SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2024
Editor’s Letter
Mitchell Owens
Field Notes
Heavenly Visions: Gift drawings by Shaker women
Elizabeth Pochoda
Travel
The Life Historic: A port town with astonishingly rich period architecture and an increasingly buzzy spirit, centuries-old Edenton is becoming one of North Carolina’s best places to be
Alexis Tobias-Jacavone
Scholar
Feats of Clay: Foundational stints at Versailles and the Mobilier National behind her, Belgian-born decorative arts expert Marie-Laure Buku Pongo has taken the Frick Collection’s new ceramics installations under her wing
Sierra Holt
Objects
All the News That’s Fit to Print: British transferware that was manufactured for American home-owners is sturdy, plentiful, restrained in palette, and sometimes surprisingly topical, bringing international events to everyday tabletops
Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle
Exhibitions
Dining with sultans in Detroit; sacred art of New Spain in Santa Fe; and what the Bourbons discovered on the Bay of Naples, in Dallas
Books
Machine à Amuser: The Life and Death of the Beistegui Penthouse Apartment by Wim van den Bergh; Rosario Candela and the New York Apartment: 1927–1937 by David Netto; Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections: A Research Guide by Jacques Schuhmacher; and Hokusai’s Fuji, edited by Wada Kyoko.
Mentors
Frontis
Collector and philanthropist Marshall Field V recalls his former Chicago apartment, which was featured in ANTIQUES in 1971
Mitch Owens
Collecting
Going For Broke: Where others hoarded stamps or trading cards, as a boy Belgian artist Pierre Bergian haunted building sites for evocative ceramic shards.
Pierre Bergian
Jewelry
Delving into agate, a hardstone where color, pattern, and history intersect
Sarah Davis
Events
Sierra Holt
Auctions
Wake Up Call: Timely results in the world of carriage clocks
Endnotes
Feast for the Eyes: Put aside the plates, because Sèvres is so much more than dishes. An exhibition at the Bard Graduate Center serves up nearly three hundred years of astonishing sculptures, traditional to decidedly not
Eleanor H. Gustafson
Features
Up At The Villa
Young Swiss painter Paul Thévenaz traveled to Vizcaya after World War I to create a Tiepolo-style ceiling for a romantic garden pavilion. Today, the weather-worn work—peopled with gamboling putti and Renaissance revelers—has been brilliantly restored, an effort that is also shedding light on the long-forgotten gay artist and his world
Beth Dunlop
Good Ordinary
In a picturesque Dorset village, architect and designer Ben Pentreath lives amid polished Georgian tables, curious Victorian chairs, and romantic Edwardiana that he swears are nothing special. That’s not modesty; that’s the point
Consolation Prizes
An exhibition at Frederic Church’s Olana highlights the nineteenth-century culture of memory and memorial
Elizabeth Pochoda
Reine Check
Marie-Antoinette’s 1779 canapé à la turque has been a prized if drearily upholstered presence at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor since the 1950s. Decades of research have recently returned it to the glory that the young queen commissioned, right down to the hand-embroidered jardin that now blooms across its cushions
Eleanor H. Gustafson
Root Cause
As UNESCO honors three Moravian settlements as new World Heritage Sites, a Pennsylvania exhibition about the church’s landscape traditions explores the fertile intersection between spiritual beliefs and garden design
Farrar Lannon and Susan Ellis