Gallery Sales Below Expectations

Eager art buyers cleaned out all but about 100 of the Thackeray Gallery’s 1,200-piece inventory of paintings, prints, sculptures and Indian artifacts during a three-day going-out-of-business auction earlier this month.

However, despite today’s inflated prices for art, the sales brought less than $300,000, a fraction of the $1.5 million to $2 million that owner George Thackeray had predicted. Thackeray’s wife, Grace, said Wednesday that not one of the 15 pieces by the late Western painter Olaf Wieghorst was sold.

“The high-priced pieces didn’t sell, but that was because we didn’t have the right buyers in the audience,” Grace Thackeray said. “That doesn’t bother me in the least. I don’t mind keeping them.”

She said the Wieghorst watercolors and paintings ranged in value from $5,000 to $250,000.

The other major item on the auction block that didn’t sell was the three-story gallery itself, formerly a stone church, built in 1912 at 4th and Robinson avenues in Hillcrest.

Meanwhile, the Thackerays, who took over the old Victor Doyle Frame Shop in 1947 and turned it into a gallery, continue to wind down San Diego’s oldest art gallery. George plans to keep his hand in the picture-restoration business for a while, his wife said, but they will sell the gallery’s picture framing equipment and stock, probably to another business.