One of the world’s most impressive private collections of a particular type of European porcelain, long housed in Minnesota, is looking for its next home via a St. Paul-based auction this week.
In an auction closing at 10 a.m. May 20, Revere Auctions is listing some 174 lots of porcelain ware, much of which comes from the famed Meissen porcelain factory in Germany, which in the early 1700s was the first company to figure out how to produce the coveted bone-white ceramic outside of Asia. The collection had previously belonged to Minneapolis art collectors Leo and Doris Hodroff, who built a significant collection of fine art throughout the second half of the 20th century.
Leo Hodroff, an entrepreneur whose father had started the funeral home now known as Hodroff-Epstein Memorial Chapel, died in 2009. Doris Hodroff died last year. The couple supported galleries and collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Weisman Art Museum and others around the country; all proceeds from the Hodroffs’ auctions at Revere will go to the University of Minnesota.
In total, the Hodroffs’ fine art will be sold in a series of six auctions throughout the year, with later sales to focus more specifically on paintings and the Hodroffs’ renowned collection of Chinese domestic and export-market ceramic art. Unlike other liquidation-focused auction companies, Revere employs a sizable team of art historians and researchers to trace the provenance and authenticity of items they come across, said Revere co-owner Sean Blanchet.
The Meissen porcelain is particularly unique, he said. Along with servingware, the collection includes several dozen figurines that are likely one-of-a-kind: Highlights of the collection are a pair of commedia dell’arte characters, circa 1743, that could be worth up to $40,000, and a figurine of a pug sitting on a cushion that is believed to have been commissioned in the 1730s by Maria Josepha, queen consort of Poland.
“(The Hodroffs) had incredible vision and commitment, and they brought it into the collection,” Blanchet said. “Unbelievably, almost all of what we’re looking at here is the rarest of the rarest 18th-century Meissen material. Many of these figurines, (there are) very few known examples in the world.”
As for the buyers of these items, Blanchet said they’ll likely go to Meissen specialists, whether gallery curators or private collectors. Museums have expressed interest, he said, but nonprofit museums sometimes struggle to compete in auction settings with wealthier art dealers.
Still, there’s much to be learned from the collection, even if this style of porcelainware is less reflective of modern decor tastes than it was centuries ago, said Olivia Lonetti, Revere’s appraisal coordinator and jewelry specialist.
“There are really important modern narratives that we can get out of this,” she said. “We’ve seen lots of museums displaying and recontextualizing porcelain like this to have conversations about colonization and the trade economy (in the 18th century). And it’s incredible for that caliber to have ended up here in this quiet, discrete collection in Minnesota.”
