Exonian Profiles
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Appraiser John Hays ’78 ‘Wrestles’ with
History For Christie’s and ‘Antiques Roadshow’
As a senior vice president at the auction house Christie’s, where his specialty is American furniture and decorative arts, John A. Hays ’78 has made a career of appraising objects of great beauty and historical significance. And as one of the original on-air appraisers with PBS’s hugely popular “Antiques Roadshow,” Hays travels all over the country to help identify unsuspected treasures. Although Hays studied art history at Kenyon, to hear him tell it, some of the most valuable preparation for his life in the arts came in some decidedly unaesthetic quarters: namely, the wrestling room at the Exeter gym. And some of his best instruction came at the hands of the Academy’s legendary wrestling coach, Ted Seabrooke. “Ted basically gave me the ground rules of life,” says Hays, who co-captained the varsity his senior year. In fact, Hays has noticed more than a passing resemblance between a high-stakes auction and a wrestling match: “You have to feel your way through both. And both require a lot of stamina.” Hays say it was the competitiveness of the high-end auction world that attracted him to the field in the first place. “I wanted to be where the action is,” says Hays—a good thing, because as one of Christie’s principal auctioneers, he sees plenty of it. He’s been associated with some of the biggest auction prices in the field of American furniture, none bigger than the $12.1 million paid in 1989 for an exquisite 18th-century Chippendale block-and-shell carved desk and bookcase—still the world record for a piece of American furniture sold at auction. But ask Hays what his own “personal best” is and he’s likely to mention the sale last year of the Joseph and Bathsheba Pope valuables cabinet for $2.4 million. He describes the small, boldly carved 17th-century oak chest as “a piece of Salem history” (Bathsheba Pope was an aunt of Benjamin Franklin). The chest had come down through eleven generations of the sellers’ family, who were unaware of its significance and prepared to part with it for a relatively modest sum. “This is a discovery that Christie’s recognized,” says Hays, who describes the sale as a “home run” all around, especially since the buyer was the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. Hays’ decision to specialize in American furniture was partly chance—there were no openings in Christie’s American art department when he began working there—but not entirely. “I knew all my woods,” he says, thanks to a sculpture course he had taken at Exeter with art instructor Cabot Lyford. Now he couldn’t be happier with his choice. “There’s no better way to understand the world we live in than to know art history,” he says. “I don’t think history is words; I think it’s objects. And furniture tells the story better than paintings.” Hays was involved in the early history of PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow,” now in its fifth season in America. He took part in the very first taping, which attracted only a handful of participants. But after just a few broadcasts, he recalls, “people were sleeping on sidewalks” for the chance to have their heirlooms appraised by professionals from Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Hays, who calls “Roadshow” a “wonderful distraction” from his day job, believes the show “brought art to America in a way that’s never been done before. It pulled the curtain back: art is in their living rooms.” —Beth Brosnan |
