As Seen by Clementine

Lot No. 673 came up for bid Sunday afternoon, June 7, 1970, on the second day of the Melrose Plantation auction. “I have an opening bid of two thousand,” said auctioneer Thomas Sanchez.  “Anybody else bidding?” 

Excitement had been building for weeks, as bidders from New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Alexandria, and even Massachusetts traveled to the small town of Melrose on Cane River (actually an oxbow lake) for a two-day auction of the plantation’s contents. 

Thomas’s father, Fernand Sanchez, a New Orleans antiques dealer whose auction house handled the sale, had announced in the Times-Picayune that the contents included fifteen antique beds, twenty armoires, marble-top dressers, washstands, collections of early looms, book presses, early Louisiana children’s chairs, a pair of Hepplewhite console tables circa 1800, Spanish olive jars, and “all sorts of clocks, glass, china, curios, and unsigned portraits.”

The heirs to Melrose, the Henry family, had sold the property to a corporation. Located on several acres in the country south of Natchitoches, Melrose comprised a main house and several outbuildings on spacious grounds shaded by live oaks and pecan trees. Bananas and other tropical plants lent the place an exotic air. About four hundred registered bidders and dozens of curious spectators showed up for the outdoor proceedings; the bidders sat in folding chairs, and Thomas Sanchez stood atop a flatbed truck outfitted with a microphone and a couple of speakers.

“Madame, I saw you waving your paddle, but I couldn’t see the number!”

Quietly observing was Clementine Hunter (1886-1988), who had worked as a cook for the Henry family until, in the 1940s, she had picked up discarded paints and brushes and used a window shade as canvas. That launched her career as a primitive or folk artist. Many of her paintings were up for auction, including three large murals she had painted in Ghana House and Yucca House at Melrose.

Twelve-year-old Aaron Jarabica, the grandson of Fernand and nephew of Thomas, was working at the auction. “There was a chicken coop made of hand-planed cypress boards,” he recalls. “Clementine had painted all around it on every side of the coop. As the pieces sold, I took them to her to sign with her initials.” According to the auctioneer, if a Hunter painting was unsigned, “Clementine will sign it for five bucks.”

Clarinetist Pete Fountain, then at the peak of his music career, had paddle No. 1, meaning he had been the first bidder to register. Another well-known attendee was Larry Borenstein, who operated an art gallery in the French Quarter. He took along his daughter Rachael, age eight. “I think my dad wanted to educate me about art, but what I remember best is sitting in the shade under the trees and gathering pecans,” says Rachael, now a home-health nurse in Asheville, North Carolina. 

Before beginning Sunday’s proceedings, an announcer had explained the rules of the game. “To all of you who are unfamiliar with auctions, there’s nothing to it. If you [want to bid], raise your paddle ...  When the auctioneer says ‘twice,’ you have one more chance to bid. After ‘going once,’ ‘going twice,’ the auctioneer will say, ‘fair warning.’ If you bought it, keep your eye on it. If you didn’t buy it, please don’t touch; it belongs to someone else.”

[You might also like: Clementine Hunter Fakes: Ruth Laney reports on a folk-art fraud]

Thomas Sanchez, who had traveled from New Orleans to conduct the sale, kept things going at a rapid clip, interspersed with joking asides (“Madame, I saw you waving your paddle, but I couldn’t see the number!”) and reminders that a concession stand was selling cokes, coffee, and the Natchitoches staple, meat pies.  

On Saturday, bidders had snapped up a small slant desk, a cypress armoire, a walnut plantation desk, an old prie-dieu (padded kneelers used for prayer), an elk horn inkwell, an antique doctor’s kit, an ox yoke, and the plantation bell, bought by Pete Fountain for $200. 

Olive jars from Spain (used to ship products to the colonies and rarely found intact) commanded top dollar, with one going for $300 and another for $550. (Nancy Potts Jensen and her husband Bill, newlyweds who lived in New Orleans, scored a broken olive jar for $30. “We collected the pieces and glued it back together,” she says, noting the item remains in their Baton Rouge home today. 

Jack Holden drove up from New Orleans with his wife Pat. “We bought a little Creole slat-back chair made of mulberry,” he recalls. “We still have it. We also bought a lot of split-oak baskets and discovered a Chitimacha Indian basket in one of them.” 

Robert Judice, a New Orleans doctor, attended with his wife Susan. “We got a Clementine Hunter painting that had been in her house,” he recalls. “It was painted on a piece of baseboard and depicted a cotton wagon and a chicken in the yard. It’s hanging in our house now.” 

The Judices spent Saturday night in Natchitoches and attended mass Sunday morning at St. Augustine Catholic Church in nearby Isle Brevelle. They returned to Melrose in time for the start of bidding.

As Lot 673, described as “Papa Augustin Metoyer,” came up for bid, Sanchez turned over the microphone to Father Norbert Rosso, pastor of St. Augustine. A native of New Jersey, Rosso had been at St. Augustine for only about a year. He knew that the founder of the church, Nicolas Augustin Metoyer (1768-1856), had been memorialized in a painting in 1836. Augustin was the son of Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer, a white man, and Marie Thérèse Coincoin, who had been enslaved until Metoyer purchased her freedom in 1778. Their ten children were the progenitors of a population known as the Cane River Creoles of color. 

