One Antique’s Fantastic Journey

One Antique’s Fantastic Journey

When the “Garvan carver” created an exquisite card table 200 years ago in Philadelphia, he had no idea it would be worth nearly $1 million today. “This table was an extraordinary thing. Lush vines dripped down its legs the claws of its feet clung tightly to wooden balls,” begins author Thatcher Freund’s description of the Willing Card table. “If you stared at it for a while, the table almost sprang to life.” Freund’s Objects of Desire (Pantheon, 1994) is the Willing table’s biography, and it ends as triumphantly as any Horatio Alger novel. Here are the highlights of the Willing card table’s picaresque journey:

1759: Still in his 30s, flush with profits from his insurance firm, and looking to plug a tiny corner of his Georgian mansion, Thomas Willing commissions a card table from one of Philadelphia’s dozen or so professional carvers. The Garvan carver, so called because his work today features prominently in the Mabel Brady Garvan collection of Yale University charges fees for his labors.

1821: On Thomas Willing’s death, the executors of his will take inventory of his estate and value the table at 50 cents. A bottle of Madeira is valued at $1. No longer fashionable, the table is packed away by Willing’s son George – perhaps to the servants’ quarters.

An antic collection. Photo by Elena

1898: Phebe Barron Willing, granddaughter of George, carefully wraps the table and places it in storage in the basement of an old and prominent Philadelphia bank along with several other treasures. The cache is soon forgotten.

1964: Seeking maritime antiques, Thomas Willing’s great-great-great grandson, Tom Hughes, stumbles across the crate with his grandmother’s name stenciled on it. Hughes shares the treasures with othe Willing heirs and, taken with its beauty, keeps the table for himself.

1990: Eight years after his death, Hughes’s widow decides to sell the table rather than try to keep up with mounting insurance rates. She contacts Christie’s and Sotheby’s auction houses, who bid for her business by means of reserve, or how much the auction house will guarantee, Sotheby’s gets the business with a guaranteed reserve of $850,00.

1991: After spending $30,000 to promote the sale with advertisements in antique magazines and the wining and the dining of the ten or so buyers that could afford to spend upwards of $1 million for a single item of furniture, Sotheby’s sends the table to the block. The final bid of $850,000 is well over the reserve bid and is made by an anonymous buyer for the Chipstone Foundation, a museum in Milwaukee. The Willing card table is taken to its new home to rest finally among other treasures and admiring visitors.