Magazine January February 2025

Thomas Jayne

Exhibitors at New York’s Winter Show describe some of the exceptional offerings they will bring to this year’s edition at the Park Avenue Armory.

Portrait miniature painter John Smart in Missouri, Old Masters on tour from Puerto Rico, Laurene Krasny Brown at Olde Hope, and more.

Sniffing the Zeitgeist
Elizabeth Pochoda

Masters of Disguise: Made for a simple purpose—to store tea securely—antique wooden caddies come in a variety of ingenious forms, some made to confound would be thieves, others to amaze.
Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle

Horse Sense: The Kimbell Art Museum’s director discusses a fine specimen from George Stubbs’s Mares and Foals series recently added to the collection.
Eric M. Lee

What happened to curtains?
A conversation with textile specialist Natalie F. Larson

Family Jewels: In the mid-twentieth century Italian designer Aloisia Rucellai remade antique adornments to meet modern standards of taste. Today, her granddaughter is championing Rucellai’s sleek, surreal, and unforgettable creations among a new generation of aesthetes.
Sarah Bilotta

A New Day for Traditional Craft: We introduce a curator who will spotlight Indigenous ceramics at the Gardiner Museum.
Eleanor H. Gustafson

Visitors who stop by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing will be greeted not only by the exciting, challenging newness of the reinstallation—undertaken to mark the Wing’s hundredth anniversary—but given the opportunity to look beyond surfaces, with the help of two many-voiced audio guides that unravel the foundational myths of American art history object by object.
Glenn Adamson

The women of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America have been preserving history since 1891.
Carol Borchert Cadou

In the bijou New Orleans apartment that decorator Thomas Jayne shares with his husband Rick Ellis, old things provide the bright backdrop to a gracious existence.
Thomas Jayne

Two longtime friends and colleagues in their passion for American decorative arts discuss a major acquisition to mark the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Met’s American Wing.
Thomas Jayne with Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen

At the Kravet archive in Woodbury, Long Island, tens of thousands of textile samples from around the world are assiduously catalogued and preserved, serving both as a comprehensive record of sewn, woven, embroidered, and printed design history, and as inspiration for contemporary makers.
Wendy Moonan

A bespoke showcase for the extensive antiques collection of its builder, Casa del Herrero remains the finest exemplar of the Californian fashion for all things Spanish during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Jeanne Sloane