Skinner Brand Guidelines: A New England Auction House That Became Bonhams Skinner in 2022

A dealer’s New England auction house.

Skinner was a Massachusetts auction house founded by the dealer Robert W. Skinner Jr. Sources give its start in slightly different terms. The Art Newspaper, reporting its sale in March 2022, said Skinner was founded in 1962; English Wikipedia says the company began operations in the 1960s and was incorporated in 1971 in Bolton, Massachusetts. English Wikipedia also says its founder believed that New England, with its long history as an international arts centre, was a fitting place for an auction house of international standing.

The business moved closer to the city as it grew. English Wikipedia says Skinner’s Boston gallery opened in 1978, and that in 2009 the company moved its headquarters to nearby Marlborough. By 2022, The Art Newspaper reported, it held around 80 sales a year in Boston and Marlborough, and it described Skinner as the leading auction house in the area. English Wikipedia gives a lower figure, of more than 60 auctions and events a year, without a date.

The house was shaped by a small, long-serving team. The Art Newspaper said Robert Skinner’s first hire was Stephen Fletcher, who by 2022 was chief auctioneer and executive vice president, and that Fletcher and the chief executive, Karen Keane, had co-owned the company until its sale. At that point, the paper said, Skinner had 75 employees, against more than 650 at Bonhams, and it called Skinner a “venerable” New England house based in Boston.

Americana, appraisers and twenty departments.

Skinner built its name on New England’s own material. The Art Newspaper said in 2022 that the house was particularly known for its specialist departments in American furniture and the decorative arts, as well as paintings and Chinese works of art. English Wikipedia says its appraisers covered 20 specialist collecting areas, ranging from American and European paintings and prints to fine musical instruments, rare books and manuscripts, and science, technology and clocks. Other areas on that list include fine silver, fine wines, Oriental rugs and carpets, and textiles and couture, and one called Discovery.

Its specialists were also familiar on television. English Wikipedia says Skinner’s appraisers regularly appeared on the PBS series Antiques Roadshow and other arts and culture programmes, which carried the house’s name well beyond its salerooms.

The house’s notable sales show the range of those departments. In November 2004 it sold Fitz Henry Lane’s painting Manchester Harbor, which The Art Newspaper said was the highest price for any work of art sold at a New England auction. English Wikipedia records the sale in 2007 of a previously unknown broadside copy of the Declaration of Independence, and, on 14 November 2010, of another broadside printed at Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1776. It also lists a molded copper weathervane of a touring car with its driver, made in Boston around 1910, and a 1958/63 Gibson Explorer electric guitar.

Folk art and Asian art produced two further landmarks. English Wikipedia says the 2011 sale of the folk portrait Portrait of Abigail Rose set a record for an American folk art portrait. In September 2014 Skinner sold an Imperial Qing dynasty fencai vase, which English Wikipedia describes as a United States record for Chinese art at the time and The Art Newspaper dated to the Qianlong period.

Auction houses and their presentation.

Auction houses and online auction platforms sell other people’s objects, so most of what they publish is about the lots rather than about themselves. The catalogue is the core document: a printed or online book for each sale, with a cover image chosen from the lots, a number and a description for each piece, and notes on where it came from. Many houses now publish the same catalogue as a web page and as a download, and some give a single important lot a catalogue of its own.

Lot photography sets much of the tone. Paintings are usually shown flat and square to the camera, furniture and objects against a plain ground, and jewellery and small pieces close up, so that a bidder in another city can judge them from a screen. The saleroom itself is the other stage: a rostrum, rows of chairs, a wall or screen for the lot on sale and a bank of telephones for absent bidders, as the houses show it in their own photographs and broadcasts.

Online bidding has added a third face. Houses and platforms publish apps and web pages for live and timed sales, with a lot image, the current bid, a countdown or a live video feed, and buttons for bidding and watching lots. Their sites also carry the practical pages, such as viewing hours, addresses of offices and salerooms, and how to consign or collect.

Corporate pages are usually short. They give a founding date, the offices and salerooms, and sometimes the names of owners or of the group a house now belongs to. This guide sets out what can be checked about each house — who founded it, who owns it and where it sells — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A 2022 sale to Bonhams and a new double name.

Skinner’s independence ended in March 2022, when the London auction house Bonhams bought it. The Art Newspaper reported on 16 March 2022 that the new company would be called Bonhams Skinner and that financial terms had not been revealed. The paper noted that Bonhams had been owned by the private equity firm Epiris since 2018, that it already had salerooms in Los Angeles and New York and 18 offices in other American towns, and that the purchase came two months after Bonhams bought the Nordic auction house Bukowskis in January 2022. It presented the deal as another sign of consolidation among auction houses, with the Epiris side suggesting that further acquisitions could follow.

Both sides explained the deal in their own terms. The Art Newspaper said Bonhams’ chief executive pointed to Skinner’s established digital footprint across the United States as part of a “local to global strategy,” while Karen Keane called the two companies “a great match.” English Wikipedia, citing The Boston Globe of March 2022, says the existing managers, including Keane and Stephen Fletcher, stayed in leadership roles, and that the company continued to hold auctions across many specialist categories from its Massachusetts locations.

Skinner no longer trades as a separate company. Its old web address now forwards to a Bonhams Skinner section of the Bonhams website, which in November 2026 listed sales such as Important Americana, Americana Online, Antique Rugs and Textiles, and European Decor and Design, held live or online from Marlborough, Massachusetts, alongside the wider Bonhams calendar of sales in London, Los Angeles and Paris.

For a design guide, Skinner shows how a regional house’s name can survive inside a larger group as half of a double name, with its local specialities intact. Compare Bonhams, its owner since 2022, and Hindman, another American auction house in this series. For this guide we use an ink blue, a cream and a copper with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Skinner’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.