THE ERICKSON TREASURES-

ALFRED WILLIAM ("Eric") ERICKSON, son of a Swedish engineer, was a kindly, rotund gentleman whose affable manner concealed one of the shrewdest business minds of his day and the same kind of boundless energy that was the hallmark of his friend Teddy Roosevelt. Long before he merged his prospering advertising agency with another to make McCann-Erickson, he had piled up a fortune by investing in products for which few others saw any future. Once, for example, he heard about an unsuccessful roofing material called Congo. He bought the company, painted the material a different color, turned it into a profitable floor covering (Congoleum). In his lifetime his name was associated not only with advertising but with such pioneering firms as Bon Ami and Technicolor, Inc.

From now on, the Erickson name will more likely be linked to his small but choice collection of paintings, bought largely with the guidance of Dealers Wildenstein and Duveen. Erickson began collecting in 1922, when he bought a portrait of a strange little boy by George Romney. English painters--Romney, Gainsborough, Raeburn--were fashionable in the '20s, but Erickson and his wife Anna were also willing to wander into richer pastures.

Besides Aristotle, the Erickson collection contained two other Rembrandts. A handsome Prince of Orange went to Knoedler's for $110,000, and a small Portrait of an Old Man was snagged by a London dealer for $180,000. Crivelli's 1472 Madonna and Child, which British Critic Roger Fry said was "one of Crivelli's greatest designs," brought $220,000; in 1886 it had been sold at Christie's in London for -L-131.5. Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Fine Arts paid $125,000 for Perugino's St. Augustine with Members of the Confraternity of Perugia, which was sadly below the house estimate of $200,000. The institute also bought Frans Hals's Man with a Herring for $145,000, more than three times as much as the Ericksons paid for it in 1925. Wildenstein bid a surprising $175,000 for Jean MarcNattier's La Marquise de Baglion, as Flora --an indication that things will be looking up for the Nattier market after the long decline from the $240,000 the Ericksons paid for the Marquise in 1927.

The Erickson sale also showed that great art can go down as well as up. A Raeburn that the Ericksons bought for $100,000 in 1927 went for $60,000; a regal Gainsborough that cost $300,000 in 1928 went for a dismal $35,000. A Holbein portrait also went for $35,000, which was $95,000 less than the Ericksons paid. The painting that took the worst tumble was a Van Dyck: it cost the Ericksons $200,000 plus two paintings, went for $27,000 last week.

If the vagaries of taste can be cruel, they can also be marvelously kind. When the delicate Girl Reading, by Jean Honore Fragonard, appeared on the velvet block, the Parke-Bernet audience suddenly burst into applause. After some whispered consultation with Director John Walker of the National Gallery in Washington. D.C., Collector Chester Dale bid it in for the gallery for $875,000. This was more than twice the price of any Fragonard before, and, for that matter, more than any other picture ever auctioned except Aristotle.

Aristotle, commissioned for 500 florins (an estimated $7.800) by a Sicilian nobleman in 1652, was sold by Joseph Duveen in 1928 to the Ericksons for $750,000. In 1929, when Erickson was in need of funds, he let Duveen have it back for $500,000, but in 1936 repurchased it at $590,000.

After Erickson's death in 1936. his widow's Murray Hill home in Manhattan was regularly visited by museum directors from all over the U.S., who hoped that some flattery at tea might win for their galleries a choice bequest in Mrs. Erickson's will. But most of the paintings were left to her in trust, and Anna Erickson decided that her own estate should be divided into 90 parts, to accommodate all the heirs (relatives, friends and charities), and that meant that it had to be liquidated. She died last Feb. 7 of a stroke; Parke-Bernet's first memo on how to get the job of auctioning the Erickson collection was dated Feb. 8.

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