Europe puts its best foot forward to welcome the massive influx of international collectors and dealers who head there each spring. The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht attracts the largest crowds and most attention but The British Antiques Dealers’ Association (BADA) annual fair in london and Paris’s tailored Salon du Dessin, both of which follow closely on TEFAF’s heels, …
It would probably surprise Samuel F. B. Morse, and not pleasantly, that future generations know him for his invention of Morse code and his services to telegraphy, rather than for those paintings, produced over six decades, that were the serious business of his life. Despite a strict Protestant upbringing, Morse (1791-1872) spent three years in Europe under the tutelage of …
The most surprising interior in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum. The sheer density of paintings, sculpture, furniture, architectural fragments and models, Greco-Roman marbles, and much more appears largely as it did when the renowned early nineteenth-century architect lived there, arranging and rearranging his art, artifacts, and antiquities. What elevates the profusion from an eccentric jumble to a splendid, startlingly …
Fig. 1. Outside the rear elevation of this c. 1670 house in North London are a wrought iron strapwork garden seat, c. 1820, and a pair of seventeenth-century carved stone gatepost finials. Photography by Debbie Patterson When a client asked the London antiques dealer Robert Young to visit his newly acquired house he could not have known that this visit …
“My husband said the house screamed for antique furniture–but I have a hard time with sameness.” This candid recollection by a lively collector provides a partial explanation of how and why she and her late husband joined their appetite for antique furniture and folk art with abstract expressionist art and contemporary sculpture. The rest of the explanation lies in the …
In anticipation of this year’s Winter Antiques Show loan exhibition, Ahead of the Curve: The Newark Museum 1909–2015, students from East Side House Settlement—the Winter Antiques Show’s beneficiary since the show started in 1954—toured the museum. Students at the Newark Museum’s Ballantine House. Photo by Jay Savulich. The Winter Antiques show is known for its sophisticated lending exhibitions, festive opening-night …
We asked exhibitors at the Winter Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments. ALLAN AND PENNY KATZ This artful rendering of a birdcage in the shape of the United States Capitol Building was undoubtedly made …
In a better world we would all be thronging the doors of the Newark Museum; in the best of worlds Ulysses Grant Dietz would be there to meet us, taking us through the galleries with fellow curators Christa Clarke and Katherine Anne Paul. But this is Newark-not a destination for many out-of-town museumgoers (though it should be), so Ulysses Dietz …
Rooks Books produces books (and other leather-wrapped objects) that have a tactile, physical presence while exuding a sense of otherworldly mystery. One might expect to find such volumes in the hands of Gandalf or on the walls of the library at Hogwarts. Each uniquely created binding, made from a vast variety of leathers and other natural skins, seems to say, …
When he was designing the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth the great American architect Louis Kahn said that he wanted it to resemble “a friendly home.” That might surprise anyone familiar with Kahn’s museums—the Kimbell, the Yale Center for British Art, or the Yale University Art Gallery—but I think he was simply saying that he wanted his building to wall …