Screen Stars
Rago Arts and Auction Center
March 10
Folk art three-panel screen from Vancroft Lodge, W. Va.
Estimate: $30,000–$50,000
Price fetched: $180,000
When Joseph B. Vandergrift went to build Vancroft, his hunting lodge-cum-manse on the banks of the Ohio River in 1901, it’s fair to say that the Standard Oil heir was living large. His 500-acre, million-dollar shangri-la included a bowling alley, an indoor pool, a closed circuit telephone system between the estate’s 20+ buildings, a series of themed rooms (Turkish, Japanese, Presidents, Indian), even its own figure-eight race track. A local newspaper dubbed the W. Virginia property, site of regular horse races, gambling, fox hunts and cock fights, “the Monte Carlo of the Ohio Valley.”
Vancroft was decorated throughout in the rustic arts & crafts mode—Gustav Stickley furniture, Roycroft andirons, and the like. Rago Auctions scored 35 lots from Vancroft in its March Arts and Crafts sale, the first time anything from the fabled estate has hit the open market.
Top lot from the group was this unusual screen from Vancroft’s “Indian” room, a piece that featured 36 platinum-print portraits taken by Frank Rinehart at the Indian Congress of 1898 in Omaha, NE. It’s an incredible who’s who of the native American leadership at the turn of the last century. Somehow I can’t imagine that it was revered as such by the weekend revelers and gamblers, as much as an “authentic” decorative piece, complete with tomahawk and feather motifs, a curiosity to flesh out the rustic hunting lodge theme. But still and all, it’s an extraordinary, one-of-a-kind document of both the robber-baron high life and the proud leadership of vanishing peoples.
P.S. Vancroft has now been converted to a senior living facility. Inquiring minds want to know: do they still have cock fights?
