Major Autumn Sale, 20^th November 2004

Daniel Shaffer writes: For me the memory of Rippon Boswell's Wiesbaden auction on 20 November 2004 will be forever overshadowed by the sad news of the death that evening of my friend and mentor, Robert Pinner. Tributes to Robert will be paid elsewhere, but for many of us in the room where his beloved collection of Turkmen rugs had been sold half a year earlier, Robert was the ultimate teppichfreund, a fount of vigorously shared hospitality, knowledge, connoisseurship, and wisdom. We shall all miss him.

Returning to more mundane matters of wool, silk and lucre, the Wiesbaden sale began with 91 lots consigned by the Horst and Eva Engelhardt Foundation, with the proceeds going to charity. The rugs, from the former Mannheim dealers' private collection, were an odd assortment of very high quality, predominantly 19th century, Persian, Chinese and Caucasian rugs, in traditional taste, mostly in smaller formats and all in immaculate condition. Some are known from the series of Engelhardt catalogues of the 1970s. Sensibly Detlef and Christa Maltzahn had negotiated reserve prices that were as much as 50 percent below the rather high published estimates, thereby yielding a total take well above the agreed minimum.

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