A week ago today, I went to an auction of American drawing, painting, and sculpture at Sotheby’s in New York. It was my first Sotheby’s auction. Quite what you’d expect: Bidding wars across the room, phone bidders jumping in at the last second, Norman Rockwell selling for a lot of money, and a handful of older men whose baseball caps and sneakers could not disguise the hale good looks of their wealthy lives. It was great.

I eyed the room for Seattle buyers, since Seattle Art Museum is known to be beefing up its American collection, and since Tom Barwick, a leading American collector, lives in Seattle. I didn’t see anybody, but that’s because I had to stand in the back, not in among the seated bidders up front.

But they were there. SAM confirmed that American curator Patti Junker was at the sale, and that other Seattle collectors were there, too. SAM wouldn’t say whether Junker bought anything.

The sale was not a roaring success for Sotheby’s, but it came in within estimates.

I have no idea what Junker et al might have been on the hunt for (she was also at a Christie’s American sale last week—a record-breaking sale there), and these are not meant as guesses, just playful imaginings.

Here are a few of the things sold at Sotheby’s last week that could conceivably come to SAM someday:

^{Milton Avery’s The Reader and the Listener, which sold for $2.505 million, breaking the artist’s record of $992,000.}

^{John Singer Sargent’s 1901 portrait of John Ridgely Carter, sold for $1.833 million.}

^{Charles Burchfield, another record, for $1.329 million.}

^{Thomas Hart Benton, $575,000}

^{Albert Bierstadt, $103,000}

^{Well, maybe not this one for the museum, but it went for the most money that day so I figured I’d picture it: Norman Rockwell’s Gary Cooper as ‘The Texan’, $5.921 million.}

Full auction list, with results, here.

(Sadly, the lone Morris Graves in the sale, Ecstatic Gander from 1952, was passed by at a bid of $65,000, $15,000 shy of the low estimate.)