Sold for $75,600

This diminutive bottle features a spread-winged eagle beneath a flying American flag. This version of the eagle and flag motif would become Clemens’s most used, appearing on numerous bottles from the late 1870s through the end of his career in 1892. When compared to the earlier bottle with a similar composition, offered as Lot 171, Clemens’s mastery of this art form by 1886 is apparent. Using finer grains of sand, he was able to achieve three-dimensionality through shading and precision of lines and borders. The decorative bands have advanced from the more ‘naturalistic’ designs on the 1876 bottle, with slightly blurred and overlapping borders, to precise, symmetrical, and cohesive patterns.

On Clemens’s price list from 1892, an eagle and flag bottle with flowers on the opposite side was listed as a standard order, something that he could complete in 1-2 days. [1] Two nearly identical bottles are pictured in Roy Sucholeiki’s The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens, figures 7.17 and 7.18. With only minor changes to flower color and placement in the wreath, and different decorative bands, these bottles, dated 1886 and 1887, demonstrate the ease and efficiency with which Clemens could create these works of art at the peak of his career while providing sufficient variety for his clients.

This bottle also notably retains a nearly perfect, and apparently rare, red paper label. One other known red label appears on the ‘Charlie’ bottle, offered at Cowan’s Auctions in 2009 and now in a private collection. That bottle is undated but features in its lower register the fluid linear decoration, more directly evocative of the Pikes Peak rock striations, that Clemens had begun to incorporate in the mid-1880s.

[1] See Roy Sucholeiki’s The Sand Art Bottles of Andrew Clemens. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2015, pg. 41, fig. 4.7.