. In all, he was responsible for more than $900,000 of the Sotheby’s total this spring. Furthermore, over at Christie’s, four of this works earned spots in the top 10. Yet, even their success could not keep Christie’s from being trounced this season.

Six years ago, Sotheby’s entered the online auction market. One hundred million dollars later, it stumbled out, bruised and beaten. While it didn’t work for the big gun, several startup specialty sites–and one powerhouse–are working to refine the online art auction game.

Surely, if any other company were to have a shot at online art auction success, it would be eBay. In the words of Lara Bridges, the company’s category manager for art and antiques, the San Jose, Calif.-based site can open up a showroom to 80 million people.

On a typical day, eBay has a quarter of a million pieces listed under “art” alone, (and another quarter million under “antiques”). What kinds of pieces are up for sale? A recent search revealed that 43 percent of the works of art on offer are prints and another 9 percent are posters. When asked about the median value of the pieces sold on eBay, Bridges said that while “it is difficult to say” there is “a huge number in the $5 to $20 range.” Yet, she said there is considerable activity all the way up to the $500 mark, and, she added, this range is “the sweet spot for dealers on eBay.” She wants galleries to view eBay as “a great place to increase liquidity,” and she may attend this month’s Artexpo show to investigate potential alliances.

The phrase “increased liquidity” reveals Bridges’ MBA background. She has also worked in marketing at Sotheby’s. Thus, she is in a unique place to comment on the ill-fated alliance Sotheby’s formed with eBay before closing its online auction division.

“We thought it was a great relationship from our [eBay’s] end, but it was difficult for Sotheby’s,” she said. Part of the reason may have been the discrepancy between the levels of material typically offered on the two sites. According to an analyst’s estimates, at the time the alliance was announced, the average eBay sale was approximately $60, while Sothebys.com was 20 times higher.

Different Strokes

So, is the eBay model now the only option for auctioning fine art online? First of all, eBay does seem to have fought off its mega rivals, Amazon and Yahoo, at least in the art field. Recent searches of art offerings on these two sites yielded relatively few listings. Furthermore, Amazon once committed an art world faux pas by allowing someone to list a piece of garage-sale-caliber art for $100,000. This is one of the perils of the company’s hands-off approach there is no screening and no editorializing–a painting listing equals a toner cartridge listing equals a house listing.

Such an attitude does not find favor with much of the art world. In the words of Steve Moses, president of fineart.com, a multi-purpose art site with an auction component, “One of the beautiful things about art is that it is not a commodity item.” Thus, a number of online auction sites have sprung up catering specifically to the needs of the art market, and they have tried to set themselves apart from eBay in a number of ways.

First of all, the founders of these sites want to show respect for the works of art. In the words of Kip Walraven, president of online auction site Fine Arts Bid (www.fineartsbid.com), his consignors fear “getting lost ha the mix” on eBay. That is an important concern for some of his sellers, he said, most of whom used to be associated with Sothebys.com. For example, search eBay for the word “oil,” and the hit list may put a 1914 Chagall painting cheek by jowl with a quart of Pennzoil. He added that “you will get nickel-and-dimed if you list free works with eBay.” He fears that the mentality of its typical buyer would be incompatible with that of the typical art vendor.

Specialist art auction sites that have cropped up seem to focus only on highly desirable works. iGavel founder Lark Mason (yet another Sotheby’s veteran) declared that his firm’s watchword is “selectivity.” At Sothebys.com, he worked with the dealer associates who consigned pieces for sale. In time, he recognized that that they were all too often simply reoffering goods that they themselves had previously purchased at auction. They were just recycling the dead stock which had failed to sell in their galleries. He now prefers to work with small brick-and-mortar auction houses and other consignment centers. The goal is to bring to the Internet pieces that have been sitting untouched “in grandma’s attic.”

Not only should the works offered on online auction sites be fresh to the market, but, according to Moses, they should be by artists with name recognition. “Unknown artists do not fare well at auction,” he said, and Mason added that this is not even a proper venue for up-and-coming painters. “Most Contemporary art does not fare well on the resale market,” he said. “It does not have much of a track record.”

