The American poet Stanley Moss, who died in 2024 at the age of 99, had a devoted following, winning admiration for his free-verse meditations from the likes of Pulitzer Prize-winning colleagues W. S. Merwin and John Ashbery, who referred to him as “American poetry’s best-kept secret". But even fans of his poetry might not be aware of his other vocation—collecting and selling Old Master paintings. Moss’s towering standing in that rarified world comes into focus this week, when his estate is putting several works from his collection up for sale at Sotheby’s New York, now installed in its new Brutalist headquarters, the Upper East Side's Breuer Building.
A total of 18 works from Moss’s collection will be auctioned later this week in two days of Old Master sales, with the highlight coming in Thursday's auction of two key Venetian paintings: Woman at her Toilette Holding a Mirror by Giovanni Bellini and workshop, created just before the artist’s death in 1516; and Allegory of Music by Jacopo Tintoretto and workshop, variously dated between the mid-1540s and mid-1550s.
The Bellini work, with a pre-sale estimate of $600,000-$800,000, shows how the painter responded to innovations by his younger colleagues, Giorgione and Titian, says Christopher Apostle, Sotheby’s international head of Old Masters.
Depicting a figure who is nearly nude, the panel painting includes signature elements associated with the Venetian school, like a sumptuous Turkish carpet and a beguiling window view suggestive of Venice’s hinterland, the Terrafirma, replete with distant mountains.
Giovanni Bellini and workshop, Woman at her Toilette Holding a Mirror (1515) Image: courtesy of Sotheby's
The Tintoretto work, estimated to fetch between $500,000-$700,000, is the artist’s only surviving illusionistic ceiling painting, showing a celestial scene of three female musicians tuning their instruments while perched on an expanse of clouds. Moss decorated the dining-room ceiling of his own New York City home with the massive work, which is nearly three-and-one-half meters long.
A native of the New York City borough of Queens and the son of a schoolteacher, Moss came from humble origins. His expertise was a response to his travels in Europe and his broader literary interests, explains his son, Tobia Milla Moss, a 54-year-old author based in Italy. The poet’s “love of art was very much a love of life,” says the younger Moss.
Though Moss never had his own gallery, as such, some of his deals are the stuff of legend. In the late 1970s, he sold the Musée du Louvre its very first Piero della Francesca, Portrait de Sigismond Malatesta, seigneur de Rimini, now on display just off the Grande Galerie. And he brokered the sale of Francisco de Zurbarán’s Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose to Southern California’s Norton Simon Museum, which counts the 1633 Spanish painting among its signature works.
Apostle recalls that Moss, noted for his keen eye, was “always a presence” in the Old Masters scene, and nothing short of “a unique figure" for his ability to combine collecting and selling art, with writing—and even publishing—literature. “I was always honoured to be summoned to his place in Riverdale,” says Apostle, of the Bronx neighbourhood where Moss had a legendary house, with a view of the Hudson River, where he lived surrounded by his collection.
Moss had a special affinity for Italian and Spanish art, says his son, and Thursday will also see the sale of a dynamic oil-on-copper painting by Luca Giordano, the late-Baroque Neapolitan artist who later served as court painter to the Spanish Bourbons. Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, inspired by an episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is thought to be an allegory about the conflict between reason and instinct. Variously dated to the late 1670s or early 1680s, the work has an estimate of $60,000-$80,000.
