NEW YORK.- On May 18, 2007, Sotheby’s will offer a various-owners sale of American Indian art, including the Leede Family Collection of Important Pueblo Pottery, from Denver, Colorado, which is among the most important collections of its type to ever come to auction. Additionally, the sale will offer works from the collection of John W. Painter and baskets from the collection of Charlotte Butler Skinner. The 160 lots offered in this sale will be on exhibition in Sotheby’s 4th floor galleries from May 12th through 17th and are expected to bring $1,698,900/2,435,000.

Highlighting the sale are items from the Leede Family Collection of Important Pueblo Pottery, estimated to bring $819,300/1,195,200. The Leede Family Collection boasts 65 superb, and in some cases quite rare, examples of Pueblo pottery from Santa Ana, Acoma, Laguna, Zuni and Zia, reflecting centuries of tradition. One such example is a Large Zia Polychrome Pictorial Storage Jar (est. $60/80,000). Decorated with undulating “rainbow” bands and a variety of birds, it has been suggested that the jar is by Trinidad Medina, a highly celebrated artist from the Zia Pueblo in New Mexico. As this work demonstrates, birds and bird motifs are abundantly portrayed in the pottery comprising the Leede Family Collection. While common in Pueblo pottery, the numerous interpretations and manifestations of the bird motif is a testament to the ingenuity and seemingly endless imaginations of the artists who made these vessels.

The sale of works from the collection of John W. Painter, a private collector from Cincinnati, Ohio, who assembled a group rich in materials from the Plains and the Northern Woodlands, will feature an Early Cree Costume (est. $250/350,000). This matching set, comprised of a Cree coat, leggings, and mittens, is an extremely rare example of the skin-painted clothing traditions of Woodlands people, for whom the wearing of hide clothing was an act imbued with meaning. Animals were believed to give their skins to human beings voluntarily, and the decoration of the skins honored the animals. In the Eastern Subarctic – and probably throughout the Woodlands – people believed that power could be transferred from the animal to a human wearer through the proper treatment of the animal’s skin.

Also being offered are Panamint Shoshone baskets from the Charlotte Butler Skinner Collection from a private collection in Nevada. This collection is estimated to bring $108,600/151,300. Highlights include a Panamint Polychrome Coiled Pictorial Basketry Bowl (est. $15/20,000). Many of these baskets were gathered in Lone Pine, Inyo County, California, during the first three decades of this century. Some of the Panamint Shoshone basket makers who came to live in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada camped on Lone Pine Creek, at a place the Indians called Waucova. They brought with them different forms and designs reflecting their desert valleys. The reason for the diversity in early Panamint Shoshone basketry can be found in their distant past, at the time when the traditional hunting and gathering existence had offered yearly contact and cultural exchanges with the basket makers of the surrounding tribes.

Another highlight of the sale is a Zuni Polychrome Pictorial Jar of classic form from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York (est. $15/20,000). This jar, finely painted in red and dark brown pigment with geometric designs, was in the collection of Amelia Elizabeth White, who was an early and influential collector of American Indian art and whose estate is now home to the School of Advanced Research (SAR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a center for the study of the archaeology and ethnology of the American Southwest.