At age 14, Walter Ames Compton read about Japanese swords in a boy`s magazine, and his lifelong interest in this esoteric subject began. Several years later, while a student at Princeton University in the early 1930s, he bought his first samurai blade for $6 at a laundry in the Chinatown section of New York.
The Compton collection of 1,100 swords and sword fittings is expected to bring $20 million at a three-part auction at Christie`s in New York. Japanese experts describe the collection as one of the finest privately owned holdings in the West.
Christie`s won the right to sell it after months of intense bidding against Sotheby`s, which had been storing the swords in its New York warehouse for security reasons. The first day of the sale will be March 31.
”This is going to be the sale of the century in this area,” said Sebastian Izzard, who organizes Christie`s auctions of Japanese art. ”Never before has such a large volume of top-quality pieces been auctioned.”
Compton, a physician who pursued a career in pharmaceutical research, went to work at Miles Laboratories in his hometown of Elkhart, Ind., in 1939 and wound up heading the company. He died in 1990 at the age of 79.
”Dad`s interests were all over the place, but Japanese swords were at the top of the list,” said Walter Compton Jr., one of the collector`s five children. Compton recalled spending long hours with his father in the climate- controlled Japanese-style room he had built in the basement. Together they would examine each blade, holding it up to a spotlight to see how light seemed to singe the surfaces of these pieces, some of which measure 50 inches.
Lethal, but beautiful
Dr. Compton always acknowledged the lethal use to which these swords were put and the terror they inspired. But, Compton said, his father also saw great beauty in these blades of folded and refolded steel and regarded his swords as high art, especially those made during the golden age of Japanese swords that extended from the 13th to the 18th Centuries.
Dr. Compton admired the striving for sculptural perfection reflected in the curvature of the blade and the shaping of its cutting edge and the painterly effects seen in the wavelike patterning on the blade`s surface.
The father and son once experienced personally how dangerous these weapons could be. ”Dad had just received a shipment of swords back from Japan where they had been cleaned and polished,” Compton said.
”He was in a kind of ecstasy, unwrapping blade after blade, seeing them free of grime, scratches and rust.” While wiping the protective oil from a dagger, it slipped from his father`s hand.
”He reached out and grabbed it, cutting his hand,” Compton said. His father quickly applied pressure to an artery to stanch the flow of blood and left for the hospital with his other son, Gordon. The father insisted, Compton said, that ”I remain behind to clean the blade before it began to rust.”
The cream of Dr. Compton`s collection was exhibited in 1976 at the Japan House Galleries in New York. The show included the first registered National Treasure loaned by Japan for exhibition abroad: a 13th Century sword Dr. Compton had acquired in the United States and identified as a registered missing rarity, which had been taken from a shrine in Kagoshima Prefecture by a member of the U.S. armed forces after World War II.
In 1963, he returned it as a gift to Japan; it was the first of seven such gifts. The Compton family plans to give two more blades back to Japan.
50 blades studied
Fifty blades were given for study purposes to the foundation in Boston that bears Dr. Compton`s name, but most of the pieces are in the Christie`s sale.
The finest are expected to bring more than $132,000 each, the record price at auction for a blade. That sum was paid for a signed 13th Century weapon once owned by the Duke of Windsor and bought in 1986 by an anonymous Japanese bidder at Christie`s in New York.
The three most significant of the Compton swords-signed works made in the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries-are considered blades of special importance by the Society for the Preservation of Japanese Art Swords.
They are illustrated, along with a Japanese sword that once belonged to the Argentine dictator Juan Peron and scores of lavishly decorated blade covers, in two books Christie`s is publishing: a softcover sales catalog ($50) and a sumptuous hardcover book ($100) that summarizes the history of the craft.
