A collection of 21 museum-quality automata will be sold at Sotheby’s Important Watches auction in New York on June 11th. The exquisite collection was assembled over 50 years and include late-18th and early-19th century Swiss snuffboxes, music boxes, watches and clocks by the premier craftsmen of the era and later owned by some of the premier collectors, including King Farouk of Egypt. The collection hasn’t been seen since the late 1970s. The crème de la crème of Swiss watchmakers — gold casemaker Jean George Rémond, Piguet & Meylan, Guidon, Guide et Blondel and my personal favorite, Jacquet-Droz — are represented in this elite group.

Pierre Jacquet-Droz, his sons Henri-Louis and Jean-Frédéric Leschot, Pierre’s apprentice who he adopted as a youth, together created three of the most advanced automata of the age. Built between 1768 and 1774, The Writer, The Draughtsman and The Musician toured the royal courts of Europe amazing the aristocracy with their human-like characteristics (The Musician breathes, The Draughtsman blows pencil shards off the paper, The Writer’s eyes follows his quill) and abilities (the Musician’s hands actually play the keyboard instead of moving to a canned tune, the Draughtsman can draw four different designs including portraits of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, the Writer dips his quill in the inkwell, shakes off the excess then writes on a paper that moves). The Writer is the most complex with more than 4,000 components all inside of the figure which, unlike his brother’s and sister’s mechanisms, can be programmed to write anything 40 letters long.

The following video show The Writer in action and explains how the mechanism works. It’s still impressive as hell; you can image how stunned 18th century courtiers were.

[youtube=https://youtu.be/bY_wfKVjuJM&w=430]

The three Jacquet-Droz automata are now the pride and joy of the Neuchâtel Museum of Art and History in Neuchâtel, western Switzerland, which has owned them since 1906 when they were purchased by the Neuchâtel Society of History and Archaeology for 75,000 gold francs and donated to the museum. The automata are played for visitors on the first Sunday of every month.

As wonderous as they were, the automata were really just hype men, advertising for the brilliance of Jacquet-Droz clocks which, unlike the one-of-a-kind demonstration pieces, were actually for sale. In 1775, Henri-Louis Jaquet-Droz moved to London and a few years later got into business with James Cox, a goldsmith, inventor and entrepreneur who also made fantastical automata, most famously The Peacock Clock, now in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the only surviving multi-figure automaton from the 18th century to survive with all its original parts in working condition.

Cox had been producing gold clocks, music boxes and other mechanical devices for trade with the Far East, first India and then China, since the mid-1760s. The Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736–95) was an avid clock collector and Cox’s pieces were in high demand for years. After some business setbacks (import bans, the American Revolution’s interference with British trade, bankruptcy), Cox got back in the saddle thanks to his deal with Jaquet Droz. From then on almost all of his exports to China were the Swiss watchmaker’s pieces and most of Jaquet Droz’s production went to China. The masterpieces by other watchmakers in the upcoming sale were also made for the Chinese market.

These were small, elegant objects — gold and enameled pocket watches, snuffboxes, music boxes — with moving elements and chimes. They were expensive and hard to make, and like all luxury items worthy of the name, only a small number of them were produced. There are a few hundred Jaquet-Droz pieces still in existence, and most of them are in museums. On the rare occasions that they appear on the market, they sell for high seven figures at least, often crossing over into the million dollar range.

The biggest star of the upcoming sale is a Jaquet-Droz Singing Bird Scent Flask timepiece from around 1785-90. The shape of a perfume flask, it is 16 centimeters (a hair over six inches) high and is made of gold with enamel and jeweled decorations on a field of deep blue guilloche enamel. Inside is a tiny articulated ivory bird less than half an inch high that moves its wee beak and tail while a miniature organ plays his song which sounds like a real birdsong, not some tinny chimes. It is so delicate, so precious and has traveled so many long distances in its life, it’s nigh on unbelievable that it still works. It sounds great, too.

You can see its movement and hear its sound in this video by Sotheby’s which also shows two other glorious pieces in action: The Marriage, a gold two-tune musical automaton snuffbox with an enamel scene of a wedding in classical antiquity on the lid and inside a mechanical workshop where men sharpen and use their tools, also by Jaquet-Droz, and The Fortune Teller, a gold snuffbox with an enamel painting of a fortune teller telling fortunes on the lid and inside a musical automaton of a lady playing the harp and a gentleman playing the lute against a beautifully painted classical interior, made by Piguet & Meylan, case by Jean-George Rémond.

Two bronze sculptures that were stolen from the Hirschl & Adler Gallery in New York in December of 1983 have been found and returned to the gallery. Central Figure of Day by Paul Manship was the first to be stolen from the gallery in broad light on December 3rd, 1983. Three weeks later, Figure of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy was stolen again in the middle of the day. The thefts were reported to the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) at the time but the case soon went cold.

