Photography Collection

The financial market crisis has deeply influenced the photography art market. Bonhams has only sold less than 18 % of its lots at the fall auction and experts await a further decline of prices. So we are going to remember better times. The sale of Edward Steichen, The pond - moonlight, was a record for Sotheby's at February 14th, 2006. The estimate was $700,000 - 1,000,000 and the hammer price with buyer's premium: $2,928,00. It was the most expensive photograph ever been sold at an auction at that time.The measures are 16 1/16 by 19 11/16 in. (41 by 50.8 cm.) and it is a multiple gum bichromate print over platinum, signed and dated by the photographer in crayon on the image, mounted, matted, framed, 1904.

This is the provenance:

The photographer to Alfred Stieglitz as agent

Acquired by John Aspinwall from the above, 1906

By descent to Mrs. John Aspinwall Wagner, Newburgh, New York

By descent to Justine Wagner Blodgett, Shoreham, Vermont

Paul Katz, New York

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1983

Sotheby's describes the photograph in the following paragraphs: Like the series of Steichen’s ‘Flatiron Building’ now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, only three examples of ‘The Pond—Moonlight’ are known, and as in the ‘Flatiron’ series, each in this trio is different in tone, in atmosphere, and in subtle detail. In addition to the present photograph, there is the print of ‘The Pond’ that Stieglitz gave the Metropolitan in 1933; and the print that Steichen himself gave to The Museum of Modern Art in 1967. Although created from the same negative, the three prints are the results of different photographic processes and are a testament to Steichen’s artistic goals and to his finely honed abilities as a printer. Multiple-process printing, on this large scale, was practiced by no one as it was practiced by Steichen.

The negative for ‘The Pond—Moonlight’ was made in the wetlands around Marmaroneck, New York, on Long Island Sound, near the home of Charles H. Caffin (1854 – 1918), the English-born art critic who had championed Steichen’s work in his volume Photography as a Fine Art (see Lot 5). After the birth of their first daughter in July of 1904, the Steichens sought refuge from the stifling heat of their top-floor Manhattan apartment, gratefully accepting an invitation to spend August with Caffin and his wife Caroline. The August visit stretched into September when Steichen suffered a bout of typhoid and was hospitalized for three weeks. A gelatin silver print of a closely-related image, entitled ‘Autumn,’ now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is inscribed ‘Autumn, Marmaroneck, N. Y., 1904,’ by Alfred Stieglitz on the reverse, a likely indication that the present photograph was made in September, during the latter part of the Steichens’ stay (The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal, Volume 16, 1988, fig. 93).

The woods at dusk, or in moonlight, was one of Steichen’s favorite subjects, one to which he returned time and again in the years before the first World War, in paintings as well as photographs. Although few of his paintings survive—he destroyed most of them in his notorious bonfire in Voulangis after the war—their titles echo his obsession with the effects of glimmering light in nocturnal settings: ‘The Road to the Lake—Moonlight,’ ‘The Moonlight Promenade—The Sea,’ ‘Balcony, Nocturne, Lake George,’ and ‘Moonlit Landscape,’ among others. A rare surviving painting from that period, now in the Whitney Museum of Art, shows parallel rows of trees in an unidentified glen, the moon rising to the top of the composition, its light reflected in the water in the foreground (reproduced in Dennis Longwell, Steichen: The Master Prints, New York, 1978, p. 17). ‘The romantic and mysterious quality of moonlight, the lyric aspect of nature made the strongest appeal to me’ Steichen wrote in his autobiography. ‘Most of the paintings—watercolors—that I did in my early years were of moonlight subjects. . . the real magician was light itself—mysterious and ever-changing light with its accompanying shadows rich and full of mystery’ (A Life in Photography, unpaginated, Chapter 1).