Page 15 - Bonhams Hong Kong The Skinner Moon Flasks
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After the last day of the sale, the New York Times touted, In 1959 descendants gave the house to the City of
“Palace Treasures Sold for $279,805” (in 2015 dollars that Holyoke to be used for cultural and educational purposes.
is $128million) Among the buyers were Bernet, Vooran & The contents of the house were divided among family
Chiat, Duveen Brothers, Ogden Mills, and G. D. Dupont members, but many pieces went to auction. The inventory
and, of course, the Skinners. included: many Tiffany items, a carved rhino horn cup, a
number of snuff bottles, ivory figures, lacquer ware, the
The next year, in 1914, William wrote “Belle and I attended Ming cloisonné jars, a stone stela, many vases, a metal
the opera Siegfried. Beautifully staged – Went to Anderson garniture (apparently the one purchased at the Prince Gong
Auction rooms [Anderson Gallery, in New York City] and sale), Chinese rugs, hanging lanterns and pierced lanterns,
bought two vases (Chinese), one for $175 Kien Lung 1775- a teakwood Chinese canopy bed (still in the house), and a
1796 period and one for $575 Kang Hsi period 1661-1722.” second floor room was called out as a Chinese bedroom.
Nothing is yet known about purchases after this date. But All of these and more confirm the Skinners’ abiding passion
research continues. for Chinese art.
In 1923 Belle had committed herself to the restoration In the photographs of the Great Hall taken in the early 1930s
of the French commune of Vigneulles-lès-Hattonchâtel, we have the first record of the moonflasks in the Skinner
which had been destroyed in 1918 during WWI, and for collection. The most likely date of acquisition seems to be
this effort she received the Légion d’Honneur. One great the 1909 trip, as the purchase does not appear in later
country house was not enough for Belle and she was in the journal entries, making it nearly 100 years that the flasks
village working on the restoration of the medieval Château have been in the Skinner family. The flasks descended to
d’Hattonchâtel for her own use when she contracted Belle’s sister, Katharine Skinner Kilborne (1873-1968), then
pneumonia and died April 9th, 1928. to Katharine’s granddaughter Belle Skinner Kilborne Taylor
(1926-2016), and now from her estate.
Belle had added the Great Hall and Marble Lobby only a
year before, in 1927, and the acquisitions from the Prince William C. had moved to New York City during the rise of
Gong sale were installed in that room. It may be that the the so-called Gilded Age (1870s to about 1900), a time of
photographs we have of these rooms, taken in the early great prosperity that saw wealthy families building grand
1930s, were meant to preserve the memory and history of mansion in the city, particularly in his neighborhood of the
Belle and William C’s efforts to create a great country house Upper East Side, who owners were steeped in the collecting
on a hill in Holyoke and to fill it with works of art from China. of Chinese art. They were also building country homes that
rivaled those in New York, in Newport, Rhode Island, on
William C. continued living in NYC. Three years after Belle’s the Gold Coast north of Boston, and in the Berkshires, the
death, he wrote in his journal, January 17th, 1931, “A bucolic mountains of western Massachusetts.
Miss Carl from China is the party who sold Belle the mirror
etc. given her by the Empress of China, came in for tea.” The flasks were, maybe appropriately, placed under the
Katherine Augusta Carl (1865-1938) had spent nine months portraits of the patriarchs of the family, William and Sarah
in China in 1903 painting two portraits of the Dowager Skinner, in Wistariahurst, as if offerings on an ancestral
Empress Cixi, one for the St. Louis Exposition, which is altar. The next owner will be acquiring not only pair of
now in the National Portrait Gallery, D. C., and another important and impressive Imperial flasks, but also the rich
now in the Palace Museum, Beijing. Could this connection history behind the flasks, unknown prior to the ownership
through Miss Carl to the Dowager Empress have been the by the Skinner family but part of a rich pattern of collecting
source of the flasks? in the Gilded Age of the United States.
In 1933 William C. donated Belle’s collection of musical Bonhams would like to thank Penni Martorell of Wistariahurst
instruments to Yale University. He lived at 910 Fifth Avenue for her contribution and support in research for this essay.
(at the corner of 72nd street) until his death on October
17th, 1947, at 90 years and 4 months.
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