The Magazine Antiques

Talking Antiques | By The Magazine ANTIQUES

Winter Antiques Show 2012

January 1, 2012  |  

We asked exhibitors at the Winter Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments.

Barbara Israel Garden Antiques

We are thrilled to be bringing a cache of extraordinary objects to the 2012 Winter Antiques Show, including this marble sarcophagus-form planter from the Hurstmont estate in Harding Township, New Jersey. Hurstmont, the country home of industrialist James Pyle and his wife Adelaide McAlpin Pyle, is an 1886 house rebuilt in 1902-1903 by the legendary Stanford White of McKim, Mead and White. The planter is presumed to have been purchased by White in Italy specifically for Hurstmont, along with an impressive marble bench and a replica of the Borghese Vase. According to noted sculp­tor and scholar Peter Rockwell (son of Norman Rockwell), the carving, which depicts the …

Dealer Profile | By The Magazine ANTIQUES

Vose Galleries at 170

November 21, 2011  |  

By Tom Christopher

•   left to right: Elizabeth Vose Frey, Carey L. Vose, Abbot W. "Bill" Vose, Marcia L. Vose.

Vose Galleries of Boston is that rarest of survivors: now completing its 170th year in business and still under the direction of the founding family, the firm itself predates many of the paintings that it buys and sells. Yet it is hardly a relic. Under the management of a dynamic sixth generation, sisters Elizabeth (Beth) and Carey Vose, the gallery is seek­ing out new fields while main­taining leadership in the old.

Why shoe manufacturer Joseph Vose bought the Westminster Art Gallery in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1841 is not clear; perhaps it was the first manifestation of what Beth Vose calls "the art gene" that seems to run in the family. Despite the name, the store's business was primarily…

New Collector | By The Magazine ANTIQUES

New Collector: Posters

November 21, 2011  |  

 Lithography and chromolithography

   Poster art was born of two tech­nological developments: The first, lithography (meaning "stone printing") was invented in 1798, a process in which an artist drew his design with a greasy crayon or oil-based ink directly on a specially pre­pared slab of fine-grained limestone. Based on the principle that oil and water repel one another, the stone was subsequently dampened with water, which was repelled by the greasy design and only absorbed by the blank areas. Conversely, when oily printing ink was applied to the stone, it adhered only to the greasy areas and not to the dampened blank ones. Lithographs were then printed on a lithography press.

   The introduction of the second process, chromolithography, in 1827, laid the foundation for color printing, and thus led to the great flowering of poster art in the later nineteenth century. Multiple stones were used, one for each color, …

The Market | By Danielle Sonnekalb

Great Estates: Gunston Hall in Mason Neck, Virginia

October 18, 2011  |  Completed in 1759 after four years of construction, the estate’s Georgian façade and animated interiors were designed and executed by two highly skilled English indentured servants, architect William Buckland (1734-1774) and carver and designer William Bernard Sears (d. 1818).  The design was conceived as a two-story structure with north and south porches and formal and vegetable gardens on what was once 5,500 acres of tobacco and corn fields.  Buckland had been trained in the architectural style of Palladio, which is clearly evident at Gunston Hall.  Yet the novice architect, who had just completed his apprenticeship prior to working for Mason, took his training to a new level by merging the established neoclassical style with rococo, Gothic, and chinoiserie elements, thus creating a decorative scheme unprecedented in Virginia at the time.  This is seen in the layout of the first floor, which includes the lively and highly ornamental “Palladian” room; the “Chinese” room wit…» More