The Thrill of the Hunt

Finding treasures in unlikely places and the people who know what to look for

by

In years of going to yard sales and estate sales, I’ve indulged my passion for cobalt-blue glass, watermelon tchotchkes, vintage fabrics, and Louisiana books and art.

I began selling on AbeBooks, an online marketplace, fifteen years ago. I had just started when I found a first edition of The Double Helix at an estate sale for seventy-five cents. Research revealed that it was scarce. I listed it at $200 and sold it immediately to a buyer on Fifth Avenue.

At a yard sale, I plucked a gorgeous bronze taffeta Vera Wang evening dress from a pile of clothes that cost a nickel apiece. I had it cleaned, consigned it to a vintage-clothing shop, and scored $165 after the shop took its fee. An estate sale yielded a never-worn 1950s polished-cotton sundress printed with cherries, with original tags still attached. I paid $2 and sold it on eBay for $127.50.

Occasionally I stumble across a real treasure. One was a signed and numbered Caroline Durieux lithograph that I spied on the floor of a garage, leaning against a bench. I recognized it immediately as a Durieux, snatched it up, and paid $3 for it. I took it to my friend Cary Long’s antiques shop, where he estimated its value at between $1,000 and $2,000. I might have sold it, but I knew I’d probably never find another Durieux, so I replaced its worn mat and put it back in the original frame. Now, some twenty years later, it is one of the jewels of my modest collection of Louisiana art.

A good eye is hard to beat—recognizing the treasure amongst the junk, grabbing it, and doing your homework. Some who make great finds turn them into cash. Others keep them. It’s always exciting to score a big profit, but what spurs the seekers is knowing that the next great find may be just around the corner. The thrill of the hunt is its own reward.

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Painter and collage artist Randell Henry was a friend of the late artist and musician Emerson Bell (1932—2006), whose work sells for big bucks. A few years ago, Henry went to the annual Jackson Assembly Antiques and Art Show. He wandered down the street to a thrift shop and found a painting by Bell, a mixed-media portrait of a woman priced at $20 (pictured left). He grabbed it and took it to the register, where the cashier announced it was half-price day. He handed over ten bucks and left happy.

Henry has collected the work of fellow artists for years and says he has enough to fill a gallery. Perhaps his most stunning find was an original signed and numbered lithograph by famed African American artist Elizabeth Catlett. He found it at an auction to benefit The Links; Catlett had created the lithograph to honor the organization of professional women of color. It depicts three women with joined hands and is titled “Links Together.” Henry bid on it at a silent auction and won it for about $150. He saw similar pieces by Catlett in a New Orleans gallery priced at about $5,000.

Henry has also found works by Van Chambers, who taught art at Southern University for years, and printmaker Max Papart, a French artist who lived part time in New Orleans. “I was flipping through a bunch of posters at a flea market when I came across it,” recalled Henry. “It was a lithograph, hand signed, worth thousands of dollars. The price tag was $200. I asked the man if he’d take $150 for it, and he did. It’s called ‘Beautiful Bird.’ He did several versions of it.”

While driving up Plank Road a few years ago, Henry spied a brightly colored painting at a parking-lot sale at a local business. He made a U-turn, went back, and found an acrylic on board by artist and musician Ayé Aton. “I was happy I stopped,” said Henry, who bought the piece for $20.

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One of the most widely recognized names among Louisiana collectors is Newcomb, particularly the pottery executed at Newcomb College by women students from about 1896 through the 1940s. Less well known are the brass pieces, including lamps, trivets, and mailboxes.

James Cole was twenty-something when he found a Newcomb lamp at a shop in Galveston. “It was an original oil lamp from about 1890 that had never been wired for electricity,” he said. “It was priced at $210. The man saw me looking at it and said, ‘I’ll take $125.’”

Cole, who was just learning the ropes, called Newcomb collector Douglas Wink, who told him to grab it. “What he actually said was, ‘Put the money in the slot machine,’” said Cole. A few years later, Cole found a Newcomb brass candlestick for $80 at a booth at the 640-acre antiques fair in Round Top, Texas.

