Signs of the times: Late artist’s work goes to auction

The two-lane “Mother Road” of the nation coursed westward toward infinity.

Stuart E. Bruce stood on the shoulder of Route 66, and read the legendary highway like a sentence until it ran out of words against the far horizon. There, somewhere along the 432 miles of crumbling blacktop that cuts through central Oklahoma, he picked up a piece of asphalt and clutched it in his aged hand.

On a recent morning, Bruce’s daughter, Mary Sanders, sat at the kitchen table in her parents’ Charlottesville home and remembered the moment.

“I can see him bending over and picking that piece of asphalt up,” Mary Sanders said of her father, who died Dec. 1, 2006. “I thought, ‘Why does he want that?’

“Then the other day I was out in his paint shop and came across a Route 66 highway sign he had painted. On the bottom of the sign he had mounted that piece of the road.

“His life dream had been to drive along Route 66. So in May 2001 we picked up the road in Missouri and drove on it to New Mexico. He thought that was the most wonderful thing.”

On Saturday, the Route 66 sign and about 30 other paintings done by Bruce will be auctioned off at his home, where his wife, Isabelle, still lives. Also going on the auction block will be antiques, a few guitars and a number of woodcarvings he did.

Bruce was a commercial artist who made his living painting signs. He operated Bruce’s Signs out of the garage in his back yard.

The artwork being auctioned off are paintings the artist did strictly for his own enjoyment. Some of his favorite subjects to paint were vintage cars and nostalgic scenes such as a barn with a Mail Pouch chewing tobacco advertisement on the side.

On the day of the sale, Mary Sanders said she’ll probably not want to leave the house. The retired accountant said she’ll be on hand to give support to her mother, but she thinks watching paintings she’s familiar with leave the family will be too painful to watch.

“My father and I were a lot alike, and I was kind of on the same wavelength with him and his art,” said Sanders, who lives with her husband, Joseph, in Cumberland County. “He didn’t want to sell any of his artwork, so I kind of feel uncomfortable about the sale.

“But we feel it’s better to let these things go to people who really want them than to have them end up in a thrift shop or something like that. It’s better to let them go.”

One for the hall of fame

Calvin S. Jones will be running the auction. The 76-year-old member of the Virginia Auctioneer Hall of Fame has been trying to retire, but he wanted to do this sale.

“I considered Mr. Bruce a friend, and I also admired him,” said Jones, who has been an auctioneer for 45 years. “I’d come here on a rainy or snowy day and sit out there in his shop and watch him paint.

“He was an excellent painter. He could put that brush down on a line just as straight as an arrow.

“During my career I’ve sold for a lot of strangers, the government, Albemarle County and the city of Charlottesville. I’m trying to retire, but when people like Mrs. Bruce call, I say, ‘I’m not too retired for that.’”

Mrs. Bruce met her future husband at a Saturday night dance at the Armory in the fall of 1943. It didn’t take them long to realize they were right for each other, and they were married on Jan. 22, 1944.

“Well, he was a nice-looking fellow, and he liked to dance and do sports,” Mrs. Bruce said of her husband, who was born in Charlottesville in 1924. “He was a hard-working man, a good man who went to church.

“He loved playing baseball and roller skating. And he was a man who read a lot. If he wasn’t working he was reading every kind of thing.

“He wasn’t a man you couldn’t get along with. He was an easy person to live with.”

Mrs. Bruce will keep a painting her husband did for her of the blessing of the hounds at Grace Episcopal Church in Cismont. Like her daughter she has come to terms with letting the other things go.

“Well, I tell you, I’m getting up in years,” said Mrs. Bruce, who will be 83 in November. “And the older I get the more trouble I would have selling or getting rid of these things.

“So I thought I better do it while the doing was good. Yes, it’s sad to watch them go, but I’m used to sad feelings.”

Bruce liked old-fashioned things, such as a vintage gas pump and an antique wagon that will be auctioned off. He ran his business with an old-time work ethic as well.

“If somebody called at 5 in the afternoon while we were having dinner and needed a sign, they came first,” Mary Sanders said. “He would get up and go out and do a sign and come back to eat later.

“He really would. He couldn’t relax until that work was done. He could paint and carve seven days a week and he never tired of it. We called the business ‘Bruce’s Signs of all Kinds,’ and it was true.

“But I think my favorite piece he did is not a painting, but a carving. He carved a life-size carousel horse, and it was just perfect. My son has that now.”

The people and products

Bruce’s family would have been hard pressed to find a better auctioneer to sell his things. Jones has heard the rapid cajoling of auctioneers since he was a boy.

“My father bought and sold cattle so I spent a lot of time at the livestock yards here in Charlottesville and also in Orange and Staunton,” said Jones, who operates Albemarle Auction and Antiques out of Scottsville. “I would hear the auctioneers and that’s how I got interested in it.

“I went to auction school in Fort Smith, Ark., and got my certificate. When I got home I went down to the courthouse and told them I wanted to get an auction license.

“They told me they didn’t have any, and that I needed to buy a common crier license. Cost me $5.”

Jones has twice served as president of the Virginia Auctioneers Association. He and other members of the organization helped to establish standards for auctioneers in the state.

“We were able to get an auction law on the books,” Jones said. “Now at least an auctioneer has to be able to read and write and they have to take an exam.

“A good auctioneer should be able to work with people, and describe a product with knowledge. He should have a good idea what things are worth. For example, the gas pump in the Bruce sale is an excellent piece.

“It probably came out of a country store or service station in the 1930s. I see them sell at auction for between $2,500 and $3,500.”

Jones said it does make a difference when he’s auctioning off things that once belonged to a person he knew. Being able to perhaps share a tidbit of information about the piece or the person can make an item more desirable.

“I’m a hands-on auctioneer,” Jones said. “I would come into your house and look at the pieces that I was going to sell for you.

“I would find out as much as I could about the history of those pieces. Information like that is very important.

“What I think the people of Charlottesville should know about Mr. Bruce is that they had in their midst an excellent artist and woodcarver. And along with that he was a good man.”

Signs of life

For now, the large oil on plywood painting of a snarling tiger on a Barnum and Bailey Circus poster leans against a gray, cinderblock wall of the garage. Paintings of a 1948 Tucker car and a snowy junkyard bookend a stack of smaller paintings.

The badge-shaped highway marker with Oklahoma and U.S. 66 painted on it in bold, black letters was found resting on top of wooden boxes. After taking the sign down, Joseph Sanders held it in his hands and focused on the chunk of gray-speckled asphalt attached to the bottom of it.

“He really loved taking that trip,” Sanders said of his father-in-law. “It was like going back in time to the 1940s or ’50s.

“All these things in here, like this sign, are things he cared about. You hate to let them go, but then again, they’re just going to sit here and go to ruin.

“We have a few pieces he did, but we don’t have room for more. So, we want people who will care for the pieces to have them. That’s all we really want.”

The estate sale of Stuart Bruce will be held at 10 a.m. Saturday at 1604 Mulberry Ave. in Charlottesville. For further information, call 286-3817 or visit http://www.albemar

leauctions.com.