Sotheby’s to showcase Stanley J Seeger's extraordinary collection under the title 1000 Ways of Seeing

KOLKATA: Stanley J. Seeger (1930-2011) was one of the greatest collectors of our time - a man of protean taste and all-embracing interests, with a voracious appetite for the beautiful and the quirky, and for things associated with key people or moments in history. Together with his kindred spirit and partner of 32 years Christopher Cone, Stanley Seeger devoted much of his rich and fascinating - but always very private - life to seeking out the vast array of special objects that were to surround them during their years together.

This spring, over the course of two full days on 5th and 6th March, more than 1,000 works from this extraordinary collection, spanning some 75 collecting categories, will be offered for sale at Sotheby’s, under the title 1000 Ways of Seeing.

Starting, chronologically, with 250 million-year-old fossilised trees, and charting many of the great moments in history and art thereafter, the collection is full of things that are either beautiful in their own right, or have a powerful story to tell, or both. Whimsicality, humour and historical resonance always appealed to Stanley Seeger and Christopher Cone. The works of art, objects and curiosities they collected were part of their everyday life.

Guests to their homes might be invited to sit in Winston Churchill’s armchair, while being poured tea from Lord Nelson’s silver teapot or served Bloody Marys from Al Capone’s cocktail shaker – a Christmas gift from the gangster’s men, engraved "To a regular guy, from the boys 1932".

Stanley Seeger’s great enthusiasm for natural history is reflected in the collection in ten fossilised dinosaur eggs from the Jurassic Period (100 million BC), while his fascination with film, history and great historical figures is reflected in Orson Welles’ working draft script for Citizen Kane (1941).