About us

A full-size Louis Vuitton explorer’s trunk clad in zinc and bound in brass, made in Paris circa 1895, the rarest and most collectible of the Louis Vuitton steamer trunks. In the 1880s, the house began building zinc-and-copper trunks to order for its wealthiest clients: titled officers, colonial administrators, engineers, and explorers heading for Africa, Indochina, and the tropics, where canvas rotted and leather mildewed within a season. The metal skin sealed the contents against humidity and insects, and the trunk is bound entirely in brass, with no leather trim anywhere, because nothing else would stand up to the climate. Louis Vuitton supplied Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza’s Congo expeditions with zinc trunks like this, and the explorer’s trunk has been part of the house’s legend ever since.

Most surviving zinc trunks are small cabin and expedition models. A full steamer trunk of this size, with three wooden slats across the front and three across the lid, was heavy, costly, and made only to order, and very few exist.

The zinc panels are framed in brass bands with brass corners, and the slats are secured with brass nails whose domed heads carry the name LOUIS VUITTON in raised letters. The main lock with its stamped clasp sits between two hasp latches, each stamped LV. The brass handle plates at either end are stamped 1 Rue Scribe Paris, Louis Vuitton, London 454 Strand, and Made in France, the last a marking that appears on French export goods after 1890.

Inside, the lid carries the original paper label numbered 37946 in red. It is printed for both shops, London and Paris, under the British royal arms, the American eagle, and the Spanish royal arms, with the Prince of Wales feathers between them and the exhibition medals for Paris 1867, Havre 1868, and London 1885 below. The London address reads 289 Oxford Street, struck through with a printed bar, and 454 Strand set beneath it. Louis Vuitton opened its first London shop on Oxford Street in 1885 and moved to the Strand a few years later. Rather than discard its stock of labels, the house corrected them, and a trunk carrying a corrected label can be placed in the years immediately after the move, before fresh labels were printed. The interior keeps its original canvas lining and the runners for the tray.

The trunk has been cleaned and the brass polished. A later owner removed the painted initials. The zinc retains the dents and burnish of its traveling life, the stamped lettering on the hardware and nails is sharp throughout, and the trunk stands on casters.

A pair of Fuji Meibo 15×80 big-eye binoculars by Fuji Photo Optical Co., Japan, 1950s, on an original 1970s field tripod. The data plate carries Fuji’s script Meibo trademark, the 15×80 designation with its 4-degree field, and the maker’s name in English with Made in Japan beneath.

The 15×80 is the classic Japanese big eye, the pattern carried aboard Imperial Navy ships in the Second World War and continued by Fuji after the war for maritime and coastal observation. At 15× magnification, the 80mm objectives deliver a steady, detailed image, equally suited to a horizon, a mountainside, or the night sky. Each objective gathers roughly three and a half times the light of a typical 42mm modern binocular, which is why these instruments are still sought out for their image.

The straight eyepieces each carry a knurled focusing ring, and brass collars join the prism housings to the barrels. The glasses sit directly on a single polished pillar, with a black ball lever at the side and a brass knurled clamp on the column, and long sunshades run forward over the objectives. The tripod has telescoping legs, a folding spreader, foot treadles, and disc feet.

The binoculars have been fully restored. They were completely disassembled, the optical glass polished, the optics reset to factory standards, and the body hand-polished to a mirror finish. The optics are bright and clear, and focus and movement operate smoothly.

Alexander Phimister Proctor (1860-1950), Stalking Panther (The Roosevelt Panther), bronze with dark brown patina, cast by the lost-wax method by Roman Bronze Works, New York, circa 1902. Inscribed A PHIMISTER PROCTOR 1891·1902 and COPYRIGHT, stamped CIRE PERDUE CAST. ROMAN BRONZE WORKS N3. Height 9 1/2 inches, length 38 1/4 inches, depth 6 inches.

Proctor conceived the subject after an 1887 hunting expedition in the Flat Tops of the Colorado Rockies, where he shot an adult mountain lion and spent several days sketching it in camp. He modeled the panther in New York in 1891 and 1892, working from studies at the Central Park menagerie and from dissection, and refined the composition in Paris in the mid-1890s. The present form, with the tail lowered and more curved, the body closer to the ground and the jaw brought forward in line with the nose, is the third and best-known version of the model, a study of predatory motion toward unseen prey.

