Orphaned at thirteen, Helen M. Turner overcame enormous obstacles to become one of the most successful American woman artists of the first half of the twentieth century. A daughter of the South, she worked in the impressionist style across a range of genres, specializing in subjects that portrayed the woman’s sphere, from still lifes of dressing-table tops to figures in …
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville is the only venue in the United States for an acclaimed traveling exhibition from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s world-renowned costume collection. The show, which opened in London in 2007 and has been seen in Australia, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, centers on the glamorous decade of Paris and London couture between …
Visitors to the left coast this summer can get a taste of the left bank, thanks to exhibitions on view at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The de Young Museum is showing the stunning Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which includes some one hundred iconic examples from that Paris museum, which is partially closed for …
Monticello A lot has been happening recently at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia, making a visit more worth while than ever. For starters, based on extensive archaeological and documentary evidence, the upper chamber of the South Pavilion has been newly furnished to reflect its many purposes as a bed and sitting room when Jefferson brought his bride to Monticello …
Child’s apron, American, c. 1830. Photograph courtesy of Joan R. Brownstein American Folk Painting, Newbury, Massachusetts. Harriet Newell Keyes attributed to Thomas Ware (1803–1826), Pomfret, Vermont, c. 1820–1825. Photograph courtesy of Frank and Barbara Pollack, Highland Park, Illinois. Chest of drawers, Essex County, Massachusetts, c. 1700–1720. Photograph courtesy of Northeast Auctions, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. August is antiques month in New …
Fazzoletto (handkerchief) vase designed by Fulvio Bianconi (1915–1996) for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 11 inches. Photograph by courtesy of Glass Past, New York. Right: Fazzoletto vase designed by Bianconi for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 7 ¼ inches. Gardner and Barr photograph. Pair of footed vases made by Salviati Dott. Antonio, Murano, c. …
Fall Preview: Paris prepares for the 25th Biennale des Antiquaires Preparations for the Biennale des Antiquaires, which will open on September 15 in Paris’s Grand Palais, are well underway. Although it is the twenty-fifth edition of the Biennale, it is the first under the direction of Hervé Aaron of Didier Aaron, who is the new president of France’s Syndicat National …
Normandy: An impressionist summer Upper and Lower Normandy join together for a massive summer-long celebration of impressionism at museums and cultural institutions throughout the two provinces. One highlight is the exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, which unites eleven of Claude Monet’s paintings of the cathedral and includes about thirty depictions of the city by Camille Pissarro. More …
Limoges: European ceramics The city of Limoges, in collaboration with the Musée national Adrien Dubouché in Limoges and the Réunion des musées nationaux, nods proudly to its centuries-old reputation as a porcelain center with an exhibition about European ceramics. If objects from Limoges abound, the show, which includes over four hundred pieces dating from the seventeenth century to the present …
Chantilly: The Musée Condé remembers Henri IV. The Musée Condé at the Château de Chantilly, less than an hour north of Paris and accessible by the RER train line, commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of the assassination of the French king Henri IV with an exhibition devoted to this perennially popular monarch. Rich in paintings of the family, lovers, enemies, …