from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Anxious and awestruck, I waited outside Wendell Garrett’s office in the spring of 1971. He was the managing editor of The Magazine Antiques and I was a nervous twenty-three-year-old graduate student in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He had agreed to meet me because of my interest in early Boston woodworkers. …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Fig. 14. Self-Portrait by van Gogh, c. 1887. Oil on canvas, 15 ¾ by 13 ⅜ inches. Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, gift of Philip L. Goodwin in memory of his mother, Josephine S. Goodwin. On February 17, 1913, the most important art event ever held in America-the International Exhibition of …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February, 2013 | The editorials that Wendell Garrett wrote for this magazine over forty years radiate a quiet confidence in American democracy. But if you read a great many of them alongside the notebooks of quotations he kept throughout his life you begin to see a man who was actually turning over the topsoil of our …
In the 1950s Robert Moses, New York’s bully-boy developer (a familiar type in these parts), had a suggestion for citizens who objected when he razed their neighborhoods: “Go to the Rockies,” he told them, implying that city life is bulldozers, cranes, and scaffolding and to resist them is to resist being urban and modern. Moses notwithstanding, modern life in New …
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 …
By Leslie B. Grigsby. Originally published in June 1999. The Longridge Collection of ceramics is English pottery Valhalla. Nestled in a New England house with rare English and Continental treen, medieval ivory and metalwork, and early furniture and carvings, this extraordinary collection of ceramics can be divided into two main groups: about 440 pieces of tinglazed earthenware (delftware) and 100 …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | In the spring of 1771 John Singleton Copley had several good reasons to look south to New York for fresh fields to conquer. Although he had effectively joined the social ranks of his clientele by marrying into one of the leading Tory families of Boston and acquired a suitable gentleman’s estate on Beacon …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | In a time of cultural awakening when Boston was hailed as the Athens of America, Sarah Goodrich (Fig. 3) was the city’s pre-eminent portrait miniaturist, creating indelible likenesses for more than a quarter-century between 1815 and 1850. Favored by such notable patrons as Daniel Webster, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Edward Everett, and William Lindall Winthrop, she …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | Today Louis Comfort Tiffany is widely recognized as America’s leading designer of the decades around 1900, but during his lifetime he was best known primarily as a designer of religious art, particularly memorial windows. They were installed by the thousands-mostly in Protestant churches and cemetery mausoleums-and formed the bulk of his business over four decades. …
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | It was meant to be a souvenir. It became a passion. Lanford Wilson (Fig. 4), the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of Burn This!, Talley’s Folly, and Fifth of July was in Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the late 1980s, watching the filming of Steel Magnolias (1989). Adapted from a successful play by native son Robert Harling, the …