Roman Bronze Works, the first American foundry to specialize in lost wax casting, produced twenty-two known casts of the model between 1900 and 1915. The present bronze carries cast number 3. The example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, cast number 4 of circa 1902, is published in the Proctor literature as the earliest known cast of that production, and the foundry ledgers at the Amon Carter Museum record the model from cast number 8, in 1904. The drilled and incised eyes of the present cast, with the iris and pupil defined, are characteristic of early lost-wax casts and distinguish them from the blank eyes of later production.

The model is known in the literature as the Roosevelt Panther. On February 26, 1909, members of President Theodore Roosevelt’s Tennis Cabinet, acting through Henry L. Stimson, presented a cast of the Panther to the President as their farewell gift at the close of his administration, and the group was photographed with the bronze at the President’s feet on the White House lawn on March 1, 1909. That cast, a Jno. Williams sand cast of a slightly later variant of the model, remains at Sagamore Hill, Roosevelt’s home at Oyster Bay.

Among all the figural cocktail shakers of the great cocktail age, none is more celebrated than the lighthouse. Produced by the International Silver Company of Meriden, Connecticut, under its Meriden S.P. Co. mark and patented on January 11, 1927, the model takes its form from Boston Light, the first lighthouse established in America, and was made only briefly at the height of the era. An example is held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

The conceit is carried through with remarkable conviction. The tapering silver-plated tower rises past two pedimented dormer windows to the keeper's gallery, encircled by a freestanding double railing on turned stanchions above a run of portholes. The lantern room, with frosted panels simulating glazing, lifts off as the cap, and the domed roof with ball finial conceals the pourer. Filled and set on the bar, it is architecture; in hand, it is a working shaker of generous capacity. The shaker was made in two sizes, and this is the classic model 343; the monumental version towers over 20 inches and appears only rarely.

The model's fame has made it one of the most reproduced cocktail shakers, and later chrome and silver-plate copies circulate widely. The present example is an original of the period, bearing the correct Meriden S.P. Co. mark for International Silver, the model number, and the January 1927 patent date struck to the base.

This example has survived unusually well. The gallery railing, the first casualty on most surviving examples, is complete and true; the dormers and portholes are crisp, and the frosted lantern panels retain their original finish.

Condition: Excellent. Original frosted finish to the lantern panels. Gallery railing complete and straight. Plating bright with only minor surface wear consistent with age. Cap and pourer fitting correctly.

Height: 14 in.

Literature: Stephen Visakay, Vintage Bar Ware: Identification and Value Guide, Collector Books, 1997.

A gold aureus of the emperor Severus Alexander, struck at Rome in AD 230. The coin weighs 5.80 grams and is graded Choice Mint State by NGC, with a full strike of 5/5, surfaces of 4/5, and the Fine Style designation reserved for dies of superior artistry.

The obverse bears the laureate and draped bust of the young emperor facing right, seen from behind, with the drapery knotted at the left shoulder, within the legend IMP SEV ALEXAND AVG. The portrait shows the sensitive, almost boyish features that the mint of Rome gave the last of the Severan emperors, and the quality of the engraving is what earned the Fine Style designation.

The reverse shows the emperor in the guise of Romulus, the founder of Rome, radiate, in tunic and military cloak, advancing right with a transverse spear in his right hand and a trophy of captured arms over his left shoulder. The legend, P M TR P VIIII COS III P P, records his ninth tribunician power and third consulship and dates the coin precisely to AD 230. The date gives the image its edge. Severus Alexander had come to the throne at thirteen after the murder of his cousin Elagabalus and ruled under the guidance of his mother, Julia Mamaea. In 230, the armies of Ardashir I, founder of the new Sassanid Persian dynasty, broke into Roman Mesopotamia and laid siege to the frontier city of Nisibis, thereby facing its most serious eastern threat in a generation. A coin showing the gentle young emperor as Romulus, the city's founder and first warrior, was a statement of resolve from a regime under pressure. Alexander campaigned in the east in the years that followed, and his murder by his own troops in 235 ended the Severan dynasty and opened the fifty years of upheaval historians call the Crisis of the Third Century. This aureus belongs to the last confident moment before that storm.