When PBS’s Antiques Roadshow came to New Orleans in 2002, Cole scored a ticket to the event from Wink. Cole drove to New Orleans, booked a hotel room on Canal Street, and walked to the Brown Convention Center, carrying a cardboard box with his Newcomb brass pieces inside. “It took me about half an hour to walk there,” he recalled.

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He waited with hundreds of others and went through several lines before arriving at the metals table. An appraiser was summoned and agreed that Cole’s pieces were indeed the work of Newcomb artists. Cole waited to be interviewed on television about his finds. “I was 28 years old and really excited,” he said. About two hours later he stepped into a small interview room where expert Eric Silver appraised the pieces at $15,000. Cole still has them, part of his sizable collection of Newcomb art. He also has a copy of Season 7, Episode 16 of the Roadshow, with his TV appearance. 

Cole parts with his treasures reluctantly, but he did recently sell a brass mailbox he found at a yard sale. His $12 investment earned him $550 at a New Orleans auction house.

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Knowing what they were looking at resulted in a great find for Nancy and David Broussard.

Nancy, a social worker, and David, a respected furniture maker and restorer, were familiar with the Campeche chair, which they had seen illustrated in a book on Louisiana French furniture. They had also seen a real one on a visit to the Gallier House in New Orleans.

A form of “lolling chair” that originated in Spain, probably in the seventeenth century, the chair was brought to the New World in the late eighteenth century.

In 1981, Nancy was working for the Crisis Intervention Center at LSU. The center held a garage-sale fundraiser, and a volunteer donated a chair from her family camp on the Amite River. The original leather seat was long gone; the chair was covered in white Naugahyde. But Nancy recognized it as a Campeche chair.

She told David, who rushed over to check it out. He thought it was the real deal, and the price was right—$7.50—so they bought it, thinking David could take it apart and use it as a template. But it was actually pretty sturdy, so they threw an afghan over it and used it for several years. “I think it even had the word ‘sold’ scribbled on the Naugahyde,” said David.

Three years later, the Broussards sold the chair to collector Ben Kleinpeter for $1,750. "They have really gone up in value," said David, who estimated the c. 1820 chair would sell for $16,000 in today's market. He has made copies of it, citing its harmonious details. "I'm really pleased with the design of it."

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James Wilson, associate director of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press, collects Louisiana books, maps, and ephemera. When his friend Russell Desmond, owner of Arcadian Books in the French Quarter, offered him an old map, Wilson picked it up to examine it.

“It was very fragile, in pieces in a Ziploc bag,” he said of that day in 2006. “I saw what it was and said, ‘You don’t want to give me this. It’s worth a lot of money.’ Russell said, no, he couldn’t sell it. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take it.’

“I immediately knew it was some version of the Samuel Henry Lockett map because I had seen the original, larger version on display at Hill Library at LSU. Few people, including me, even knew it had also been produced as a foldout map in a book in 1873. I could see the cover of the book inside the bag.

“It was in four pieces and several little fragments. I contacted Renee Deville, a paper conservationist in New Orleans. It took her about a year to piece it back together and mount it on Japanese rice paper. She recolored parts of the rice paper where the map had gaps. She charged me $400.

“Before I took it to her, I did a WorldCat search. [WorldCat is the world’s largest online library catalog.] I found out the map was pretty rare.”

Wilson’s research revealed that the Lockett map is regarded as the most detailed and informative Louisiana map published in the nineteenth century. The 1873 version is the rarest of all the printings, especially with the originally issued boards. There are only four known copies in libraries, and Wilson’s research indicated that his may very well be the only copy ever offered for public sale.

“After I got it back from Renee, I bolted it between two pieces of Plexiglas just to keep it stable and able to be displayed,” said Wilson. “I contacted Neal Auction in New Orleans. I knew the market for maps was high. We put a value of between $2,500 and $4,000 on it. “

At Neal’s annual Louisiana Purchase sale in October 2008, the map sold for $10,575. Wilson was having dinner with Desmond when he got a call from the auction house. He immediately offered Desmond a share of the profits. “Russell told me I didn’t owe him anything,” said Wilson. “He said, ‘It’s your knowledge that enabled you to sell it.’”