Name recognition goes hand-in-hand with premium pricing, and it is therefore unsurprising that online fine art auction sites have targeted mid- to high-value items.

Walraven revealed that he see Fine Arts Bid’s target price range as $500 to $3,000. According to Robert Rogal, director of Long Island City, N.Y.-based Ro Gallery, which sells art online through its site, Rogallery.com, eBay loses ground to the specialist sites because it focuses too much on lower-priced items. He thinks eBay should have a $500-and-up department in order to lend it more exclusivity. When his firm holds Internet auctions, the average price per item is $1,000.

It is becoming ever more important for the photo experts at the top auction houses to persuade important collectors to consign top-flight collections. Last year, in a major embarrassment for Sotheby’s and Christie’s, the upstart Phillips won the right to sell the Seagram’s collection and subsequently walked off with the season’s top honors. This season, Sotheby’s struck gold with two major single-owner sales of its own.

Sotheby’s strikes gold while Christie’s sales are off.

On April 27, Sotheby’s held a sale entitled “Important Photographs from a Private Collection.” Of significance is the fact that it held the sale on that night in April, perhaps trying to emulate the powerful Impressionist and Modern paintings department. (Their top sales are ticket-only evening events comparable to glitzy Hollywood movie openings.) When the auction houses try to woo collectors away from each other, the promise of such an over-the-top production is a powerful lure.

Evidently, the ploy worked. It lured a standing-room only crowd that bid very aggressively–so aggressively, in fact, that nine out of every 10 pieces sold over-estimate.

Each and every one of the 43 pieces sold, and the auction brought in $3.9 million, 60 percent more than the estimate. The top lot at the sale was the disquieting Diane Arbus masterpiece, “Identical Twins (Cathleen and Colleen), Roselle, N.J.”

“Disquieting” might be an understatement; according to Sotheby’s, it served “as inspiration for the recurring motif of twin girls that appears throughout Stanley Kubrick’s film, ‘The Shining.’” Originally expected to bring $250,000 to $350,000, it ultimately sold to an anonymous private collector for $478,400, a new auction record for Arbus.

Another record was set when Walker Evans’ “Negro Barbershop Interior, Atlanta,” sold to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York for $198,400. This price is somewhat baffling, as this very work had sold just two years earlier at Sotheby’s for only $95,600. This represents a 100 percent increase in two years–quite an enviable return on investment. The last of the three records set that night was for Robert Frank, when an image of his 1956 photograph “Chicago” realized $131,200; more than four times its high estimate of $30,000.

The second single-owner sale held at Sotheby’s this season carried the following unwieldy title, “The Gordon L. Bennett Collection of Carleton Watkins ‘New Series’ Photographs of Yosemite.” The set is remarkable in that it comprises 40 125-year-old mammoth photographs in “superb condition.”

In fact, finding any Watkins pieces at all is difficult, according to the head of Sotheby’s photographs department, Denise Bethel. “He lost his life’s work twice,” says Bethel. Once, when he was forced to turn over his entire stock of negatives to I. W. Taber, a rival photographic publisher, and then when the fires following the San Francisco earthquake destroyed his ‘New Series’ views.”

The 40 photographs were purchased by Gordon Bennett in a rare book store in San Francisco in 1967. He found them hidden on the store’s bottom shelves. One might hope that the shop’s owner, who had priced them at $25 each, or less, is not around to read that the set brought $2 million, far exceeding its high estimate of $1,406,000. The top lot was “Aggasiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, From Union Point,” which sold to the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco for a record price of $310,400.

As for the main mixed-owners auction, the results were somewhat less extraordinary.

The sale totaled $2,795,200, (below the high estimate of $2.9 million), and approximately 20 percent of the 179 works on offer went unsold. Frankly, this may be a more accurate gauge of the general state of the photo market. It seems that when exceptional collections appear, so do exceptional buyers, which explains the phenomenal success of the two Sotheby sales. For those in the real world trying to sell typical items, the reception is not quite as enthusiastic.

