Silver curator and dining historianPhilippa Glanville hasassembled an insightful display oftable objects and related documentsthat elucidate the eating rituals ofthe dukes of Portland—and of theirextensive staffs. The elegance offormal entertainments given by thiseminent family is seen through suchimportant creations as a pair ofDutch silver water fountains ofabout 1681 by Adam Loofs forWilliam of Orange; an extensivecollection of porcelain ice pails …
The Saxon state’s magnificent collectionof Turkish and Turkish-styleobjects originated in the late sixteenthcentury and has been called the Türckische Cammer since at least 1614. However,the bulk of its contents have not beenpublicly displayed for the past seventyyears. A lavish new permanent exhibitionof about six hundred items hasbeen opened on the second floor of the Residenzschloss in Dresden, part ofthe first …
Paintings of collectors’ cabinets orrooms of art celebrate collecting.The form emerged in the early seventeenthcentury in the rich merchant cityof Antwerp, where this exhibition, ajoint venture of the Rubenshuis thereand the Mauritshuis in The Hague, wasrecently on view. For the first time, theexhibition brings together the threeextraordinary works by the early masterof the genre, Willem van Haecht II,whose father, Tobias …
Chinese export porcelain is one of the oldest and mostvenerable areas of serious collecting. The term Chinese export refers to porcelain made and decorated in China betweenthe sixteenth and twentieth centuries specifically forthe Western market. The Chinese first exported porcelain tothe Middle East in the fourteenth century, but it was not untilPortugal established sea routes to China that this materialmade …
Fig. 1. Slingshots carved and painted by members of the North Carolina Cherokee tribe during the first half of the twentieth century for the tourist trade (see also Fig. 6). Fig. 2. A rare nineteenth-century gourd fiddle and two banjos by African American maker Bill Plummer (1873–1942), of Chilhowie, Virginia, hang in the den (see also Fig. 10). Fig. 3. …
The Detroit Institute of Arts is presenting a fascinating and adventurous exhibition that explores the consequences on African art of cultural exchanges between Africa and Europe over the past five hundred years. Casting the European as the cultural “other,” a reversal of the usual Eurocentric perspective, the exhibition examines how African artists from diverse cultures used, and continue to use, …
So many exhibitions open in New York in any given month that it is hard to choose which ones to feature. Two that have great appeal are Women Only: Folk Art by Female Hands, at the American Folk Art Museum, and Vienna Circa 1780: An Imperial Silver Service Rediscovered, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from April 13 …
With an atrium, a forty-foot-high glass wall, new galleries, restaurant, café, and sculpture garden, the reopening of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) on May 1 is the latest in a series of important museum renovations and one of the most anticipated. The 165,000 square-foot expansion, designed by the London-based American architect Rick Mather and the Richmond firm SMBW, …
Philadelphia hosts two important antiques shows in mid-April, and free shuttle service between them makes it easy to see everything on offer. The Twenty-third Street Armory Antiques Show, now in its sixteenth year, opens on Friday April 16 and features more than forty dealers showcasing eighteenth- through twentieth-century American and European fine, folk, and decorative arts. A special exhibition entitled …
Fig. 1. Womb chair and ottoman designed by Eero Saarinen (1910–1961) and first manufactured by Knoll Associates, New York, 1946, 1948. Tubular steel, fiberglass, with wool upholstery and foam cushion; height (of chair) 35 ½, width 40, depth 34 inches. Photograph by courtesy of Knoll. Fig. 2. Sunday Morning by Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) as the cover of the Saturday Evening …