The Magazine Antiques

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

The Market | By Courtney Bowers

More on Manz

March 24, 2011  |  Tiffany and Company. Shreve, Crump and Low. Black, Starr and Frost. Marcus and Company. Gorham. Raymond C. Yard. These are just a few of the prominent jewelry retailers supplied by the German-born New York jeweler Gustav Manz in the first decades of the twentieth century. Hitherto little known, Manz's work is examined in "Where credit is due: The life and jewelry of Gustav Manz" by Courtney Bowers, in the September-October 2010 issue of ANTIQUES. But his clients during his peak years-between about 1910 and 1925-were too numerous to document there. The listing that follows, collated from Manz's business records at Winterthur, along with the number of sales he made to each, shows why. Though Manz's mark almost never appears on a piece, his jewelry is definitely out there to be found.

The Market | By Carolin C. Young

Paris prepares for the 25th Biennale des Antiquaires

Fall Preview: Paris prepares for the 25th Biennale des Antiquaires

Preparations for the Biennale des Antiquaires, which will open on September 15 in
Paris’s Grand Palais, are well underway. Although it is the twenty-fifth edition of the Biennale, it is the first under the direction of Hervé Aaron of Didier Aaron, who is the new president of France’s Syndicat National des Antiquaires, which organizes the show. Although the Biennale will feature the same caliber of objects and installations that have made it the most glamorous antiques fair, this year twenty-five “young dealers” have been selected for inclusion in a special section
called the “Tremplin pour la Biennale” (springboard for the Biennale), which will
be located on the balcony.

Although similar to Maastricht’s Showcase initiative, which also added young dealers, the Tremplin is muchless formal, although no less rigorous. Rather than soliciting applications, Aaron asked members of every vetting committee to nominate ca…» More

The Market | By Staff

Talking Antiques

Leigh Wishner
Cora Ginsburg
It was a fateful trip to view antique textiles and costumes at Cora Ginsburg in New York that set me on my current path. I went there one afternoon in 2000 with Michele Majer, a professor of mine at the Bard Graduate Center in New York where I was pursuing a master’s degree in the decorative arts of the ancient world and taking courses in textiles (something I did not even realize you could study when I was an art history major at Barnard). Up until that visit I had assumed I would continue at Bard and eventually become an academic, but when I walked
into the gallery and met the owner Titi Halle, I knew this was where I wanted to be. Among other things, the experience was so different from a museum visit, so much more tactile and intimate. I have been with the firm since 2001 getting the kind of experience that is probably not obtainable in a purely academic environment. I completed my master’s degree in clothing and textile history in 2004 while cont…» More