Four works in the sale broke the $100,000 mark, and, interestingly, three of them were taken by the lovers Tina Modotti and Edward Weston. The one Modotti, “Bandolier, Corn, and Guitar,” which sold for $120,000, is a politically charged piece intended to evoke thoughts of the Mexican revolution. The other two $100,000-plus pieces, still lifes by Weston, are far less radical: “Pepper (3P)” (which also brought $120,000) and “Shells” (which brought the highest price at the sale, $232,000).

It is, however, a tribute to Weston’s genius that, at one time, he could make even a still life appear revolutionary. When the arts journal “Forma” published Weston’ still life of a toilet bowl entitled “Excusado,” the Mexican government was so incensed that it ceased funding the publication, causing it to close down. In general, Weston featured quite prominently this season. In all, he was responsible for more than $900,000 of the Sotheby’s total this spring. Furthermore, over at Christie’s, four of this works earned spots in the top 10. Yet, even their success could not keep Christie’s from being trounced this season.

Hardin’s cousin by marriage, James Miller, known as “Killing Jim,” had requested legal assistance in a case involving armed altercations with Sheriff G.A. (Bud) Frazier. In two shooting incidents, Miller had survived being shot by Frazier, thanks to a steel plate insert placed by Miller in his clothing. Their feud, which began in 1891, eventually resulted in the death of Frazier, murdered by Miller in 1896.

Hardin had responded to requests from Miller to prosecute Frazer in court, having been shot by the latter in April and in December, 1894. Trial was scheduled for April of 1895, in El Paso; Frazer had been arrested that December. Tiring of the wait, Miller eventually killed Frazer.

Miller was known as “the most dangerous man that ever lived,” according to an acquaintance, Dee Harvey. In 1908, Miller would be the prime suspect in the murder of Pat Garrett, killer of Billy The Kid. In 1909 Miller was lynched, after he killed a rancher in Ada, Oklahoma.

Court records show John Wesley Hardin was carrying a Colt Lightning Model 1877, serial number 84304 and an Elgin watch, serial number 4069110, when he was shot and killed on August 19, 1895. The revolver and the watch had been presented to Hardin in appreciation for his legal efforts on behalf of Miller in his trial for murdering Frazer. That trial lasted from April 8 to 14, 1895, ending in the jury being deadlocked.
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The Colt, (with a .38 caliber, 2 1/2″ barrel) is nickel-plated, with blued hammer, trigger and screws. The back-strap is hand-engraved: “J.B.M. TO J.W.H.” It wears mother-of-pearl grips.

The Lightning is recorded in Colt factory ledgers as shipped on July 16, 1891, to Hartley & Graham, New York City, with five like guns in the shipment.

The Colt is accompanied with a tooled leather holster, marked with a barely visible stamp of an El Paso maker. The hunting case pocket watch by Elgin is a 14 karat, gold-filled, lever set, inscribed on the front: “April/7th/1895.” The inscription on the top of the inside lid reads: “J.W. HARDIN/From/J.B .MILLER.” There is also a gold-plated brass chain, with a fob of a liberty head penny, with the date 1853 (the year of Hardin’s birth).

The set includes a mounted photograph of Miller and Hardin, likely at the time of the presentation of the revolver and watch. The photograph is marked: “Simpson/602 Main St./Ft. Worth, Tex.”

The original John W. Hardin, Esq. business card and, “The Life of John Wesley Hardin From the Original Manuscript, As Written by Himself” (1896) rounds out this rare and historically significant bit of Americana.

Our thanks to Greg Martin Auctions for supplying photos and information. Phone: (800) 509-1988; www.gmartin-auctions.com

Note: Property documented in inventory of Jon Wesley Hardin estate, recorded at the time of the outlow’s death in 1895. To quote: “1.38 Colt Pistol (84304), While handle./1 watch, Elgin, on movement (4069110)

Condition: Revolver excellent, with 75-80% finish remaining; some flaking on frame and cylinder, 75% blue on trigger and hammer. tiny nick on toe of left panel of pearl grips. Minor wear on holster.

Six years ago, Sotheby’s entered the online auction market. One hundred million dollars later, it stumbled out, bruised and beaten. While it didn’t work for the big gun, several startup specialty sites–and one powerhouse–are working to refine the online art auction game.

