Several years ago I visited the Reverend Peter Gomes, Harvard University’s chaplain and professor of Christian morals, to interview him about the way he had furnished Sparks House, the residence Harvard provides for its preacher. I was struck by the exuberance of his rooms, their voluptuous colors—golds, reds, and greens—their antiques—Yankee, French, Scottish, English—the dramatic spiral stairwell lined with wallpaper …
A charming array of original prints and watercolors from rare design books and folios is currently on view at the print gallery of Ursus Books in Manhattan in the exhibition The Decorative Arts on Paper. Ranging from early works such as Thomas Sheraton’s The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book and Ackermann’s Repository of Arts to designs for art deco fabrics …
I first encountered the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in the 1970s, when I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire. Wanting to learn more about the material world of seventeenth-century New England, I signed up for an architectural tour led by Abbott Lowell Cummings. It must have been in the fall. I remember …
Photography by Gavin Ashworth | It took knowledge—knowledge and taste together,” according to Harry Hartman of Harry B. Hartman Antiques and Interiors who helped to form this exceptional private collection of American furniture and folk art and American and Chinese export paintings. For nearly fifty years, the Hartman name has been synonymous with purveying fine antiques from southeastern Pennsylvania. This …
“Do not bore. Do not be obvious.” That was the advice given by painter, teacher, and critic Hamilton Easter Field (1873-1922) to his students in the Ogunquit (Maine) School of Painting and Sculpture, which he opened in 1911 with his protégé, the French-born sculptor Robert Laurent.1 For Field, Laurent, and their colleagues who passed through Ogunquit and who shared similar …
Photography by Aya Brackett | One of California’s finest collections of eighteenth-century English and European decorative arts is to be found in San Francisco in a large Queen Anne revival house in Pacific Heights. Carefully chosen to evoke the atmosphere of an English country house or a French château, these objects shine brilliantly against the dark brown paneling in the …
Currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, An Enduring Motif: The Pomegranate in Textiles (through February 21) is a small exhibition of works from the museum’s permanent collection that spans a remarkably diverse range of techniques and geographic regions including the 18th-century French block-printed cotton fabric shown here. The pomegranate bears many symbolic associations—from the Greek myth of …
TOP WARHOLWhat: 200 One Dollar Bills by Andy Warhol, 1962Where: Sotheby’s New York (November 11, Contemporary Art Evening Sale)Estimate: $8-12 millionSold For: $43.7 million A large-scale masterpiece from Warhol’s first series of silkscreened paintings, 200 One Dollar Bills was also from the artist’s second earliest group of serial works. Originally from the collection of Robert and Ethel Scull, the work …
When visiting the International Fine Art and Antique Dealers Fair in New York in October, I was struck by the imposing arms and armor on display in the booth of Peter Finer of London—enormous poleaxes, a beautifully ornamented Italian half suit of armor, a bronze cannon on its field carriage. It made me stop and wonder idly about how you …
Among this year’s best surprises is the moving exhibition Bold, Cautious, True: Walt Whitman and American Art of the Civil War Era, which opened during the summer at the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, and remains on view at the Katonah Museum of Art in Katonah, New York, through January 24, 2010. Taking its title from a Whitman …