The Old Lyme drawings by Andy Warhol and Marisol
Coming to auction at Phillips Auctions Editions and Works on Paper sale in October is a pair of drawings created in 1963 by Andy Warhol and fellow pop artist Marisol. The two drawings have been in a private collection housed at Teviotdale in Linlithgo, New York since 1972 when they were given by artist Wynn Chamberlain, one of the “sitters” depicted in the drawings, to interior designer Harrison Cultra, who had recently purchased Teviotdale from the Delafield family. “Wynn was tall and lanky, a very good magic realist painter who was beginning to get a little interested in pop,” recalled Warhol.
In POPism: The Warhol Sixties by Warhol and Pat Hackett, Andy often refers to the endless weekends spent at Wynn’s house. “I went out to Old Lyme, Connecticut, a lot of weekends that summer [1963]. Wynn Chamberlain was renting the guest house on [gallerist] Eleanor Ward’s property, and he had gangs of his friends out there the whole time. Once, Eleanor visited the guest house and got really, really upset when [writer] Taylor Mead came into the living room dressed up in drag and announced to her, ‘I’m Eleanor Ward. Who are you?’” “That summer in Old Lyme was a prelude to all the craziness later. People were up all night wandering around the grounds smoking dope or playing records back at the house. Every weekend was a non-stop party—no one broke the weekend up into days, everything just flowed into everything else. . . The great thing about staying at Wynn’s was that nobody ever locked their doors—in fact, nobody really had doors to lock, everybody just drifted around and slept wherever, and of course, that made it really convenient to film.”
These drawings were created over one of those long weekends in Connecticut in 1963, when several artists, including Warhol, Marisol, John Ashbery, and Chamberlain were there together. On commercial packing paper, the feet (Warhol) and hands (Marisol) of the guests were traced, and then identified. Teviotdale has a fascinating history. The house was built in 1774 by Walter Livingston in the Irish Georgian style a year after his father, Robert Livingston, the third lord of Livingston Manor, sold him the land. Over the years, many generations of the family were raised there, including the family of painter and inventor Robert Fulton, who had married Walter’s daughter, Harriet, in front of the fireplace there in 1808.
The house was uninhabited during the twentieth century until it was purchased by Livingston descendant John Ross Delafield, who had also inherited nearby Montgomery Place in 1945. Harrison Cultra purchased the property in 1969 from the Delafields while staying at Grasmere, in Rhinebeck, with his client Louise Timpson, the former Duchess of Argyll. Harrison’s clientele eventually included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Richard Jenrette, and Sam and Grayson Hall, writers of Dark Shadows, who lived at Wildercliff, also in Rhinebeck.
