Sotheby’s Hatches a Real Crowd Pleaser

New York’s spring auction season will be a buyer’s market, and Sotheby’s is prepared for every last collector who has as little as $10,000 or as much as $3 million to spend on art. If that leaves you out, you can still have the fun of perusing a free auction preview exhibition at Sotheby’s Beverly Hills showroom, 308 N. Rodeo Drive, today and Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m., and on Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.

The crowd pleaser is sure to be the “Love Trophy Egg,” an enameled and jeweled Easter egg by Peter Carl Faberge, valued at $3 million. Russian Czar Nicholas II is believed to have commissioned the pale blue egg as an Easter gift for his wife, Alexandra, in 1905, in honor of the birth of their son, Alexei.

The “Love Trophy Egg,” which has been consigned by an unidentified American collector for sale in New York on June 10, is one of only 54 Easter eggs produced for Russian czars by the legendary goldsmith and one of 47 known to have survived, according to Gerard Hill, vice president of Sotheby’s Russian art department.

Only four imperial eggs have been sold at auction since World War II, Hill said. The last was the “Cuckoo Egg,” an intricate creation containing a clock and a singing bird that brought $1.76 million in a 1985 auction and is now in the collection of Forbes magazine. The Forbes collection boasts 11 of Faberge’s imperial eggs, one more than the next largest collection, in the Kremlin Armory Museum in Moscow.

Alexander III began the imperial Easter egg tradition in 1885, when he commissioned an egg for his wife, Marie Feodorovna, Hill said. The czar continued the practice until his death in 1894, when his son, Nicholas II, began ordering two eggs each Easter, one for his mother and one for his wife.

Each egg is a unique creation, ranging from the “Rosebud Egg” in the Forbes collection to the “Upensky Cathedral Egg” at the Kremlin. The “Love Trophy Egg,” which is crowned by a basket of enameled flowers, sits in a gold cradle supported by four quivers with diamond-set arrows, mounted on a white onyx base. “This is one of the designs that works best,” Hill said. “It’s done in a straight Louis XVI French style, which was more successful than the Rococo-style eggs, and it was made by Henrik Wigstrom, Faberge’s chief workmaster.”

The remainder of Sotheby’s gallery is filled with artworks for two other upcoming sales. Six Old Master paintings from the collection of Jaime Ortiz-Patino, grandson of Bolivian “Tin King” Simon I. Patino, include enchanting views of Venice by Francesco Guardi (valued from $500,000 to $1.5 million) and a pair of sensuous 18th-Century French “Bathing Scenes” by Jean-Baptiste Pater ($700,000-$1 million). The auction of the Ortiz-Patino collection, onMay 21-22, is expected to exceed $25 million in sales.

Thirty-one other paintings and drawings in the preview will be in Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art auction on May 13. Unlike similar sales in the late ‘80s, in which multimillion-dollar prices were the norm, this spring’s event will feature small, relatively modestly priced pieces, according to Alexander Apsis, head of Sotheby’s Impressionist and modern art department.

The Impressionist works are from the collection of the late Benjamin and Minna Reeves, who made their fortune in New York by importing, manufacturing and distributing gourmet foods and formed the core of their collection in the ‘50s. Among the most attractive pieces on view are two French village scenes, Camille Pissarro’s “Le Parc aux Charrettes, Pontoise” ($1 million to $1.5 million) and Alfred Sisley’s “Rue de Village--Temps Gris” ($700,000-$900,000).

A particularly rich selection of small Cubist works is from the collection of the late Sidney E. Cohn, a New York attorney who was prominent in the labor movement and represented entertainment figures in the McCarthy anti-communist hearings.

Among items displayed to entice collectors are Picasso’s 1907 gouache and watercolor on paper, “Study of Head for Nude With Drapery” ($500,000-$700,000), which once belonged to Leo and Gertrude Stein; Georges Braque’s elegant 1913 collage, “Still Life With Pipe and Glass” ($700,000-$900,000); and Juan Gris’ colorful 1915 painting “Bottle of Curacao” ($800,000-$1.2 million). An early (1904-5) Picasso drawing ($250,000-$300,000) contains sensitive sketches of an actor and the artist’s mistress.