Cottone Auctions’ Sept. 23-24 sale features the Dr. Bruce A. Austin Collection of American Arts & Crafts

A scholar’s collection of Grueby, early Stickley, Roycroft, Rohlfs and rare Limbert and Van Erp lighting opens the sale. Day two follows the Larkin family of Buffalo from Roycroft to a McCartan bronze, then on to Tiffany, Steuben, European paintings and modern art.

GENESEO, NY — Cottone Auctions will hold a two-day sale on September 23 and 24, 2026, beginning at 12 noon Eastern each day. The first day is given over entirely to the collection of Dr. Bruce A. Austin of Pittsford, New York, 221 lots of American Arts & Crafts. The second is a Fine Art & Antiques auction of some 275 lots from estates and private collections. Bidding is in the gallery, by phone and absentee, and online at live.cottoneauctions.com, LiveAuctioneers and Invaluable.

September 23: The Dr. Bruce A. Austin Collection

Bruce Austin was Professor Emeritus at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he founded the Department of Communication and chaired it for fifteen years, and later directed RIT Press. He was as much a scholar of the Arts and Crafts movement as a collector of it. He curated “The American Arts & Crafts Movement in Western New York, 1900-1920” at RIT and wrote its catalogue, mapping the region’s makers from Stickley’s Craftsman Workshops at Eastwood and the Roycroft at East Aurora to Charles Rohlfs in Buffalo and Walrath in Rochester. A second exhibition and catalogue, “Frans Wildenhain, 1950-75,” at RIT’s Bevier Gallery and Dyer Arts Center in 2012, took up the mid-century potters of the region. For more than thirty years he covered shows and auctions for the New York-Pennsylvania Collector, and he wrote the way he collected: with the model number, the retail plate and the shop mark in hand. The catalogue for this sale follows his lead.

Grueby is the heart of the collection, about thirty pieces, led by a 23-inch tooled-leaf matte green floor vase with its original labels (Lot 4, $7,000-$10,000), a two-color tooled-leaf and bud vase (Lot 5, $4,000-$6,000) and a matte green gourd-form vase (Lot 6, $5,000-$8,000), with signed work by decorators Ruth Erickson, Ellen W. Robbins and Eva Russell. Austin favored the earliest Gustav Stickley. A rare early bow-arm Morris chair of about 1904, model no. 336/2340, with reverse-tapered legs and the red “Als Ik Kan” decal, leads some forty Stickley lots (Lot 23, $4,000-$6,000), alongside a rare diminutive two-door bookcase, a trestle library table, an early smoker’s cabinet and a Harvey Ellis server.

Two Roycroft pieces have no twin. A nine-foot oak settle is said to have been built by Herbert Buffum, head of the Roycroft furniture shop, for his brother’s medical waiting room in East Aurora, and is believed unique (Lot 108, $2,000-$4,000). A bird’s-eye maple dresser, model no. R0108, was made for the Roycroft Inn and still has its original hardware and finish (Lot 110, $2,000-$4,000). From Buffalo, a pair of Charles Rohlfs ‘Beacon Hill’ buttressed oak and copper candlesticks, circa 1902, incised with his cipher and illustrated among his retail plates in Cunningham’s monograph (Lot 2, $3,000-$5,000).

Two lamps stand apart. The Charles P. Limbert ‘Lighthouse’ table lamp, made in Grand Rapids between about 1910 and 1920, is one of the rarest forms Limbert produced: a hexagonal hammered copper shade with a pierced overlay of a Dutch landscape, windmills turning above grazing cattle against bent amber glass, on a tapering lighthouse standard cut with green-glazed windows (Lot 3, $5,000-$8,000). The Dirk Van Erp table lamp, circa 1910, hand-hammered copper with a 20 5/8-inch mica shade and the impressed windmill mark, descended in the family of its original owners and passed through Cottone in March 2024 before Austin bought it (Lot 24, $8,000-$12,000).

The rest of the collection reads like a roll call of the movement: L. & J.G. Stickley, Limbert, Roycroft copper by Karl Kipp and Victor Toothaker, Heintz, Marblehead, Hampshire, Van Briggle, Teco, Jugtown, Wilkinson and Duffner & Kimberly leaded glass, Kalo Shop and Hans Christensen silver, and a Western New York thread of Walrath Pottery, Charles Fergus Binns, Fong Chow for Glidden, George Herdle paintings, Frans Wildenhain, Lulu Scott Backus and Nancy Jurs.

