Art and furnishings filling a California estate owned by the Gettys will be sold in the family’s second major auction in less than a year.
More than 400 pieces from a San Francisco property owned by Ann and Gordon Getty will be auctioned in June by auction house Christies.
Known as the Temple of Wings, the Berkeley Hills home is built in the Greco-Roman style and filled with artifacts collected by Ann Getty, who died in 2020 at age 79.
Author, interior designer and philanthropist Ann was married to Gordon Getty, 89, a classical music composer and the son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty.
The couple purchased the Temple of Wings in 1994, and over the following decades, Ann filled it with various types of art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The upcoming auction comes after $150 million was raised in October from the sale of some of Ann’s other decorative objects.
A Coign of Vantage (1895), by Dutch painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, depicts three aristocratic women peering over a balcony of a Roman villa and is expected to fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million
More than 400 pieces from a San Francisco property known as the Temple of Wings, owned by Ann and Gordon Getty, will be auctioned in June by auction house Christies. The house is in the picture
Author, interior designer and philanthropist Ann was married to Gordon Getty, 89, a classical music composer and the son of oil magnate J. Paul Getty. The two are pictured in 1972
Before the first auction, Gordon told ABC7 News, “There’s no reason I should have all that stuff.
“Just about everything that can be sold will be sold. I don’t think I reserved anything for sentimental reasons.’
Items for sale at the upcoming auction include an 1895 oil painting, which Christies says is expected to fetch between $2.5 million and $3.5 million.
A Coign of Vantage, by Dutch painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, depicts three aristocratic women peering over a balcony of a Roman villa as ships come and go from a harbor below.
Maria Santangelo, the couple’s chief curator, told the San Francisco Chronicle it was one of the first pieces bought for the home and it was the theme for everything that followed.
“It reflects the architect’s conception of the house as a Roman villa,” said Santangelo.
“You have this dizzying fall in the Berkeley Hills overlooking the bay, (and the figures in the painting) looking out over the bay. You’ve got these gorgeous gown-clad models in the picture, which also reference the earlier history of this house, “whose original owners taught modern dance there.”
The house was built in 1914 as the home and dance studio of Florence Treadwell Boynton.
Two other paintings by Frederic Leighton will also go on sale, A Dancing Girl with Cymbals in a Green Robe (left) and A Dancing Girl with Cymbals in a White Robe (right).
One particularly eye-catching lamp for sale is a 1903 ‘Wisteria’ table lamp. It consists of thousands of hand-selected pieces of purple, green and blue glass
A few paintings that will also be for sale are by a friend of Alma-Tadema, British Victorian painter Frederic Leighton.
His oil painting, The Bath of Psyche, was first exhibited in 1890 and is valued at $300,000 to $500,000.
The Bath of Psyche by Frederic Leighton, first exhibited in 1890, could sell for about $500,000 in June
Two of the artist’s other paintings, A Dancing Girl with Cymbals in a Green Robe and A Dancing Girl with Cymbals in a White Robe, will also go on sale, oil on canvas with a gold leaf background.
The two pieces are expected to sell for between $100,000 and $200,000 each.
They appear in a study in the Temple of Wings, directly in front of an ornate wooden desk decorated with several stained glass lamps.
One particularly eye-catching lamp for sale is a 1903 ‘Wisteria’ table lamp. Made up of thousands of hand-selected pieces of purple, green and blue glass, it is reminiscent of real wisteria on the exterior of Temple of Wings.
It’s just one of many stained glass lamps, each of which has estimated retail prices starting at over $300,000.
“The house is a fantasy of a specific moment in time, with many different artistic movements all united in one space,” said Jonathan Rendell, deputy president of Christie’s Americas, in a statement. web page advertise the upcoming auction.
“It takes us to a world where art and music and literature and painting are elevated to a way of life.”
He told the San Francisco Chronicle that it was a mix of American and European art.
‘[Ann Getty] filled it with her reflections on the culture of the late 19th century, and did something unusual by fusing the European culture of the second half of the 19th century with American culture,” Rendell told the newspaper.
He spoke of the house in poetic terms, describing Temple of Wings not as a home but as a piece of music.
A set of nine ‘jewel’ stained glass windows created by English architect and designer William Burges is expected to sell for around $30,000
A stained glass window depicting a cypress landscape is estimated to cost between $300,000 and $500,000
‘It is a special piece of music that you wander through. You don’t run through Temple of Wings, you wander, you experience it, you look out, you smell the gardens of the Berkeley Hills and appreciate its unique beauty,” he said.
Other works on display at auction include those designed by AWN Pugin, the figurehead of design reform and the Gothic revival in Britain.
A set of nine “jewel” stained glass windows created by English architect and designer William Burges is expected to sell for about $30,000.
Works by other Victorian architect-designers such as Bruce Talbert and Charles Robert Ashbee are also part of the lots.
Santangelo told the Chronicle that there are currently no plans to sell the Temple of Wings home itself.