Guyette and Schmidt, Inc Antique Decoy Auction Firm

Dr. James M. McCleery, an avid collector of wildfowl decoys, almost certainly would have agreed with Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset's diagnosis that hunters played the seminal role in the birth of art.

Prehistoric hunters' obsession with and appreciation of their quarry's mystical qualities, Ortega y Gasset asserted, is what led them to decorate cave walls with painted images of those animals.

"To the primitive, to possess the image . . . is, in a word, to possess the (animal) itself," Ortega y Gasset wrote in his 1942 treatise, ``Meditations on Hunting.''

Of course, the late McCleery was no "primitive." He is invariably described as an articulate, educated gentleman of old-school manners with a sharp sense of humor, a ready laugh and an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

But he certainly understood that intangible magic when he looked at or touched wooden images of wildfowl created by earlier hunters and craftsmen.

To the Pasadena pathologist, the hand-carved and painted decoys created to draw migratory fowl within hunters' range embodied the soul of the birds and their creators. They were the birds they mirrored.

"He could see inside them," Karen McCleery said of her father's connection to the aging wooden ducks, geese and shorebirds. "He genuinely understood them and saw what they represented."

When he died a year ago at age 74, the Pasadena pathologist left what experts agree is the finest private collection of wildfowl decoys in the world and one of the greatest troves of premium American folk art in the nation.

On Saturday and Sunday, Sotheby's of New York will auction 450 lots of decoys and 180 lots of duck-calling instruments, traps, shell boxes, prints and baskets from McCleery's vast collection. The sale is expected to total $6 million.

"There's no doubt that Dr. McCleery's collection is monumental," said Nancy Druckman, senior vice president of Sotheby's and head of the auction house's American Folk Art Department. "The level of quality of the pieces is exceptional. He could see in those birds the highest degree of artistic excellence."

Decoy Magazine termed the auction, which is expected to draw more than 1,000 people, "the most significant event in the history of decoy collecting."

One collector styled the McCleery auction as "the Holy Grail" of the decoy world.

Observers expect a half-dozen or so decoys to sell for $100,000 or more each. The premier piece, a circa 1920 Canada goose decoy carved and painted by Massachusetts decoy maker A. Elmer Crowell, is estimated to bring as much as $500,000.

"It could very easily go for more than a half-million," said decoy and folk art collector and broker Joe Tonelli of South Dakota. "It's going to break the current record, that's just about given."

The record for a wildfowl decoy sold at auction stands at $335,500 paid in 1997 for a century-old carving of a curlew.

That price, the fact it was paid for a shorebird decoy and the increasing profile of wildfowl decoys in folk art circles can in large part be traced to McCleery.

"He was one of the first to recognize that shorebird decoys were substantial pieces on their own," Tonelli said. "And when he saw a bird he liked, money was not an object. Quality was."

"He acquired the very best of the very best," Sotheby's Druckman said.

That a Texan would secure what most consider the world's finest private assemblage of wildfowl decoys runs counter to the conventional standards that have marked this relatively young niche of the art world.

"It was quite a shock for some people to realize that this Texas doctor was so interested - obsessed, really - with decoys," said Dallasite Ron Gard, a former adviser to the Museum of American Folk Art and a longtime friend of McCleery. "But they didn't realize just how passionate he was about the birds."

The majority of decoy collectors and the original proponents of this wholly North American art genre were clustered in the Northeast and upper Midwest. It was there that recognition of hand-crafted and painted wildfowl decoys as art first took hold in the 1930s. It was in those areas where hand-crafted wildfowl decoys were most commonly produced.

The great waterfowl and shorebird wintering grounds of Long Island, Chesapeake Bay, Currituck Sound, Barnegat Bay and other coastal wetlands along the Atlantic coast drew both commercial hunters and recreational wildfowlers.

To attract the gregarious ducks, geese, swans and shorebirds, the hunters used counterfeit fowl, a tactic learned initially from American Indians.

