Based as we are in New York, the staff of The Magazine ANTIQUES has a fond if not proprietary tendency to look upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially its American Wing, as our “local” museum. So when we heard the news that the redoubtable Morrison H. Heckscher was retiring after forty-eight years, thirteen of them as head of the …
When visitors enter the renovated and reinstalled Harvard Art Museums on the north side of Harvard Yard, they will find a series of galleries that invite a new way to approach the history of American art. The first and second floors of the Fogg Museum galleries in the 205,000-square-foot facility designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop bring together the …
Recent noteworthy publications that are a pleasure to read and a delight to behold French Art Deco by Jared Goss (Metropolitan Museum of Art, distr. Yale University Press). 280 pp., color and b/w illus. As an artistic term, art deco is one of the most misunderstood. “Art Deco is commonly referred to as a ‘style,’ a designation that suggests specific shared characteristics,” …
In 1893, in the small town of Biloxi, Mississippi, George E. Ohr’s Biloxi Art Pottery burned down. In common with all calamities of this kind it must have caused considerable disruption and financial distress to the victim, but a propitious effect was to ignite a smoldering radicalism in Ohr, who thereafter began to produce some of the most inventive pottery …
The origins of the New Jersey jeweler
This article was originally published in the December 1963 issue of ANTIQUES. In his book Old Clocks and Watches and their Makers, F. J. Britten notes that “watches with enamel painting before 1640 are exceedingly rare, and there is a marked difference in the character of such decorative work executed at the beginning, compared with that done during the later …
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. Raphaelle Peale’s Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup has come to the Seattle Art Museum from the estate of Ruth J. Nutt, well known to collectors of American silver for the …
At first glance, the small oil portrait of a handsome man in a flowered dressing gown looked somewhat unprepossessing (Fig. 1). Hanging on the wall of a dealer’s booth at an antiques show in 2010, it had a “folksy” appeal, but wasn’t an obvious candidate for acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, as a curator in the midst …
Jack London died young, at the age of forty, yet in some ways it is amazing that he lived as long as he did. To anyone who happened to see the thirty-one-year-old London and five other inexperienced sailors cruising through San Francisco’s Golden Gate on April 23, 1907, his survival would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. His boat the …
The splendor of the house of Habsburg was always inversely proportionate to its prowess on the field of battle. Under Maximilian I of Austria and his grandson Charles V of Spain, the dynasty waged continuous battles from Cuzco to Constantinople and from Scandinavia to the shores of Africa. During this time, the external manifestations of its magnificence were fairly restrained, …