Surely, if any other company were to have a shot at online art auction success, it would be eBay. In the words of Lara Bridges, the company’s category manager for art and antiques, the San Jose, Calif.-based site can open up a showroom to 80 million people.

On a typical day, eBay has a quarter of a million pieces listed under “art” alone, (and another quarter million under “antiques”). What kinds of pieces are up for sale? A recent search revealed that 43 percent of the works of art on offer are prints and another 9 percent are posters. When asked about the median value of the pieces sold on eBay, Bridges said that while “it is difficult to say” there is “a huge number in the $5 to $20 range.” Yet, she said there is considerable activity all the way up to the $500 mark, and, she added, this range is “the sweet spot for dealers on eBay.” She wants galleries to view eBay as “a great place to increase liquidity,” and she may attend this month’s Artexpo show to investigate potential alliances.

The phrase “increased liquidity” reveals Bridges’ MBA background. She has also worked in marketing at Sotheby’s. Thus, she is in a unique place to comment on the ill-fated alliance Sotheby’s formed with eBay before closing its online auction division.
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“We thought it was a great relationship from our [eBay’s] end, but it was difficult for Sotheby’s,” she said. Part of the reason may have been the discrepancy between the levels of material typically offered on the two sites. According to an analyst’s estimates, at the time the alliance was announced, the average eBay sale was approximately $60, while Sothebys.com was 20 times higher.

Different Strokes

So, is the eBay model now the only option for auctioning fine art online? First of all, eBay does seem to have fought off its mega rivals, Amazon and Yahoo, at least in the art field. Recent searches of art offerings on these two sites yielded relatively few listings. Furthermore, Amazon once committed an art world faux pas by allowing someone to list a piece of garage-sale-caliber art for $100,000. This is one of the perils of the company’s hands-off approach there is no screening and no editorializing–a painting listing equals a toner cartridge listing equals a house listing.

Such an attitude does not find favor with much of the art world. In the words of Steve Moses, president of fineart.com, a multi-purpose art site with an auction component, “One of the beautiful things about art is that it is not a commodity item.” Thus, a number of online auction sites have sprung up catering specifically to the needs of the art market, and they have tried to set themselves apart from eBay in a number of ways.

First of all, the founders of these sites want to show respect for the works of art. In the words of Kip Walraven, president of online auction site Fine Arts Bid (www.fineartsbid.com), his consignors fear “getting lost ha the mix” on eBay. That is an important concern for some of his sellers, he said, most of whom used to be associated with Sothebys.com. For example, search eBay for the word “oil,” and the hit list may put a 1914 Chagall painting cheek by jowl with a quart of Pennzoil. He added that “you will get nickel-and-dimed if you list free works with eBay.” He fears that the mentality of its typical buyer would be incompatible with that of the typical art vendor.

Specialist art auction sites that have cropped up seem to focus only on highly desirable works. iGavel founder Lark Mason (yet another Sotheby’s veteran) declared that his firm’s watchword is “selectivity.” At Sothebys.com, he worked with the dealer associates who consigned pieces for sale. In time, he recognized that that they were all too often simply reoffering goods that they themselves had previously purchased at auction. They were just recycling the dead stock which had failed to sell in their galleries. He now prefers to work with small brick-and-mortar auction houses and other consignment centers. The goal is to bring to the Internet pieces that have been sitting untouched “in grandma’s attic.”

Not only should the works offered on online auction sites be fresh to the market, but, according to Moses, they should be by artists with name recognition. “Unknown artists do not fare well at auction,” he said, and Mason added that this is not even a proper venue for up-and-coming painters. “Most Contemporary art does not fare well on the resale market,” he said. “It does not have much of a track record.”

Name recognition goes hand-in-hand with premium pricing, and it is therefore unsurprising that online fine art auction sites have targeted mid- to high-value items.

Walraven revealed that he see Fine Arts Bid’s target price range as $500 to $3,000. According to Robert Rogal, director of Long Island City, N.Y.-based Ro Gallery, which sells art online through its site, Rogallery.com, eBay loses ground to the specialist sites because it focuses too much on lower-priced items. He thinks eBay should have a $500-and-up department in order to lend it more exclusivity. When his firm holds Internet auctions, the average price per item is $1,000.