Wes Cowan - Andrew Clemens Sand Art, ca. 1880

Extraordinary Find: Andrew Clemens Sand Art, ca. 1880

Transcript

HOST: And now for an entirely different kind of folk art. 20 years ago, appraiser Wes Cowan had never heard of Andrew Clemens, a young man from McGregor, Iowa, who, in the late 1800s, mastered the meticulous art of filling bottles with colored sand-- grain by grain. But that all changed dramatically in 2002, when a guest named Tom Ellsworth brought his fragile heirloom to the Hot Springs ROADSHOW.

APPRAISER: I was at the folk art table, and a gentlemen walked up and he showed me this bottle that was filled with sand, but it wasn't just a bottle filled with sand. It was an unbelievable construction. I took one look at it and I just, my mind was completely blown.

GUEST: We're not really sure what to call it. (chuckles) But it's colored sand in a jar. And it was presented to my great-grandfather around the end of the Civil War. He was a surgeon in the Union Army, I believe from New York. And this was a gift from two of his friends, and it's been in my family ever since.

APPRAISER: Let's start with who your great-grandfather was. He didn't come from New York.

GUEST: Did he not?

APPRAISER: He came from Illinois, and he spent most of his Civil War career in the Hot Springs, Arkansas, vicinity.

APPRAISER: The real interesting thing about this remarkable piece of sand art,

though, is just what you see here. Not only is his name on it, but on the back, you see this wonderful eagle with a 36-star flag. You spin it around, you see his name is written in script, there's a mortar and pestle. All of this is done with individual grains of sand. And when you flip it up, the label on the bottom says, "Pictured Rock and Sand by A. Clemens, Deaf Mute from McGregor, Iowa."

APPRAISER: I had never heard of this guy. And, in, and I was sitting at a table with two top folk art experts in the country, and they'd never heard of Andrew Clemens! So, um, it, it was a real moment of discovery, I think, for all of us.

APPRAISER: He went to the deaf-mute school in Iowa and would come home in the summers and he started going to this spot on the Mississippi River in McGregor, Iowa, and collecting sand and started experimenting with making these bottles. He used a great big, oversized fishhook and, like, a popsicle stick, and he would pack it in this bottle and manipulate it with the fishhook. By the time he was about 17, he, he was really into it, and from 17 on, until he died, he was basically working with this colored sand that he was collecting locally. We know that for part of his career, he, he sat in the front window of a grocery store so people could watch him make bottles. He also apparently worked at the family home in front of a window there. He actually had a, a rate sheet, uh, that he had printed up. "Pictured Rock Sand from Andrew Clemens, McGregor, Iowa." If you want to order a bottle that's a, a half-pint or a pint or a quarter-pint, if you wanted a marine scene. He advertises a locomotive, a sailboat, steamboats. All of these were priced differently. The fact that he had this rate sheet printed shows that, you know, he, he was peddling these things far and wide, or trying to. The Iowa State Museum has Clemens's masterpiece bottle, which he made for his mother, that has George Washington on horseback, has a steamboat, has the state seal of Iowa, all on the same bottle. It's absolutely mind-blowing.

APPRAISER: It is a remarkable piece of folk art. On today's market, I would guess that it's between $4,000 and $6,000, is what we'd estimate.

GUEST: Really?

APPRAISER: It might bring more than that in the right auction. Great piece.

GUEST: That's great.

APPRAISER: The market for Clemens sand bottles, um, has been, it's been pretty astonishing.

APPRAISER: The, the market perked along for a number of years where bottles were selling for $5,000, $10,000. 2015, 2016, a couple bottles, um, brought $35,000 or $40,000. I didn't sell those for, for that amount of money. And I was, I remember being, "Whoa, that's pretty astonishing. That much money for one of these bottles.” The next time we had a bottle, I think I had it estimated... I, I can't even remember, $30,000 to $40,000. But I do remember there were phone bidders, and I remember it blowing past $50,000, $60,000, $70,000. It was like a, there was a, like, "Really? "Are you serious? Somebody's paying..." This is, this is, like... With the buyer's premium, it's, like, $100,000. This is serious money. Then six months later, I had two more. Both of them sold for more than $100,000 in the same auction. The owner of the bottle, the, the gentleman that I interviewed first in Hot Springs in, you know, almost 20 years ago, contacted Cowan's last spring, and he said, "We've made the decision to sell the bottle. And, um, would you like to handle the bottle?" Well, duh, of course! We were prepared to drive down to Arkansas, pick the bottle up, and kept waiting to hear from the gentleman when we could do it, when we could do it, and the next thing I know is that, "Well, you know, we've made other arrangements." (chuckles) I suspected knowing, uh, who had sold other bottles, that it had to be, you know, one of maybe three or four other places that had sold the bottle, and lo and behold, it was Skinner.