September 24: Fine Art & Antiques

The second day begins where the first leaves off, in East Aurora. Before Elbert Hubbard founded the Roycroft he was a partner in the Larkin Soap Company, and John D. Larkin (1845-1926) was his brother-in-law. Two lots come down from Larkin through his daughter Ruth Larkin Robb and are sold from the estate of Patricia Forman Robb, Buffalo. Edward F. McCartan’s bronze Pan, modeled about 1913 and cast by Gorham, is the life-size, 56-inch version, the largest size in which the figure was cast; the 30-inch and 15-inch reductions are the ones that usually come to market, and McCartan wrote to the Albright in 1922 that he had limited the casts of Pan to six. It was shown at the Albright Art Gallery in 1916 in the National Sculpture Society’s exhibition of contemporary American sculpture, staged under the gallery’s director Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, the first woman to head a major American art museum. This cast was illustrated as a full-page plate in her catalogue and stood outdoors on the gallery terraces for the summer. It then passed from the Buffalo Fine Arts Academy to Larkin for the gardens of “Larkland” on Lincoln Parkway. It has stood outdoors for more than a century and its green patina shows it (Lot 356, $20,000-$40,000). With it is Alexander O. Levy’s portrait of Ruth Larkin Robb, painted about 1910 on her father’s commission (Lot 357, $3,000-$6,000). Four more Levys follow.

The top lot of the two days is a Tiffany Studios Daffodil lamp, circa 1910, with a 20-inch leaded shade (Lot 262, $60,000-$80,000), followed by a rare Favrile floriform vase on a bronze base, an engraved leaf-and-vine “flower frog” centerpiece and a labeled cabinet vase (Lots 265-267). Ruth deLorraine of Campbell, New York, a few miles from Corning, spent a lifetime on Carder-era Steuben, and some fifty lots of her collection are offered together: gold and blue Aurene, a Tyrian vase (Lot 300), a green Aurene lamp with hooked decoration (Lot 289), blue moss agate, acid cut-back, Rosaline, jade and Cluthra. Loetz and Quezal follow, including a Loetz Jack-in-the-Pulpit vase and a Quezal example (Lots 331 and 337), then Handel Peacock and landscape lamps (Lots 282-283).

European paintings include an Anton Mauve panel of the 1870s or ‘80s (Lot 353, $3,000-$5,000), Édouard Cortès’ La Place de la Madeleine with Rehs Galleries provenance (Lot 354, $8,000-$12,000) and Paul Louis Bouchard’s A Moscow Street in Winter (Lot 355, $8,000-$12,000).

The modern section opens with three Andy Warhol screenprints: Jacqueline Kennedy II of 1966 (Lot 222, $3,000-$5,000), Hot Dog Bean from Campbell’s Soup II, 1969, signed and numbered 7/250 with the Authentication Board stamp (Lot 223, $25,000-$35,000), and Mao, 1972, signed and numbered 75/250 (Lot 224, $20,000-$40,000). Charles Burchfield’s 1941 watercolor Winter Scene, inscribed on the back “Snow for Christmas” for Dr. Jim and Miriam Ehinger, descends in that family (Lot 231, $15,000-$25,000). Joseph Floch’s Tapestry of 1944 (Lot 236, $5,000-$8,000) and Tetsuo Ochikubo’s Insight into Nature (Lot 227, $5,000-$8,000) were deaccessioned by St. Lawrence University. A Robert De Niro Sr. figural abstraction follows (Lot 238, $8,000-$12,000).

Modern furniture and sculpture is led by Wendell Castle, who worked a few miles from the gallery in Scottsville. Three late fiberglass pieces span his last decade: Destiny, 2010, a unique silicone-finished form over wood, signed and dated (Lot 258, $15,000-$25,000); Blue Noon (Prototype 2), 2008, polychromed fiberglass, one of two prototypes (Lot 259, $10,000-$20,000); and You’ll have to wait till yesterday (Lot 260, $8,000-$12,000). His Molar series is here too, in dining chairs, a table and a pair of Baby Molars (Lots 251-254). George Nakashima follows with a free-edge slab coffee table (Lot 255, $10,000-$15,000), a cushion armchair and ottoman (Lot 257, $5,000-$8,000) and an end table with shelf (Lot 256, $3,000-$5,000). A 24-inch Claude Conover stoneware vessel, Tuch, from the collection of Dr. Lynn Rosen of Rochester (Lot 247, $5,000-$8,000) closes the highlights.

Preview and bidding

Preview is Tuesday, September 22, noon to 5 p.m., and Wednesday, September 23, 9 a.m. to noon, Thursday, September 24, 9a.m. to noon or by appointment. The gallery is at 120 Court Street, Geneseo, New York. Catalogues are at www.cottoneauctions.com. Register to bid at live.cottoneauctions.com, or call 585-243-1000 for phone and absentee bids. Cottone operates a full-service in-house shipping department.

Contact Matt Cottone Cottone Auctions 120 Court Street, Geneseo, NY 14454 585-243-1000 info@cottoneauctions.com www.cottoneauctions.com