Here Comes the Rockefeller Sale

The marketing of the David Rockefeller collection has begun. And though some of the hyperbole of this Vanity Fair story situating the collection within David Rockefeller’s personal life is understandable, there are few clunkers like this: “he lived at a level of refinement that will probably never be seen again on this earth.”

There’s also a few good tidbits in the story: Mitchell Rales bought Rockefeller’s house in Maine, Ringing Point; some of the works come from Gertrude Stein’s estate, including the Picasso Rose period Young Girl with a Basket of Flowers from 1905; and the lurking star of the sale may not be the big ticket pictures but Rockefeller’s passion for porcelain dinner settings (which, because of their accessible value and high quality, may offer many more opportunities for souvenir seekers to bid up a piece of the Rockefeller legend.)

Here’s how Vanity Fair described Rockefeller’s life:

Consummate connoisseurs, they collected masterpieces across myriad categories: 19th- and 20th-century European and American paintings, English and American furniture, European porcelain, Asian art, pre-Columbian ceramics, silver, textiles, decorative art, folk art, and Native American art. All these items they harmoniously integrated into their well-staffed, gorgeously sited, but never ostentatious houses, including Hudson Pines, a nine-bedroom Georgian-style, helipad-equipped country manor on 75 verdant acres overlooking the Hudson River in Pocantico Hills, New York (adjacent to the former 3,400-acre Rockefeller-family fiefdom); Ringing Point, a seven-bedroom summer place on 14.5 oceanfront acres in Seal Harbor, Maine (where his parents built their 107-room “cottage,” the Eyrie, on what over time grew to 1,500 acres); and Four Winds, a house designed for them by modernist architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and built on a 3,000-acre farming estate in Columbia County, New York. Then there was the 40-foot-wide, four-story, red-brick Colonial Revival-style town house on East 65th Street in Manhattan, replete with eight bedrooms and six staff bedrooms. “The staff this year still included a butler and three maids,” says a family friend. “It was running like it was 1948 till the end.”

David Rockefeller and the Largest Art Auction of All Time  (Vanity Fair)