Sandy Lerner Is Rehoming Her Cats: A Tiffany Cat Brooch and Sixty-Five More

Sandy Lerner co-founded Cisco Systems, founded Urban Decay, and restored Jane Austen’s brother’s house in Hampshire as a library of women’s writing. In between she spent four decades collecting cats. Not the live kind, or not only the live kind: cats in gold and enamel, cats carved out of amethyst, cats in bronze, one cat in rock crystal with its own gold ball of yarn. On 30 September, at noon in New York, Bonhams sells The Sandy Lerner Cat Collection, Part I: 66 lots, every one a cat, all from the same house. Part II, another 242 cats, runs online alongside it.

Her Virginia estate, Ayrshire Farm, sold in February for $19.8 million, and the cats lived there, both kinds. She told the Washingtonian in 2012 that the farm ran on its animals, more than seventy live cats among them. “I live alone with my cats,” she said. “I’m your typical nerd who lacks social skills.” The live ones are going with her. The gold ones are going to Bonhams.

Her own line, in the catalogue announcement: they “need to be rehomed, now, to others who will care for, cherish, and respect them as icons of the human achievement and — in the case of the caticons — affection that created them. May these beautiful things give you as much joy and wonder as I have found in their company.” Most people rehome a cat with a cardboard box and half a bag of kibble. She is doing it with a catalogue and a viewing week. We adore her for it.

The cats you could actually wear

Nine of the 66 lots are jewelry, the last nine on the block, and five of those go on a person. Single-owner sales are where estate jewelry worth buying turns up; this one is all cats.

The one we would go and look at is the Tiffany & Co. cat brooch, lot 60: a stylized cat in 18K gold, ten grams, signed, green enamel eyes, $3,000 to $5,000. It last came up at Phillips de Pury in New York in 2012. Of everything coming back onto jackets this year, a gold cat with a stare is what we would want on ours.

Beside it, lot 59, a pair of 18K white gold earrings, each cat curled around a 15mm South Sea pearl, sapphire eyes, $2,000 to $3,000. The eyes are the fun of the whole sale: enamel here, sapphire there, garnet a few lots down.

The cats that sit on a shelf and judge you

Four of the nine are not wearable at all. The prettiest is by Boucheron, the Paris house, lot 65: a cat in rock crystal and nephrite, a green stone in the jade family, with gold claws, a gold ball of yarn, and its own base to sit on, $1,000 to $1,500. Somebody gave this cat a toy and then carved it somewhere to sit and ignore it.

The bottom of the sale is a carved amethyst cat, lot 64, circa 1905, gold collar, demantoid garnet eyes, $700 to $1,000. Purple cat, green eyes.

The top is a bronze by the sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti, whose Petit Chat à L’Écuelle of 1906 is a small cat at its bowl, the seventh of fourteen casts, $80,000 to $120,000. The $700 cat and the $120,000 cat are in the same room on the same day.

Lerner wrote the reference book on the subject, Caticons: 4,000 Years of Art Imitating Cats, in 2017, and Bonhams’ lot notes cite it page by page to describe her own cats back to her. The book dates the collecting to a new husband allergic to anything with fur, which left her, it says, forced to be catless. The selection rule it gives her is two questions: is it a cat, and do I like it?

Viewing runs 23 to 30 September at Bonhams New York, and anyone can walk in and look. Whether any of the lots come with a jeweled litter box or a small gold cat tree, the catalogue does not say.