from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …
Every so often a few wise things get said about the passions of people who are collectors (most famously in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”). Rarely is anything of interest written about dealers, and oddly enough, almost nothing can be found on the nature of that intriguing hybrid, the dealer/collector, which brings us to the pre-eminent example of the …
By L. M. A. ROY [Originally published September 1949 ; posted in conjunction with Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s “American Pewter,” March/April 2013.] Mr. Roy’s model for this pictorial demonstration was John G. Herrock, “whose family,” he says,” were tinkering with tools from the time they came to Maine in 1799.” Besides pewter, he makes violins, reproductions of colonial furniture, wrought iron, jewelry, and …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April, 2013 | Pewter is effectively the mirror alloy of bronze: the latter is an alloy of copper with a little tin, while pewter is the result of smelting tin with a little copper. The large tin content imparts the silver-gray color-indeed the more tin, the more silvery the appearance. Pewter has been worked from ancient …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | An impressive roster of renowned craftsmen trained and worked in Philadelphia during the twentieth century. This flourishing activity is due to the city’s long history as a center for artisans extending back to the time of its founding. The French Huguenot silversmith Cesar Ghiselin arrived in Pennsylvania in 1681 in the company of …
A few weeks ago the Connecticut congressman Joe Courtney registered dismay at one of the more significant departures from historical fact inSteven Spielberg’s Oscar-bound Lincoln. To dramatize the narrow margin by which the Thirteenth Amendment passed, the film’s screenwriter Tony Kushner shows two members of the Connecticut delegation voting against the abolition of slavery. As it happened, all four voted …
By John W. Poole [Originally published November 1938; posted in conjunction with Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s “American Pewter,” March/April 2013.] IN ADDITION to the desirability of maintaining the value of personal property, the owner of antiquities possessing historical and cultural significance owes a very definite obligation to posterity. In some fields, little or none of this responsibility may be shifted …
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 …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This issue celebrates the long history of Philadelphia as the city of great artist-artisans. That history would be even more impressive had there been a Helen Drutt on the scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make sure that absolutely nothing of value was lost to posterity. What Drutt has done for …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This summer the nation will commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Most historians believe the repulse by George G. Meade of Robert E. Lee’s emboldened Army of Northern Virginia was the turning point of the American Civil War. Fought in and around a small town eighty-five miles north of the …