Beginning on Saturday August 1, more than 500 lots from the estate of Joseph Stanley will go on view at Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, New Jersey, before being sold at auction on August 8. Items in the sale—which range from 18th-century English furniture to a wide array of Chinese export art and objects—are the unusual survival of …
* The top lot of the July 25 auction of science, technology, dolls and toys at Skinner Boston was a circa 1865 walnut astronomical clock by E. Howard that sold for $195,525 (estimate $175,000-200,000). Other notable sales included a pair of Newton library globes that sold for $74,063 (estimate $30,000-40,000), a miniature carved and painted wooden ship’s figurehead that sold …
“Living in the desert is the spiritual cathartic a great many people need. I am one of them.” -FLW This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the iconic Fifth Avenue building designed by seminal architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The museum’s golden anniversary has inspired a year-long series of events beginning with the exhibition Frank Lloyd …
Elinor Gordon of Villanova, Pennsylvania, the premier antiques dealer in Chinese export porcelain, died on Wednesday July 22, at her vacation home in Osterville on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. She was ninety-one years old and had been in the business for more than half a century, helping to build some of the best public and private collections of China trade porcelain …
This week I came across a Georgian armchair that was recently offered at Christie’s South Kensington in a sale aptly titled “An English Look.” This chair—with its intricate fretwork, japanned wood, and fanciful imagery—typifies the style of chinoiserie that was popular in the decorative arts beginning in the 17th century as trade brought exotic new wares from Asia to the …
Raising a glass of wine in a toast is among the oldest of dining traditions, and antique wineglasses are among the most appealing objects upon which to build a glass collection. One of the first things you discover, when investigating this field, is that antique wineglasses were often much smaller than the oversized goblets we have become accustomed to. Paintings …
It will probably not come as a surprise to many to learn that the French impressionist painter Edgar Degas enjoyed music and often attended performances several times a week. After all, the artist’s sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old-Dancer of about 1880 and his many paintings of ballerinas in class, at rehearsal, backstage, and on stage are among the best-known works of …
American impressionism, in particular Connecticut impressionism, is the focus of the current exhibition at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which has recently been promised the major gift of the collection of its trustee Clement C. Moore. The collection, which will be on view through October 18, includes major works by notable members of the Lyme Art Colony, …
Since classical Greece, philosophers have been extolling the virtues of a glass of good wine. Socrates supposedly advised: “So far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep.” According to the thirteenth-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a …
Low-tech risingAs a child, I made many discoveries in my grandmother’s house. My favorite of these was her Underwood No. 4 Standard Typewriter, made in 1911. Today, this typewriter sits near my desk. It is both a reminder of my grandmother and a handsome example from the field of vintage office equipment-typewriters, adding machines, telephones, glass-domed Edison stock tickers, and …