But instead of bundling reeds and covering them with a bird skin, modern hunters carved most decoys from wood. Some were made of cork. A few were fashioned from metal.

Almost all were made individually, the maker shaping the wood and applying the paint in unique styles and patterns. Some aimed for realism, both in form and painting. Others were more abstract, integrating exaggerated necks, over-sized bodies and sparse coloring.

Styles and materials differed from region to region, with decoy makers using locally available wood or other supplies and focusing their attention on species common to their waters.

During the heyday of waterfowling in North America, beginning after the Civil War and continuing until the 1930s, tens of thousands of such decoys were made.

But the traditional craft came to an end with habitat destruction and drought that reduced waterfowl numbers and with laws that prohibited market hunting or imposed regulations on recreational hunters.

The final blow came with the introduction of mass-produced plastic or fiber decoys.

Wooden decoys became artifacts generally appreciated only by waterfowl hunters who saw them as connections to their past. But some hunters and early folk art connoisseurs saw them as much more.

Appreciated for their combination of form, function and coloring, decoys began to be seen as "floating sculpture," and their makers as true artists. The decoys' utilitarian origins and their great variety made them naturals for inclusion in the growing American folk art genre.

But general appreciation was slow in coming. Until the 1970s, only a handful of serious art collectors focused on decoys.

When McCleery began collecting in the 1960s, outstanding decoys could be purchased for as little as $100.

"Decoys that sold for $100 then are now worth $15,000-$20,000," Tonelli said.

But that's only for the best of the best - the decoys that have special qualities. And McCleery was one of the few with the ability to see in an instant the qualities that separated a "nice" decoy from a one-of-a-kind.

"His eye was incredible," Tonelli said. "He could tell more about a decoy from looking at a photo than most collectors could by holding the bird."

That insight was hard-earned.

McCleery was a hunter at heart, having grown up on a farm in Oklahoma. He loved the outdoors and hunting. He enjoyed falconry. And he was fascinated by the natural world.

"He loved birds. He studied them all his life," Gard said. "He could tell you the differences in all the shorebirds, the changes in plumage from fall to spring. He was incredibly knowledgeable on all things having to do with them."

But McCleery's personal participation in field sports was limited to his youth.

While attending medical school in the 1950s, he contracted transverse spinal myelitis, a disease that confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

But the disease did not diminish his love of the natural world.

"He always wanted to hear about your latest hunting trip, and what you saw," said Tonelli. "He had a passion for the outdoors that never stopped."

That passion evidenced itself in his decoy collecting.

"He called it a hobby," Gard said. "It was a lot more than that. He loved those birds."

"Once he set his eye on a particular decoy, he usually got it," said his daughter, who is keeping some of her father's decoys for sentimental reasons.

In 1973, McCleery paid $10,500 for a long-billed curlew decoy made in the late 19th century by William Bowman of Long Island.

The price stunned the decoy world, then a relatively small group of hunters and folk art aficionados conditioned to three-figure prices for outstanding decoys.

"I couldn't believe it, I couldn't comprehend it!" Tonelli, who at that time had been collecting and dealing in decoys for about 15 years, said of the 1973 shorebird purchase. "I'd have sold every decoy I owned for that much money."

The Bowman curlew is predicted to bring as much as a quarter-million dollars at this weekend's auction.

Eight months before he died, McCleery paid more than $300,000 for a Mason wood duck decoy that he had admired for 20 years. He sold several other decoys to make the purchase.

But it never was about the money, his family and colleagues said. It was about the birds, and what they meant to him.

"When he'd get a new bird, he'd be as excited as a child," Karen McCleery said.

Decoys surrounded him in his home, and he'd invite even the most casual of acquaintances to see the collection and talk decoys, art, hunting and fishing.

"He handled them on a daily basis," Karen McCleery said. "And when he did, you could see him get a faraway look in his eyes. Those birds took him someplace else."