Jayne Wrightsman, the famously private philanthropist, is allowing a glimpse of her home life. Ms. Wrightsman, the 90-year-old oil heiress, is emptying out her London duplex apartment, the contents of which have been shipped to Sotheby’s in New York for an auction on Wednesday. A preview revealed how her staff pampered guests with fine linens and china, and what lighthearted motifs course through her rarified French antiques.
She and her husband, Charles, an Oklahoma oil tycoon who died in 1986, spent decades acquiring French furniture ? and donating roomfuls of it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Wrightsman Galleries for French Decorative Arts, a suite of period rooms lined in salvaged paneling, are among the Met’s most vivid evocations of history. Simulated candles in rock crystal chandeliers flicker over pre-French Revolution gilded armchairs clustered as if in readiness for aristocrats’ whispered anxieties. Mrs. Wrightsman’s London apartment, a few blocks from Buckingham Palace, was only slightly less regal-looking than her galleries at the Met.
French court artisans produced many of the apartment’s objects. Jean-François Oeben, the maker of her 1760s mahogany commode (estimated at $30,000 to $50,000), supplied at least 17 similar ones for Madame de Pompadour’s quarters. The leather book bindings in Mrs. Wrightsman’s library bear the stamps of Russian and French counts, and her 1770s dining chairs with scrollwork legs ($50,000 to $80,000 for her dozen) have twins at Fontainebleau palace.
Mrs. Wrightsman humanized the apartment somewhat with feather patterns, which are molded into her Art Nouveau earthenware umbrella stand ($1,000 to $1,500) and stitched into velvety green upholstery on a canapé with flared arms ($25,000 to $35,000) and a five-legged gilded chair ($20,000 to $30,000). She collected peacock feather fans ($400 to $600 for a pair) and amassed about 500 loose feathers ($1,200 to $1,800 for an armload).
Sotheby’s has cleared out her china cabinets (Louis-Philippe’s 1840s Sèvres dinner service is estimated at $30,000 to $50,000) and her linen closets, filled with ruffled canopies that cascaded over her beds ($3,000 to $6,000, complete with Porthault pillowcases). Her 1760s dog kennels are for sale, as well ($25,000 to $35,000 for a pair). No dog seems to have ever dared scratch the gilded doorways, or left a hair or stain on the 18th-century green silk curtains embroidered with flowering vines.
Parents a century ago could persuade themselves that the newest toys were educational, since the boxes showed historically accurate battlefield scenes dating back to medieval sieges on moated citadels. The boxes held stacks of cutout paper and cardboard soldiers, wearing uniforms from dozens of countries and wielding rifles, sabers or cannon barrels.
The toys did not hold up well; the soldiers’ necks and weapons were especially likely to snap. But the fragility did not discourage Edward Ryan, the field’s best-known collector, who owned legions of two-dimensional regiments and wrote a comprehensive 1995 guide, “Paper Soldiers: The Illustrated History of Printed Paper Armies of the 18th, 19th and 20th Centuries.”
On Saturday, Philip Weiss Auctions in Oceanside, N.Y., will start selling the collection of Mr. Ryan, a retired C.I.A. officer who died in August 2009 at the age of 90. (More phases of the Ryan sale will be held later this year.) Philip Weiss, the auctioneer, knew the collector and had toured his Maryland house.
In room after room, “a lot of the soldiers were standing up on shelves,” Mr. Weiss said. “It was all displayed beautifully.”
According to Mr. Ryan’s obituary in The Washington Post he started acquiring toy soldiers in the 1920s, “an interest fueled by reading pulp adventure stories about World War I.” He built up the collection while traveling on C.I.A. assignments and branched into metal, wood and composition toys. He fabricated his own paper sets as well, by hand-coloring small vintage illustrations of soldiers’ uniforms and posting the cutouts on wooden blocks.
The lots in Saturday’s auction were mostly manufactured between the 1890s and 1940s, by American companies including Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers. The sets of soldiers, less than a foot tall, have gung-ho names on the box covers like “Merry War,” “Forward March!” and “Spear-Em.” The uniforms are meticulous representations of history’s best-known underdogs and doomed armies, including American Revolution troops and Napoleon’s invaders. But Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers also patriotically printed images of the active forces of their own time, from Rough Riders and doughboys through World War II paratroopers.
Mr. Ryan’s holdings even document nearly forgotten moments in the annals of military alliances and conflicts. He owned an early 1900s set from Milton Bradley showing Russian and Japanese forces during the 1904-5 struggle over Port Arthur: the bearded Russians wear gold-and-green jackets, while the Japanese infantrymen are dressed in impractical white. On Mr. Ryan’s 1940s set, optimistically named “United for Liberty/Allied Soldiers/Together They Fight,” a box label explains that it “contains United States Marines, English Guards and Russian Cossacks.” That trio, the label predicts, is “sure to bring joy into the play of every child.”
The labels suggest some proper regiment arrangements. “The soldiers should be about two inches apart, six in a row, with the captain in the lead” was Milton Bradley’s advice for its “100 Soldiers on Parade with Band” set. Toy pistols, rifles and cannons that shoot balls or dowels were sometimes included, so the bad guys could be knocked down. A 1940s set promises a “coastal artillery gun” with “patented mystic shooting mechanism,” while assuring adults that the result would be “loads of harmless fun.”
There are few illustrations of women in the sets ? mostly nurses to stand around miniature tents. The auction’s only other women are in scenes from Cinderella incongruously printed on the backs of some British infantrymen.
Mr. Weiss, the auctioneer, has placed estimates of a few hundred dollars on most of the lots. His Web site, prwauctions.com, gives mini-slideshows for each soldier set, revealing occasional condition problems: Popsicle sticks and cardboard patches reinforce the backs of some cutouts. Bidders, unfazed by the damage, sometimes concentrate on soldiers from one region, era or manufacturer. But overall the collecting pool is narrow. When the Ryan collection ends up dispersed to new owners, Mr. Weiss said, “I think everybody’s going to know each other.”
antigua & Barbuda Stamps
china cabin, london apartment, s library
A Look at Some of the Longest Running Newspaper Comic StripsAfter a long and wonderful ride, “Cathy”, the long running (34 years!) comic strip about a neurotic single gal, came to an end this past weekend. But while “Cathy” creator Cathy Guisewite may have put down her pen, there are several long running comic strips remaining that show no end in sight.