Reference: RIC IV.2 103; Calicó 3121

Examples of the type are held by
The American Numismatic Society, New York

A gold aureus of the emperor Maximian, struck at the mint of Rome in the early years of his reign, circa AD 286–294. The coin weighs 5.50 grams and is graded Mint State by NGC, with a full strike of 5/5 and surfaces of 4/5.

The obverse carries the laureate, draped, and cuirassed bust of Maximian facing right, within his full titulature, IMP C M AVR VAL MAXIMIANVS P F AVG. The portrait is a fine example of the soldier-emperor style of the late third century, with the close-cropped beard and heavy features of a career officer from the Danube frontier.

The reverse shows Jupiter standing left, nude but for a chlamys over the shoulder, a thunderbolt in his outstretched right hand and a long scepter in his left, with the legend IOVI CONSERVAT AVGG, to Jupiter, preserver of the Augusti. The doubled G is the key to the coin. It marks the plural, two Augusti, and places the issue after 1 April 286, when Diocletian raised Maximian from Caesar to co-emperor and divided the burden of the empire between them. The partnership was sealed in religious terms. Diocletian took the title Iovius, placing himself under the protection of Jupiter, the ruler of the gods, while Maximian took Herculius, placing himself under Hercules, the god of strength who earned his divinity through labor. The choice fit the man. Maximian was the fighting half of the partnership, the commander who crushed the Bagaudae revolt in Gaul and campaigned across the Rhine while Diocletian governed, and the court orators praised him as a Hercules toiling on earth while Jupiter ruled above. A coin of the Herculian emperor honoring Jupiter is therefore the junior colleague paying public homage to the patron god of the senior, the theology of the two-man empire stated in a single reverse. The full weight of 5.50 grams reflects the strengthened standard of sixty aurei to the Roman pound, a weight increase introduced at the time of Maximian's elevation.

Reference: RIC V.2 492

Examples of the type are held by
The American Numismatic Society, New York
The Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
The American Numismatic Society specimen weighs 5.45 grams; the present coin, at 5.50 grams, is the heavier of the two.

A gold stater of Alexander the Great, struck at an uncertain Greek or Macedonian mint in the decades following the king's death. The obverse carries the head of Athena in a triple-crested Corinthian helmet, the bowl decorated with a coiled serpent. The reverse shows Nike, the winged goddess of victory, standing with a wreath in her outstretched right hand and a stylis, the mast of a warship, in her left, beside the legend ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ, "of Alexander." In the field are the two control marks of this issue, an ant to the left and an eight-rayed star below the goddess's wing.

The ant is among the rarest images on all Greek coinage, and its pairing with the star is thought to allude to some local legend whose meaning is now lost. The combination has intrigued scholars since the nineteenth century. Ludvig Müller, cataloging the Alexander coinage in 1855, read the two marks as civic badges and argued the coin was struck jointly by Apollonia and Acrothoon, two towns on Mount Athos, the ant standing for Apollonia and the star for the city at the holy mountain's summit. Modern scholarship no longer reads control marks as city emblems, and Martin Price returned the mint to "uncertain" in his 1991 corpus, but the puzzle Müller tried to solve remains open: a tiny insect, chosen deliberately by a mint official twenty-three centuries ago, for reasons no surviving source explains.

The type is scarce. Five examples are recorded in PELLA, the American Numismatic Society's corpus of the Alexander coinage in public collections, and market appearances are correspondingly few.

The coin weighs 8.59 grams and measures 18 millimeters. It is graded Choice Mint State (Ch MS) by NGC, Strike 5/5, Surface 4/5, certification 4877406-011.

Reference: Price 831.

Other examples of this type are held in the following collections:

The British Museum, London

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

The American Numismatic Society, New York

The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge

The Münzkabinett, Vienna

At 8.59 grams, the present coin is identical in weight to the Ashmolean example, deposited at Oxford by New College in 1907.

