* Skinner Boston/November 8, American Furniture and Decorative Arts The top lot was William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset with the Ice Bound Panther that sold for $259,000 (estimate $80,000-100,000). Other top lots were a pair of gilt and mirrored pier New York tables that sold for $54,510 (estimate $12,00-18,000), and a federal bookcase by Joseph Murphy of South Berwick, Maine that …
Although not typically associated with the trend-setting designs of the 20th century, today the Winterthur Museum in Deleware hosts its third annual design conference Chic It Up—which features a stellar roster of historians and curators, all giving talks on interior design from the 1940s. Among the speakers are: Donald Albrecht, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, …
Here is a point that had somehow eluded me until now: eighteenth-century American furniture—a John Townsend chest-on-chest, a Philadelphia tea table—was already bold, original, and world class while American painting was still struggling for stature and its own voice. This discrepancy dawned on me while reading Carrie Rebora Barratt and Barbara Weinberg’s article in this issue about the stories American …
November 2009 | William Franklin Jackson was an artist who spent most of his career in an out-of-the-way city that was more concerned with politics and economic development than art. Sacramento, California, was little more than a frontier outpost when he arrived in 1863, although it was already the capital city of a state with almost unlimited potential for growth. …
Located on sixty acres in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Fonthill, the home of Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), one of the leaders of the American arts and crafts movement, stands as a testament to handcrafted goods, replete with relics dutifully gathered by Mercer in the wake of the industrial revolution.Mercer, a Bucks County native, graduated from Harvard in 1879. After receiving a law …
November 2009 | Thoughout his half-century-long artistic career in the United States and Italy, James E. Freeman (Fig. 2) specialized in creating paintings of sentiment that sought to cross the boundaries dividing different cultures and social classes by engaging emotions, encouraging empathy, and ultimately prompting beneficence.1 Sentimentalism flourished in the antebellum period as a sort of bridge between the overt …
November 2009 | Of all the great disappearing acts in American art history, the tonalist artist Charles Melville Dewey’s is one of the most complete and inexplicable. Few artists of the period received more glowing notices from critics or were more widely admired in elite art circles, only to have left so little in the way of a footprint. Like …
November 2009 | In The American School (Fig. 1) Matthew Pratt portrays himself seated at his easel, the sharp profile of his head silhouetted against the canvas, which bears his signature at bottom left. Holding a palette and maulstick to steady his hand, Pratt presents himself as a painter—an astonishing act of bravado as he had just arrived in England …
Clifford Wallach is a widely recognized expert in the field of tramp art—a branch of folk art in which objects are constructed from chip carved wood. As an antiques dealer, scholar, and author of two books on the subject, Tramp Art: One Notch at a Time (1998) and most recently Tramp Art: Another Notch, Folk Art From the Heart (2009), …
* Sotheby’s New York/November 2, Russian ArtThe sale total was just under $13.8 million, with 98 of 122 lots sold. The top lot was Boris Dmitrievich Grigoriev’s Mother and Child that sold for $1.3 million (estimate $500,000-700,000). Other top lots were an award portrait miniature of Peter the Great that sold for $1.3 million (estimate $80,000-120,000), and Konstantin Alexeevich Korovin’s …