The Magazine Antiques - Most Recent Articles

European elegance in San Francisco

By Martin Chapman — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

One of California's finest collections of eighteenth-century English and European decorative arts is to be found in San Francisco in a large Queen Anne revival house in Pacific Heights. Photography by Aya Brackett

Modern sculptors and American folk art

By Kevin D. Murphy — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

"Do not bore. Do not be obvious." That was the advice given by painter, teacher, and critic Hamilton Easter Field to his students in the Ogunquit School of Painting and Sculpture.

Pennsylvania style

By Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

The rich art and history of Pennsylvania shine forth in a collection of fine Philadelphia furniture, Pennsylvania folk art, American paintings with regional connections, and Chinese export porcelain and other treasures obtained primarily from local dealers. Photography by Gavin Ashworth

Celebrating the exotic and the ordinary

By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Historic New England, subject of the loan exhibition at the Winter Antiques Show, captures our attention by preserving grand houses as well as humble objects, allowing us to see the rich interplay between artifacts, documents, memory, and place.

Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the furniture of John and Hugh Finlay

By Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

December 2009 | President James Madison and his wife, Dolley Payne Todd Madison, presided over Wednesday evening gatherings in the French salon tradition that were the highlight of Washington social life.

At home with Christopher Dresser

By Max Donnelley — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

December 2009 | When you visit Janet and Lawrence Larose's New York dining room, you are surrounded by hundreds of objects designed by Christopher Dresser. Photography by Paul Rocheleau.

The Hidden Magic of Henry Davis Sleeper's Beauport

By Howard Mansfield — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

December 2009 | In anticipation of the loan exhibition of objects from Historic New England at next month's Winter Antiques Show in New York, we offer two appreciations of one of the organization's most intriguing properties.

The legacy of Henry Davis Sleeper

By Shax Riegler — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Ralph D. Curtis: A nineteenth-century folk artist identified

By J.E. Jelinek — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0100

November 2009 | In 1973 at an auction in Ellenville, New York, an early nineteenth-century portrait of a woman wearing a lace bonnet, holding a red book, and seated in a high-back chair sold for what was then an unusually high price of nine thousand dollars.

American artists as they saw themselves

By Carrie Rebora Barratt and H. Barbara Weinberg — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

November 2009 | American artists had to grapple with the nature of their role and their identity in society

Charles Melville Dewey: A forgotten master of classic tonalism

By David Adams Cleveland — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

November 2009 | Of all the great disappearing acts in American art history, the tonalist artist Charles Melville Dewey's is one of the most complete and inexplicable.

James E. Freeman and the painting of sentiment

By Mary K. McGuigan and John F. McGuigan Jr. — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

November 2009 | Thoughout his half-century-long artistic career in the United States and Italy, James E. Freeman specialized in creating paintings of sentiment that sought to cross the boundaries dividing different cultures and social classes.

Finding beauty, creating harmony: The art of William F. Jackson

By Alfred C. Harrison — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

November 2009 | William Franklin Jackson was an artist who spent most of his career in an out-of-the-way city that was more concerned with politics and economic development than art.

Design and reform: the making of the Bauhaus

By Christopher Long — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

October 2009 | The first comprehensive American exhibition on the Bauhaus in decades opens at the Museum of Modern Art next month.

Chicago and the arts and crafts movement

By Monica Obniski and Brandon K. Ruud — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

October 2009 | During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Chicago stood at the crossroads of the handcrafted and the machine-made, aspects that came to define the American arts and crafts movement.

Gauguin rising

By James Gardner — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

October 2009 | The bold, but mostly forgotten, Volpini exhibition at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889 has been re-created in the Cleveland Museum of Art's Paul Gauguin: Paris 1889, where it emerges as a turning point in the history of modern art.

Timeless Tudor: Bradley Court in Gloucestershire

By Meredith Etherington-Smith — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

October 2009 | The calm rooms of a sixteenth-century manor house reflect several generations of collectors. Photography by Nic Barlow.

An appreciation of Henry Ossawa Tanner

By Maureen Mullarkey — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

September 2009 | Within nine years of moving abroad, Henry Ossawa Tanner, America's first major African American artist, had become an international success.

Eyre Hall on Virginia's Eastern Shore

By J. Thomas Savage — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

September 2009 | Photography by Langdon Clay | "Eyre Hall...all through its venerable existence but another name for everything elegant, graceful and delightful in Old Virginia life."

Margrieta van Varick's East Indian goods

By Marybeth De Filippis — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0100

September 2009 | At the time of her death in 1695 in the bucolic village of Flatbush, New York, the textile merchant Margrieta van Varick owned an astonishing array of exotic goods from around the world.