A gold stater of Alexander the Great, struck at the royal mint of Amphipolis in the late fourth century BC. The obverse carries the head of Athena in a triple-crested Corinthian helmet, the bowl decorated with a coiled serpent, her hair falling in corkscrew curls over her left shoulder. The reverse shows Nike, the winged goddess of victory, standing with a wreath in her outstretched right hand and a stylis, the mast of a warship, cradled in her left arm, beside the legend ΑΛΕΞΑΝΔΡΟΥ, "of Alexander." In the left field is the control mark of this issue, a trident head, the emblem of Poseidon.

Alexander introduced the Athena and Nike stater as the gold coinage of his empire, and the mints continued striking it in his name long after his death in 323 BC. Martin Price dated this issue to circa 330 to 320 BC, spanning the king's final years, while more recent scholarship places it under Cassander, circa 310 to 301 BC, the ruler who governed Macedon after Alexander's line was extinguished yet kept the conqueror's name on his gold. Either way, the coin belongs to the great Macedonian series struck at Amphipolis, the principal royal mint, within living memory of Alexander himself.

The coin weighs 8.59 grams and measures 19 millimeters. It is graded MS★ by NGC: Strike 5/5, Surface 4/5; the star denotes exceptional eye appeal. Certification 4885147-009.

Reference: Price 175.

Other examples of this type are held in the following collections:

The British Museum, London

The American Numismatic Society, New York

The Münzkabinett, Berlin

The Swiss National Museum, Zurich

At 8.59 grams, the present coin sits at the center of the recorded weight range for the type.

A Roman gold aureus of Lucius Verus, struck at Rome in AD 164 and certified by NGC as Gem Mint State, Strike 5/5, Surface 5/5, with the Fine Style designation, the highest combination of grades NGC Ancients awards short of a star. The coin weighs 7.28 grams, certification number 2100935-001.

The obverse bears the laureate, draped, and cuirassed bust of Verus facing right, the wreath ribbon trailing at the nape, with the legend L VERVS AVG ARMENIACVS. The reverse reads TR P IIII IMP II COS II and shows Victory, winged and half-draped, standing front with her head turned right, inscribing VIC AVG on a shield she steadies atop a palm tree.

The coin commemorates the campaign that earned Verus his title. When the Parthian king Vologases IV invaded Armenia in 161, expelling its Roman client king, Marcus Aurelius sent his co-emperor east. Roman forces under Statius Priscus retook Armenia and captured its capital, Artaxata, in 163, and Verus was hailed Armeniacus, a title he accepted with some reluctance, having directed the war from Antioch rather than the front. The shield Victory inscribes on this reverse is the official record of that victory, rendered in gold.

Portraits of Verus in this quality are seldom encountered. The engraving is unusually sensitive, the tight curls and full beard of the young emperor rendered with the depth of relief that earned the Fine Style designation, and the surfaces are essentially as struck. References: Calicó 2177; RIC III 525; BMC 296 note; Cohen 247 var.

A large Italian bronze door knocker, or battente, of Venus Anadyomene, after a model of circa 1600, probably Venetian. The goddess is modeled fully in the round, one hand raised to her hair as she rises from the sea, drapery gathered at her hips, standing on a scrolled console above a bearded mask of Oceanus. Two dolphins rise at her sides, their arched bodies forming the loop of the knocker and their tails breaking into acanthus. Measuring 17 1/2 inches high by 14 inches wide and weighing approximately 38 pounds, it is a piece of sculpture that has spent its life on a door.

The construction is that of the earliest examples of the type. Figure and frame were cast together in a single, thick-walled pour by the lost-wax process, with the interior left open and irregular. The forged iron striker was set into the mould and the bronze poured around it, so the knocker was conceived as a working object from the wax stage, and the striker head, forged square, has been rounded by years of use against the strike boss on the reverse. The chasing is selective in the seventeenth-century manner: the hair worked in fine detail, the fingers and toes finished down to their nails, other passages left as cast. The cast is, on the evidence of its construction, of the seventeenth or early eighteenth century.

The surface tells the same story. The black patina is rubbed through to a warm bronze exactly where hands have gripped it for generations, along the goddess's leg and on the noses of the dolphins, while the reverse carries the green corrosion and iron staining of long service out of doors. Traces of old door paint survive in the crevices of the pivot lugs, left by painters working around a knocker that was never taken down, and the pivot bolt was replaced later, as fittings on a door in daily use are.

