Windsor Sale Tops $15 Million
Runaway bidding continued Tuesday at the Duke and Duchess of Windsor estate auction, with two racks of gaming chips selling for $24,150, or 30 times their pre-auction estimated value.
The buyer, Rick Patrick, a New York artist, said he intended to wow his weekly poker buddies, using the chips as quarters.
"When I saw them, I said to myself, 'They're mine.' I can't wait to use them," said Patrick.
The 400 red, yellow and black chips each bear a gilt coronet and the interlaced initials "WE" for Wallis and Edward.
On Monday, a Sir Alfred Munnings oil painting of the duke on his horse, Forest Witch, was the top-priced item, selling for $2.3 million, a record price for a work by the artist. It had been estimated at between $600,000 and $800,000.
The most expensive pieces during the Tuesday morning session at Sotheby's auction house were two pairs of William and Mary stools, valued at $10,000 a pair and bought for a total of $159,000 by an anonymous telephone bidder.
The Windsor estate was bought by businessman Mohamed Al Fayed after the duchess died in 1986. Profits of the auction will go to the Dodi Fayed International Charitable Foundation, named for Al Fayed son's, who died in the car crash last year that also killed Princess Diana.
The total of all sales, midway through day six of the nine-day auction, edged past $15 million.
Other sales (all prices include Sotheby's house commission.:
- A two-volume edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland given to Edward when he was Prince of Wales by the author, Lewis Carroll, as a birthday present, $7,475
- A portrait of the duchess by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, $107,000, to the National Portrait Gallery of London
- A six-volume edition of Winston Churchill's The World Crisis, inscribed to the duke, $145,500, to Texas businessman John McCall
- A copy of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, inscribed to the duke and duchess by the future president, $41,400, also to McCall
- A framed collection of 122 British Armed Forces buttons, $35,650. The high estimate for the buttons from the 1920s was just $1,500.
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