A typically frosty January 1^st, 2015, wintry morning didn’t stop a huge crowd from filling Robert Foster’s auction gallery in Newcastle, Maine. For decades, Foster’s winter auctions have been drawing mobs of bidders. “Probably the biggest crowd we’ve ever had here,” Foster announced at the commencement of the sale.

Bidders saw a lot of “red,” as in red painted country furniture and folk art. A red and black grain painted Sheraton server, with nicely turned legs and a three-sided splash around the top, sold for $385 (with buyer’s premium). A dark red and black grain painted Sheraton one-drawer drop leaf harvest, measuring 55 ½” long, brought a respectable $550. And a simple and straight-lined Connecticut Valley Chippendale four-drawer chest in old dry red finish, with a widely overhung top, wooden knobs and a cutout bracket base topped the red paint lots. It was the best piece of country furniture in the sale, and it sold well for $1980. Near the end of the sale came a nifty red painted and carved wall box, with two rearing horses pawing an eagle and shield. The lower half had some faint gilding and an even fainter signature apparently reading “Nathan Dunellen” or “Nathan Dunmiller.” I wasn’t able to track down the name, but the little folk art gem brought $137.50.

Some other interesting folk art pieces drew solid attention without pulling out-of-reach prices. A contemporary folk art diorama sculpture by Unto Jarvi (1908-1991) showed a Finnish couple in the altogether, happily enjoying a sauna, complete with the traditional birch boughs. Jarvi left his birthplace of Saaksmaki, Finland, to join his parents in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula about 1919. He began painting and sculpting around 1959, creating figures he called “Jarvi’s Little People.” After settling in Auburn, Kentucky in 1971, he began to produce more of these diorama-type sculptures, and his works were included in a 1991 exhibition by the Owensburg Museum of Fine Art, entitled “Kentucky Spirit / The Native Tradition.” This one was signed and dated 1976, and it fetched $385.

A nicely painted sea chest appeared to be commemorating the last year of service of the Cunard Line’s RMS Campania. Having completed 250 voyages, her last scheduled passenger trip was on September 26th, 1914, after which she was to be sold for scrap. But the British Admiralty stepped in with the idea of converting her to an armed merchant cruiser. She served in that capacity, carrying up to fourteen float planes and armed with eight guns. But November of 1918, just six days before the World War I armistice was signed, she collided with the battleship Royal Oak and the cruiser Glorious in Scotland’s Firth of Forth. Her boiler exploded and she went to the bottom, where the remaining wreckage is still classified as a site of historical importance. At this sale, just over one hundred years after her last commercial voyage, the colorfully painted chest brought $247.50.

©Maine Antique Digest

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