Relics

At auctions of collections of esthetics, all is not art that is bartered, even though the assembled objects may once have represented the ultimate artistic impulses of many a departed collector. Strange, strange things have gone under the hammer, some to end in dime curiosity shows, others to adorn the private amassings of eccentric or nouveaux accumulators. But buyers are never lacking. No one doubted that new owners would be found for several relics offered for sale last week in Manhattan and London.

Jackson. One treasure was a crop of hair from the scalp of Andrew Jackson, shown by the American Art Association. The straw colored hair was enclosed in a cardboard box "enough of it to stuff a small doll." Other Jacksonia were exhibited and offered-- hand-cut wine glasses, a snuff box from Lafayette, a gavel, wine-bottle tags of silver.

Catherine, Napoleon. In another Manhattan art-huckstering shop, one more sale impended in the life of a vase once owned by Catherine the Great and later smashed by Napoleon.

Made for King Ferdinand IV of Naples, the vase was passed on by Catherine, its temperamental second owner, to Count Louis de Cobenzel, an Austrian diplomat. Cobenzel later negotiated with Napoleon, then only a general, in his apartments at Campo Formio, for peace between Austria and France. Cobenzel attempted to bolster his arguments by hinting at aid from Russia. General Napoleon, raging, replied: "Before autumn is over, I shall shatter your empire as I shatter this vase," and dashed the bit of crockery into the fireplace.

Napoleon's brother Joseph was present. He picked up the pieces, had them cemented. Last week, still clinging together, the pieces were on sale to help their latest owner, a U. S. woman physician, satisfy a judgment obtained against her by a trained nurse.

Jones. Another object made valuable through association with Catherine the Great, was available at the Corona Mundi Galleries, Manhattan. No detriment to its price, either, was its connection with an all but forgotten interlude in the career of that exemplary U. S. figure, Sea-fighter John Paul Jones. The object was a miniature Catherine gave her hero together with other favors and a commission in her navy.

The popular credo that Catherine's life was one continuous hanky-panky with her lovers is not dispelled by Russian chronicles of John Paul Jones's sojourn at St. Petersburg. After the American Revolution, Sailor Jones found colonial life ashore undeniably dull. Russia was trying to start a war with the Turks. It got one. The lovely empress desired Jones's services in the east, and Jones was exquisitely flattered by her notice.

He fought in the Black Sea and acquitted himself as nobly as at the palace, but as war waned, he noticed that simultaneously Catherine's extraordinary desire for his eagerly offered services became jaded. Eventually John Paul Jones left Russia, unhonored and unrewarded for the invaluable services rendered to Her Majesty, but not without memories and a miniature.

Alexandra. In England, minor knick-knacks which belonged to Queen Alexandra are already filtering through the land, though she has been dead little more than a year (TIME, Nov. 30, 1925). Pawn-shoppers discovered this last week, by spotting on oddments of china, furniture, lithographs, the royal arms and "A"s. Ardent collectors nosed about to see if Alexandra, like her mother-in-law, Victoria, ever perpetrated water color sketches of the kind that one's relations dispose of furtively after one's death.