Iconic Collections

Our firm was asked by the trustees and executors of the Estate of Katharine Hepburn to oversee the entire marketing and sale process for Ms. Hepburn’s vast collection. During a long and celebrated career on stage and in the movies, Ms. Hepburn had divided her time between a townhouse on East 49th Street in New York and the family home, “Fenwick,” in Connecticut. While she was by no means a serious art collector, Ms. Hepburn had retained an enormous and diverse assemblage of family and professional heirlooms, of furnishings and memorabilia that, taken together, represented nearly a century of collecting. While the value of this asset was perhaps not impressive, its auction potential was truly extraordinary.

The “celebrity sale” has become a phenomenon in the auction world. One has only to mention such sales for the estates of Andy Warhol and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to envisage the drama and publicity these events create. Hence our goal was to fashion a sale for Ms. Hepburn’s collection that not only paid tribute to her memory with elegance and dignity but maximized the value of each and every item sold.

After many months of intense planning and liaison among the many parties involved, the sale took place over two days at Sotheby’s New York. Both the catalogue and the public exhibition of the collection had been organized in chronological fashion, illustrating Ms. Hepburn’s life and career through her collection.  There were the many paintings she had done on movie sets and vacation spots around the world; studio stills and family photographs; furniture, silver and porcelain; prints, books, clothing, costumes and wonderful Hollywood memorabilia. In a sale that brought an impressive $6,100,000 overall, amidst almost frenetic bidding, the highest price was achieved for a work Ms. Hepburn herself had created. This was a tiny (3 inches tall) Portrait Head of Spencer Tracy in bronze, sculpted by Ms. Hepburn in the 1960s and one of her most prized possessions. Estimated at $3,000-5,000, it brought—after about ten minutes of bidding--$316,000.