Last December, both sculptures were consigned for sale by a private collector to the Gerald Peters Gallery. He had owned them since 1985 when he bought them together from a shop in New York’s diamond district. The collector no longer had receipts nor remembered which store he had purchased them from. In advance of their exhibition and sale, the Gerald Peters Gallery did due diligence research into the ownership history of the sculptures and discovered they were stolen property. It then hired Art Recovery International to negotiate between the parties and arrange for the return of both pieces. Two months later on February 6th, 2015, the works were returned to Hirschl & Adler.

The legal process of determining ownership in this case presented very few obstacles. Unlike the legal systems in most European counties, it is a basic tenet of US law that no individual can obtain good title to a stolen work of art – not even when purchased in good faith. The law recognises that a stolen work of art is always stolen property and therefore makes no exceptions for good faith, passage of time or the number of owners since the theft occurred.

It helped that Hirschl & Adler had retained full documentation of their ownership of the statues and of the theft, so there was no question of who held the last legal title. The collector who has owned them for 30 years is not considered a suspect. He just spotted a bargain in a shady store.

Ray Lazerson, Treasurer at Hirschl & Adler Gallery, commented: “There can’t be too many dealers who have to tell their gallery Director twice in three weeks that something has been stolen! We are delighted that these works have been found and grateful for the co-operation of all parties in their recovery.”

Both sculptors are famous for monumental outdoor works: Manship for his 1934 gilded statue of Prometheus overlooking the Lower Plaza of Rockefeller Center and Troubetzkoy for his 1909 equestrian statue of Tsar Alexander III of Russia now in front of the Marble Palace in St. Petersburg. Indeed, Central Figure of Day was done in a similar style to Prometheus, during a period when Manship became fascinated by ancient sculpture after he won the Rome Prize and attended the American Academy on residential fellowship from 1909 until 1912. He also became interested in Indian art at this time, an influence you can see in Central Figure of Day.

Figure of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was one of a number of sculptures Prince Troubetzkoy made for high society figures of the golden age. Mrs. Whitney was one of the most notable. A succesful sculptor in her own right as well as a society maven, philanthropist and patron of the arts, she is best remembered today as the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art which she established in 1931 to showcase the works of living American artists who had been rejected by more hide-bound institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Whitney is opening in a new building come May 1st. It would be cool if they acquired the sculpture of their founder in time for the reopening. Troubetzkoy’s bronzes rarely appear on the market, and since this one is believed to have been cast during his lifetime, it is particularly valuable. Together both pieces are valued at around $250,000 now, an exponential growth from their estimated worth of $24,000 each in 1983.

This image has made the rounds of a couple of sites (io9, Bleeding Cool) the past few days and it’s so damn cool I had to get on the bandwagon. This article will be factually accurate, however. The other pieces say the original art is for sale at ComicLink, but it’s not. ComicLink sold it in 2006 for $75,000. It’s one of their record sales, so they have a link to the description from the 2006 sale on their homepage. There’s no date under the homepage thumbnail or on the description, which I guess is why the other writers got confused. It was obvious to me that it’s a past sale since the description had no purchase options or auction link anywhere and the homepage noted the $75,000 sale price.

Besides, that price is downright modest. It more than doubled between the work’s first appearance at auction in 2002 when it went for a bargain $33,350 and the sale four years later. There is no way this gorgeous piece of art complete with key notes about the character’s design from Wonder Woman original artist H.G. Peter and creator Dr. William Moulton Marston would go for less than six figures today.

The note in pencil on the left side is from H.G. Peter to William Marston.

“Dear Dr. Marston, I slapped these two out in a hurry. The eagle is tough to handle – when in perspective or in profile, he doesn’t show up clearly – the shoes look like a stenographer’s. I think the idea might be incorporated as a sort of Roman contraption. Peter”.

The note underneath the drawing in red is Marston’s response:

“Dear Pete – I think the gal with hand up is very cute. I like her skirt, legs, hair. Bracelets okay + boots. These probably will work out. See other suggestions enclosed. No on these + stripes — red + white. With eagle’s wings above or below breasts as per enclosed? Leave it to you. Don’t we have to put a red stripe around her waist as belt? I thought Gaines wanted it – don’t remember. Circlet will have to go higher – more like crown – see suggestions enclosed. See you Wednesday morning – WMM.”

Gaines is Max Gaines, co-founder of All-American Publications, who had hired Marston after reading an interview with him in the October 25th, 1940, issue of The Family Circle magazine entitled “Don’t Laugh at the Comics.” Marston was a Harvard-educated psychologist (that’s where the Dr. came from), the inventor of the polygraph machine (that’s where Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth came from), and the author of a bondage-heavy erotic historical novel called Venus with Us later reissued as The Private Life of Caesar. Gaines saw in him an opportunity to add some scholarly heft to his stable of writers, an important virtue during a time when comics were under constant attack from psychologists and other assorted pearl-clutchers raving against the influence of these lurid picture-books on malleable young minds.

