The Magazine Antiques

Discovery | By Staff

A to Z: Penwork

February 22, 2010  |  
A Regency penwork cabinet, England, 19th cetury. Courtesy of Mallet/1stdibs.com.

Penwork  A type of decoration applied to japanned furniture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, mainly in England. Furniture to be treated in this way was first japanned black, then patterns were painted on in white japan and finally the details and shading were executed in black India ink with a fine quill pen. The effect is delicate and lacy, rather like an etching in reverse, with white motifs on a black ground (The Penguin Dictionary of the Decorative Arts edited by John Fleming and Hugh Honour)» More

Discovery | By Kathleen Luhrs

Museum accessions, part 2

February 18, 2010  |  

This short list of notable acquisitions began with a request to decorative arts curators in major American museums to choose and discuss a favorite recent gift or purchase.

The design of this elegant Gothic revival center table is attributed to the renowned Alexander Jackson Davis. The leading advocate for the "pointed style" in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, Davis incorporated medieval elements in his architecture, furnishings, and interiors.  Strikingly similar to his center table illustrated in Andrew Jackson Downing's Architecture of Country Houses (1850), this recent acquisition features a hexagonal white marble top supported by a bracketed apron with drops and turrets, a suspended pierced tracery cage, three-clustered columns, and a tripod base. Its fine craftsmanship suggests that it was produced in the New York shop of Alexander Roux, the émigré cabinetmaker whose knowledge of European styles and techniques attr…» More

Discovery | By Staff

Recommended this week

February 17, 2010  |  The Met blog show off a recently acquired daguerreotype The Salon of Baron Gros by Jean-Baptiste-Louis Gros—a French diplomat who took up photography while stationed in Bogota, Columbia. Curator Malcolm Daniel calls it the Met's finest French daguerreotype.

Ryan Sutton reviews the sleek new restaurants at the Museum of Arts & Design and the Guggenheim, and gets nostalgic for cafeteria food. Read it at Bloomberg.com.

Budding gallerists take heed! ARTNews examines just the right shade of white for your walls from Benjamin Moore's November Rain to the Getty's custom shade of (Richard) Meier White. Take your pick.
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Discovery | By Staff

ANTIQUES bookshelf

February 16, 2010  |  Film historian Ira M. Resnick bought his first film posters forty years ago. These are still a part of his collection, which has grown to some 2,000 posters and 1,500 film stills, and has been published for the first time in Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters from Classic Hollywood. As both a dealer and a collector, Resnick, who owns the Motion Picture Arts Gallery in New Jersey, is a leading authority in the world of film memorabilia, and here presents both a guide to collecting—with an appendices of his fifty favorite posters and a glossary of terms—and an in depth history of Hollywood's golden age from 1912 to 1962.
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