Magazine September/October 2024


SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2024


Editor’s Letter

Mitchell Owens

Field Notes

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

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

Image
Palazzo Sacchetti, the Room of the Mappamondi by Pierre Bergian (1965–), 2023.


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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

The Woman Who Loved Beautiful Things

Rita Lydig coveted rare art and ravishing antiques to the point that bankruptcy had to be declared. But the spendthrift’s fine-tuned aesthetic sense remained gloriously intact, until the very last penny
Mitchell Owens

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