Market dispatch·New York
Bonhams offers 150-plus Georgian teapots from the Weinstock collection in New York
Bonhams will sell the collection of celebrated Philadelphia interior designers Bennett and Judie Weinstock — including more than 150 18th-century teapots — across two October sales: a live New York auction on 20 October and an online-only sale running 11–22 October.

Bonhams will sell the celebrated collection of Philadelphia interior designers Bennett and Judie Weinstock across two October sales in New York, anchored by more than 150 18th-century teapots. Part I, a live sale, takes place on 20 October at noon EDT; Part II, an online-only sale drawn from the couple's Philadelphia home, runs from 11 to 22 October. The Weinstocks, both listed on Architectural Digest's AD100, built their collection over decades around English ceramics, furniture, sporting pictures and decorative objects. But it is the teapots that define the group: vessels shaped like squirrels, camels and ripening fruit, others carrying royal portraits or political symbolism, spanning salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, agate ware and Wedgwood. Among the highlights of Part I is a Staffordshire solid-agate squirrel teapot from around 1750–55, its head forming the removable cover, estimated at $6,000 to $9,000 and illustrated in Frank Tilley's 1957 book Teapots and Tea. A large camel teapot from about 1745, modeled as a recumbent animal carrying an elaborate howdah, and a pear-shaped trompe-l'oeil teapot from 1760–65, estimated at $5,000 to $8,000, show the ambition of Georgian potters. Political history surfaces in a tartan-decorated salt-glazed teapot of 1750–60, estimated at $3,000 to $5,000, which Bonhams links to Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite cause, and in a creamware teapot of about 1785 bearing portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte. One lot carries a television-age provenance. "Norah's Teapot," a Whieldon-type punch pot of about 1765–70, appeared on the BBC's Antiques Roadshow in 1988, where the ceramics expert valued it at more than £5,000; it later sold at Sotheby's London for £14,300, allowing its owner Norah Ambrose to buy her council house. The Weinstocks, who kept a newspaper clipping of the story inside the pot, bought it through dealer Alistair Sampson. It carries a $6,000 to $8,000 estimate in Part I.


