NEW YORK.- Christie’s is delighted to announce the sale of the C. Ruxton and Audrey B. Love Collection. This remarkable collection includes masterpieces in a wide range of areas to be sold in three separate sales at Rockefeller Center on October 19 and 20. The sales comprise elegant jewelry, an extraordinary selection of decorative Regency and Napoleonic silver-gilt, and a diverse but coherent group of European and Asian furniture and works of art. The latter includes not only Chinese Imperial cloisonné enamels and lacquer, antiquities, Regency ormolu and Italian pietre dure but also marvelously theatrical paintings from the 1930s. C. Ruxton Love and Audrey Josephthal literally met on a slow boat to China in 1926. He was secretary to the U.S. Ambassador to China and she was completing a Far Eastern tour she was undertaking with her mother, Edythe Guggenheim Josephthal. Ruxton Love’s passion for collecting was first kindled in China whereas Mrs. Love, a niece of Solomon Guggenheim, the founder of the New York museum bearing his name, had been born into a world that promoted and supported arts and culture.

Their collecting life spanned many decades during which Mr. Love would closely follow the art market on both sides of the Atlantic. As well as lending to several exhibitions, the Loves also donated works of art to a number of American museums. After Ruxton Love’s death in 1971, his wife continued this tradition, both donating and lending works of art to museums in and outside America, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, Connecticut, the Lowe Art Museum of the University of Miami, Florida and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. On Mrs. Love’s death last year, aged 100 years old, several pieces of Napoleonic silver and furniture were bequeathed on her behalf to the Louvre, Versailles and Malmaison in France. As a final act of generosity, the entire proceeds of these sales will go to the Audrey Love Charitable Foundation, which will continue to support Mrs. Love’s life-long interest in medical research, animal welfare, the performing arts and the museum world.