Serveware, Ceramics, Silver and Glass

Victoria Pottery (VPC) Majolica plate 8.75-ins, English, circa 1875, with simulated bamboo edging, colorful bamboo shoots, on a vivid turquoise basket-weave ground. VPC painted pattern mark 'M110' to reverse. Provenance: From the Estate of Mrs. John Hay Whitney, Sotheby's New York, April 22-25, 1999, Sale number 7293, Lot number 956 (color illustration p. 369). For over 28 years we have been among the Nation’s preeminent specialists in fine antique majolica. Betsey Cushing Roosevelt Whitney (1908-1999), the widow of John Hay "Jock" Whitney and the first wife of James Roosevelt II, the eldest son of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was one of the three glamorous Cushing sisters of Boston. Married at twenty-two, she was FDR's clear favorite during the White House years, where she often stood in as a highly competent, enthusiastic and poised Hostess, a job which the first lady deplored. Betsey’s social-climbing mother preened her three daughters from birth to make socially and financially advantageous marriages. And that they did. Her elder sister, Mary (Minnie), married Vincent Astor, and her younger sister, Barbara, whom they called 'Babe' form a young age, married Standard Oil heir, Stanley Mortimer, Jr., and after divorcing him, married William S. Paley, founder of the CBS television network (Babe Paley). These glittering doyennes of New York and international society defined taste, what was in and what wasn't, for thirty years. After divorcing James Roosevelt in 1940, Betsey married Jock Whitney on March 1, 1942 in an informal family-only ceremony held at her mother’s New York apartment on East 86th Street. She was 33 and he was 37. She had two young daughters, Sara and Kate; he had no children from his previous marriage. As one of the wealthiest men in the world throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Jock achieved his great fortune through equal parts inheritance, business acumen and flat-out good luck. His concerns were as vast and varied as they are interesting; for example, in 1933 he acquired a 15% interest in Technicolor Corporation, and in 1942 when David O. Selznick liquidated his company for tax reasons, and sold his share in gone with the wind to his business partner, Jock Whitney, for $500,000, who in turn sold it on to MGM for $2.8 million, so that the studio owned the film outright. In 1946, he founded J.H. Whitney & Company, the oldest venture capital firm in the U.S. In 1949, after eight years of marriage, he adopted Betsey’s two daughters from her previous marriage to James Roosevelt and the girls’ names were changed to Whitney. Jock was appointed by Dwight D. Eisenhower as Ambassador to Great Britain and the couple moved to London in 1957 for four years, taking with them some 150 of their favorite paintings, all of them masterpieces. Since their marriage in 1942, the couple had set about collecting scores of nearly priceless paintings and other significant works decorative art, the finest antique furniture, tapestries, porcelains, ceramics, and Majolica. During their tenure in London, both Ambassador and Mrs. Whitney became close to Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, who, in a departure from the usual procedure, addressed them by their first names. After Betsey Whitney’s death in 1999, their collections were consigned to Sotheby’s New York. Items were removed directly from their many homes, a quadruplex at Beekman...

Majolica game Partridge Pie dish with liner, circa 1880, Victoria pottery. Rare yellow color for a pie dish.