A cast of this model hung on the doors of the Hotel Porges in Paris, the mansion built in 1892 for Jules Porges, the diamond magnate whose Kimberley mining company was absorbed into De Beers in the great amalgamation of 1889. The house was built to hold his collection, its gallery hung with Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Frans Hals, with Renaissance bronzes and enamels beneath them, and it was on the doors of that house that Eugène Atget photographed the model around 1901, paired with a pendant Neptune on the opposite leaf. The type belongs to the great tradition of figural knockers made for Venetian palace doors in the decades around 1600, when the finest were treated as sculpture and passed among collections accordingly.

A French Industrial Series automaton clock in the form of a submarine, by André Guilmet, Paris, circa 1890. The black patinated hull, riveted throughout, rides atop a cast-bronze sea on an oval plinth of green onyx with a gilt rim. The silvered conning tower houses the movement behind a gilt-bezelled enamel dial, and the deck carries a full complement of fittings in gilt and silvered bronze: boarding ladders, railings, an anchor with chains, a copper vent cowl, a binnacle compass, and a stern davit crane with a winding wheel. A funnel-form thermometer stands amidships, its scale printed in English, indicating an example made for the export market. It measures 23 inches long, 15 inches high, and 10 inches deep, 58.5 by 38 by 25.5 cm.

The clock is a two-motion automaton. When wound, the conning tower rotates, and the stern propeller turns beneath the counter, both driven by the same train that powers the clock, so the vessel is animated whenever it is running.

The submarine is the rarest subject in Guilmet's nautical group, which also included a quarterdeck, a lighthouse, and a battleship. When this model was designed, no such vessel existed in service yet, and its true ancestor is literary. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea of 1870 gave the public the Nautilus, an elongated cigar-shaped hull of riveted plates with a raised pilot house and a platform where Captain Nemo takes the air, and the illustrations by Alphonse de Neuville and Édouard Riou for the first illustrated Hetzel edition fixed that image in the popular imagination. The clock reads as the Nautilus made domestic, the same spindle hull, raised tower, and railed deck, translated to the drawing room. Reality only caught up afterward: France launched the Gymnote, her first working electric submarine, in 1888, and the larger Gustave Zédé followed in 1893. This is a mythical ship assembled from the fittings of real ones, machinery presented as spectacle.

The example survives in exceptional condition, the gilding bright, the patina unrubbed, and the chains and deck fittings complete. The series is discussed in Derek Roberts, Mystery, Novelty and Fantasy Clocks, 1999, pp. 253-270.

A life-sized carved eagle owl, attributed to the Ruef Brothers of Brienz, Switzerland, circa 1880, standing 28 inches high. The bird is carved in linden wood and perched upright on a cut branch rising from a rocky outcrop, the whole cut from a single block with a turned circular base. Ear tufts raised, wings folded, talons gripping the branch, it fixes the viewer with yellow glass eyes set into deeply carved facial discs.

What distinguishes this owl is the treatment of the plumage. Every feather is carved individually and then worked with a heated iron, the edges and barring scorched into the wood so that the graduated breast, the mottled crown, and the darker flight feathers read in tone as well as relief. This burning of the surface is the technique most closely associated with the Ruef workshop, whose birds of prey were a specialty of the Brienz trade, and the attribution rests on that handling together with the composition and the scale. The piece is unsigned.

The head is made separately and lifts off at the neck, a construction the carver has concealed within the ruff of feathers at the throat. It is not hinged, and the body is not hollowed out for use as a tobacco jar or humidor, which is consistent with the piece's size. The separate head allowed the carver to work the face and the body from blocks of different grain, and it is a feature worth knowing when a piece of this model is examined.

Carving of this ambition came out of Brienz in the Bernese Oberland, where the Ruef Brothers worked alongside Johann Huggler, Hans Huggler-Wyss, and Walter Mader in the decades when the international exhibitions at Vienna, Philadelphia, Paris, and Chicago carried Swiss carving to an American and English clientele. We discuss the Ruef workshop and the scorching technique in our article on the masters of the Black Forest, and in the reference we co-authored on the subject, Swiss Carvings: The Art of the Black Forest, 1820 to 1940.