Bill,
I think that if nothing else, aesthetically it's an absolute beautiful. The contrast, condition and clarity are all there. Like one can in Conlon's famous eye studies, you can see the man's pores, wrinkles, irises and all of that good stuff.
But I'm willing to wager that it was the content in which the photo might have lost out. And that's not to say that that content is poor. All of the stuff you mentioned, especially the stuff about Ruth being towards the end of the his career definitely rings true. There's a lot of pathos in those eyes for sure, but like you had alluded to before, not having the context and provenance readily available didn't really let that aspect of the photo shine through.
Because you were privy to that stuff, it probably makes you feel a lot more attached to it. And I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just that knowing what goes into a piece like this (in this case, Van Oeyen's preference or the newspaper article), it's easier to see that there's a lot of profundity there, and that said-profundity should have been reflected in the final bid.
Unfortunately, I feel like the to average collector, they might only see that it's a photo of an older Babe Ruth, not in uniform. And in their head, the fact that he's not in uniform could be a detriment. The fact that he's older could be a detriment. The fact that it was during a season the Yankees came in second could be a detriment. I know that it's mentioned in Henry's book to an extent, but I truly feel that for a photo to be an absolute knockout price-wise, it really helps to have those four Cs be at the highest echelons. And I guess to most collectors, this particular photo may have been pretty high in three of them. I think that even if it were slightly different, like if he was in uniform, it would have made a tremendous change to not only the final price, but also to who would have been interested in bidding in the first place.
With that in mind, it takes a certain kind of collector to see a piece like this and fall in love with it for the same reasons you did (and again, not saying that this kind of collector is better than another). And in the end, it's possible that whoever won it felt the same way that you did, but didn't have to battle very hard because he/she didn't come up against anyone who felt similarly. And it's definitely possible that had all of that context been included in the auction description, there would have been more of a bloodbath. I guess it just goes to show that when it comes to auctions, you really never can tell.
And of course, take all of this with a grain of salt, as I'm not even a photo collector. But I hope it provides some kind of insight.
Graig
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