According to the auctioneer, if a Hunter painting was unsigned, “Clementine will sign it for five bucks.”

The church was established in 1803 with funds provided by Augustin and his brother Louis. It is believed to be the first Catholic church in the United States built and supported by free people of color. That early church did not survive and had been replaced twice. In back of the church was a graveyard in which Metoyer had been buried in 1856.

According to the book Plantation Memo by François Mignon, who lived at Melrose for decades, the painting had remained in the home of Augustin Metoyer throughout the Civil War “and like the house itself was woefully damaged or plundered by the marauding soldiers.”

Mignon quoted from a 1928 article in Scribner’s Magazine by New Orleans artist William Spratling “when he visited the home of Madame Aubin Roque to make a sketch of her and other Cane River characters.” 

Spratling described the painting: “Here was a cafe au lait Augustin Metoyer done in the grand manner. A tall man dressed in black, with a Prince Albert coat, and, back of the figure in voluminous folds, a red plush curtain   ... With one hand there was a graceful gesture toward a toy-like church which reposed on green velvet grass ... There were numerous scratches, a bullet-hole, and two large rents—as large as a man’s hand.”

According to Mignon, in 1929 Melrose mistress Carmelite Garrett Henry had asked Metoyer’s descendants to let her have the portrait restored and displayed at Melrose. The painter was a man named Feuille, about whom little is known. He is thought to have been born in France and is known to have worked in New Orleans between 1834 and 1841. The Metoyer painting was done in 1836. 

Henry, better known as Miss Cammie, had reigned over Melrose since going there as a bride in 1899. Widowed in her forties, she had turned Melrose into an artists’ colony. Painters Spratling and Alberta Kinsey and writer Lyle Saxon were among the many artists welcome to stay indefinitely as long as they were working. Cammie died in 1948. The house had been occupied by her heirs until they decided to sell it in 1970.

Furniture belonging to Saxon and two Kinsey paintings were up for auction. Kinsey is credited with inspiring Clementine Hunter to take up painting with oils and brushes she left behind. 

But for the moment, all eyes were focused on the large painting of Augustin Metoyer, and all ears turned to Father Rosso. 

“This is the first church that he had built for this community,” he said. “In a letter dated 1802 ... Mr. Augustin Metoyer is speaking about building a church for the people here in this community, to be finished in about three to four months—the first church built in Isle Brevelle, in 1803.

[Now read: Anything Goes at the Reddell Auction: Wanna buy a cheap chicken?]

“We would like very much to have this picture brought back to its original home,” said Father Rosso, who then introduced several descendants of Metoyer, both old and young. 

“We have . . . the same interest as you would have for your great-great-grandfather,” said the priest. “He is referred to as Old Grandpa Augustin. We would like very much to have this picture brought back to the church ... Anyone could come there and see it. The public is invited. The church is open to anyone.” 

To bring the painting back to the church, said the priest, “We took up a collection ... I’ll start the bid with two thousand dollars, money earned by the parishioners of St. Augustine.” 

It was rumored that a buyer from New York had traveled to Melrose to vie for the painting, but there seemed to be an unspoken agreement that only the priest could bid on it. Sanchez announced his bid to the crowd.

“There were no other bids,” recalls Judice. “If anybody else had put a bid in, they’d have been mobbed.”

“The silence was palpable,” says Pat Holden.

Sanchez spoke again. “Two thousand dollars once, two thousand dollars twice, fair warning, sold for two thousand dollars!”

The crowd burst into applause and jubilant shouting. “I’m sure everybody is pleased,” said Sanchez. “It’s a happy moment.”

“It was an amazing moment,” recalls Jack Holden. “It was very emotional,” says Pat. “A moving moment. It was unforgettable. “

Betty Metoyer Roque, a member of St. Augustine Church and a descendant of Augustin, says her mother attended the auction and told her, “There was not a dry eye in the crowd.”

According to the Natchitoches Times, Jane Whitney of New Orleans paid to have the painting sent to New York for restoration. Then it was returned to its home at St. Augustine. Today, forty-eight years later, it hangs in a vestibule in the rear of the church. On the opposite wall are photos of Father Rosso and Metoyer’s descendants posing with the portrait on the grounds of the plantation.  

Last March, three Clementine Hunter panels that had originally been murals at Ghana House and Yucca House sold at Neal Auction in New Orleans. A buyer from Maine had purchased them at the Melrose auction. Unseen publicly since 1970, they sold for a total of more than $143,000.

At another auction last May, Neal sold a Hunter painting of the Melrose auction that depicted furniture, paintings, and plantation ephemera as well as the auctioneer. 

Hunter made several paintings of the auction, including one that Tom Whitehead bought from her in 1973. “This is one of the first auction scenes Clementine ever painted,” says Whitehead, who owns dozens of her works and wrote a book about her. “She painted herself into the scene, wearing a yellow skirt and sitting under a blue umbrella. The auctioneer is behind her on the wagon. And the Papa Augustin painting is in there, too.”  

Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.