Many paths to modernity

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | A 1947 newsreel shows throngs of men filling Delhi’s open spaces and government compounds while a voiceover in a clipped British cadence reports that “everyone ran wild with joy.”1 After almost ninety years of colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was free-albeit split. Twenty-four hours earlier, Pakistan had been carved out as an independent …

Philadelphia collects: City folk

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 |  Twenty-five years ago in these pages, Beatrice B. Garvan wrote about an anonymous collection of Pennsylvania folk art that was already more than a quarter-century in the making. Garvan was struck by the coherence of the assemblage that was ever in flux, by the sense of motion generated by the collectors’ unyielding search …

Curiously Carved: Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Contrary to persistent stereotypes characterizing seamen in the Age of Sail as a barbaric rabble-unruly, illiterate ruffians devoted to the pursuit of disreputable vices-nineteenth-century Yankee whalemen were characteristically literate and, as a class, avid readers. Whaling voyages were matters of two, three, or even four years’ duration, including months at sea between landfalls; …

Delftware from a St. Louis collection

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BY REKA NEILSON FISHER, Curatorial assistant, Saint Louis Art Museum THE CREAMICS COLLECTION of Mr. and Mrs. George S. Rosborough Jr., of Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, is mainly devoted to English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Initially they collected early nineteenth-century yellow-glazed earthenware, but then they turned to earlier wares, particularly delftware, which attracted …