The Magazine Antiques

Discovery | By Cynthia Drayton

Query: Seeking Stretch

July 29, 2010  |  The early Philadelphia clockmaker Peter Stretch (1670–1746) and his two clockmaking sons, Thomas (1697-1765) and William (1701-1748), are the subject of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné to be published by the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware.

Peter Stretch was born in Leek in Staffordshire, England, and apprenticed with his older brother Samuel, a clockmaker who specialized in lantern clocks there. A Quaker, Peter Stretch and his wife and three sons left England for Philadelphia in 1703. He set up his shop on the southwest corner of Second and Chestnut Streets known as “Peter Stretch’s Corner,” where he made and sold clocks and imported wares. He joined the Common Council of Philadelphia in 1708, and nine years later received a commission from the council to work on the town clock.

Stretch produced a wide range of clocks, including thirty-hour and eight-day ones with engraved brass movements, plain dials, and single hands — more elaborate ones with a sweep s…» More

Discovery | By Katy Kiick

Great Estates: Historic Hampton in Towson, Maryland

June 30, 2010  |  Just outside of Baltimore in Towson, Maryland is the Hampton National Historic Site, part of the National Park Service since 1948, when it was the first site to receive recognition for architectural merit.  Built in a popular Georgian domestic style, the mansion is a series of three main units connected by recessed "hyphens," stretching 175 feet across a large hill.  A thirty-four-foot tall cupola surmounts the central unit, creating a palatial effect that some called "pretentious" during its construction in the late eighteenth century. Today, the mansion is the decorative and architectural centerpiece of the site, but extant farm buildings introduce the servants, slaves, and farmers who ran the estate for its long tenure as a successful farm.  These buildings include everything from an orangerie and greenhouses to stone slave quarters and an icehouse, making Hampton a rare example of an eighteenth and nineteenth century plantation and farm left intact. 

Seven generations of t…» More

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