Marston had been making headlines for years with demonstrations of his lie detector (he campaigned vigorously without success for Bruno Hauptmann to be polygraph tested before he was executed for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby) and his unconventional views on the relations between the sexes. As early as 1931 newspapers reported with aghast titillation on a survey he did as a visiting professor of psychology at Long Island University which purportedly demonstrated that women in college were abandoning the pose of “Victorian timidity” and deliberately cultivating a “red hot baby” reputation, thus reversing the age-old gender roles of hunter and hunted in sexual pursuit. The men weren’t pleased with this change, according to Marston, because they prefer to be “unhappy masters” rather than “happy slaves.”

In 1937 he asserted confidently in a lecture in New York that “the next 100 years will see the beginning of an American matriarchy — a nation of Amazons in the psychological rather than physical sense. In 500 years, there will be a serious sex battle. And in 1,000 years, women will definitely rule this country.” The AP picked up the story and from there it spread to newspapers all over the continent.

In 1939 he determined WITH SCIENCE that gentlemen in fact prefer brunettes. The conclusion was based on a survey of 20,000 men and, Marston contended, it’s all because of the endocrine glands.

“Too much thyroid secretion in your blood, for example, may make your eyes pop out and turn your hair white, then make you bald. This same overdose of thyroid will give you a tense, nervous, sleepless, irritable fear-haunted personality. These subtle chemicals which influence your personality so profoundly reveal their presence by the colors they produce in your skin. For this reason, a girl’s hair becomes a flag which nature compels her to fly, revealing to all who understand the endocrine code her controlling personality traits.”

Therefore, the brunette is the “natural man conqueror.”

Dr. Marston practiced what he preached. He was married to Elizabeth Holloway Marston, a psychologist and lawyer who had defied her father to pay her way through Boston University School of Law and who continued to work with much success and to other people’s consternation after she bore their two children. He also had a lover, writer Olive Byrne, who lived with the couple. It was Byrne, incidentally, under the pseudonym Olive Richards, who interviewed Marston for the fateful The Family Circle story that caught Gaines’ eye.

Byrne had two children with Marston who were officially adopted by the married pair, but they all lived together as a single family. When Marston became ill first from polio and then with cancer, Elizabeth supported the family while Olive stayed home taking care of the children and their ailing father. Elizabeth continued to provide for Olive and the children after Marston’s death in 1947, ensuring all the kids received a college education. Marston’s widows, one de jure and one de facto, lived together until Olive’s death in the 1980s. By all accounts, including those of the Marston children, the arrangement worked for them and they were a close-knit, loving, happy family before and after William’s death.

It was Elizabeth’s idea for Marston to make his new superhero a woman, an idea that suited him to a T. Marston’s vision of the brunette amazon who makes happy slaves of men easily crossed over from psychology lectures to comic books in the form of Wonder Woman. Olive apparently inspired her look. His bondage fetish — so thoroughly explored in Venus with Us — dominated, as it were, the early issues of Wonder Woman comics. She gets chained or tied up in pretty much every issue, then returns the favor. For a riveting exploration of Marston’s personal and professional life and the early BDSM days of Wonder Woman, read Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. It is a page-turner of the highest order.

Marston laid it all out, for those with eyes to see, in a 1944 article he wrote for The American Scholar, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Hyperbolically titled Why 100,000,000 Americans Read Comics (that figure is not a typo; he included some trumped-up, extrapolated stats to support the contention), the article sings the praises of the visual medium, connects comic book heroes to Homeric progenitors like Achilles and Ulysses, and relays a backstory (minus any references to Elizabeth and Olive) of how the Wonder Woman comic came to be.

It’s smart to be strong. It’s big to be generous. But it’s sissified, according to exclusively masculine rules, to be tender, loving, affectionate, and alluring. “Aw, that’s girl stuff!” snorts our young comics reader. “Who wants to be a girl?” And that’s the point; not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, power. Not wanting to be girls they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving, as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weak ones. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of a Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. This is what I recommended to the comics publisher.

My suggestion was met by a storm of mingled protests and guffaws. Didn’t I know that girl heroines had been tried in pulps and comics and, without exception, found failures? Yes, I pointed out, but they weren’t superwomen, they weren’t superior to men in strength as well as in feminine attraction and love-inspiring qualities. Well, asserted my masculine authorities, if a woman hero were stronger than a man, she would be even less appealing. Boys wouldn’t stand for that; they’d resent the strong gal’s superiority. No, I maintained, men actually submit to women now, they do it on the sly with a sheepish grin because they’re ashamed of being ruled by weaklings. Give them an alluring woman stronger than themselves to submit to and they’ll be proud to become her willing slaves!