Master Auctioneer

The name of Novelist Somerset Maugham, whose collection of impressionist and postimpressionist paintings was on the block at the great London auction house of Sotheby's, undoubtedly accounted for the record turnout of 2,500. But in a larger sense, the star of the evening was, as always, Sotheby's chairman and chief auctioneer, Peter Cecil Wilson, 49. Wilson has sold 28,000 paintings in his career, and last week he went about his work with the same persuasive urbanity that has made Sotheby's the biggest art auction house in the world. Wilson does not joke or coax or subject laggard bidders to reproachful looks. "The cunning of Wilson," says one colleague, "is that there is no cunning.''

It has been no disadvantage, of course, that his grandfather was a baron, or that Wilson himself attended Eton and Oxford. "He knows every picture in every manor in England," says one London dealer. One of his first jobs after leaving Oxford--"A terribly humble job," he says, "a hopeless kind of job"--was as a general rewrite man and assistant circulation manager for the art magazine Connoisseur. But after a year of drudgery, Wilson felt he had learned enough about antiques to brazen it out at Sotheby's. For his first auction in 1938, he practiced all weekend by "auctioning" off every stick of their furniture to his young wife and their baby's nurse. Even now he scarcely sleeps the night before a sale. "Selling pictures is not like selling boots," he says.

Going Modern. Sotheby's is 218 years old, but it was not until the 1950s that it stepped to the front. In 1954 the British government ended all currency restrictions art sales, and Sotheby's 260 catalogues a year ever since then have stressed its unique ability to make sales without taxes. That same year, when Wilson was an assistant to the director for modern art, he promoted a charity sale of modern works from Henry Moore to Graham Sutherland. This sort of thing had never been done at rival Christie's, which only now is getting around to the moderns. Sotheby's low commission (10%) gives it an advantage over foreign competitors, but Wilson's pioneering in the auctioning of modern art captured the British field.

Every day Sotheby secretaries clip the obituary pages of the London Times and send along the pertinent stories to the nine directors for porcelain, jade and Eastern art, medals and coins, manuscripts and so on, who must estimate the art-sale possibilities of the estate. Wilson himself has the reputation of being able to hear "a death rattle before the doctor is called." Actually it is largely Wilson's aristocratic soft sell and impressive presence (he is 6 ft. 4 in. tall) that brought to Sotheby's such tasks as the record-breaking Goldschmidt collection sale in 1958 and Rubens' Adoration of the Magi, which in 1959 went for a record $770,000.

"A Charming Man." Wilson knew that Maugham was considering selling his collection a year and a half ago, but when he visited Maugham's Riviera villa, he tactfully avoided even mentioning the fact. Sure enough, when the novelist finally made up his mind, he sent for Wilson to visit him again. "Wilson is a charming man," says Maugham's longtime secretary, Alan Searle. After only two days of quiet negotiating, Maugham himself declared: "I wouldn't trust my pictures with anyone else."

For the sale, Wilson pored over the catalogue, noting in his private code bids already phoned in and the reserve price below which Maugham would not sell. From his opening announcement--"Lot No. 1. Roderick O'Conor's Still Life with Vegetables"--he presided over the sale without a flicker of nervousness, apart from shooting a cuff now and then. The 35 paintings went for $1,466,864, including $244,000--the highest price ever paid at auction for a living artist--for a Picasso curiosity that showed The Death of Harlequin on one side and Woman Seated in a Garden on the other. In the last five years, Sotheby's has brought in $76.5 million, of which nearly half has come from Wilson's painting sales alone. This year promises to be the biggest yet.

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