Preservation: The Stanton-Davis homestead

Editorial Staff Magazine, Opinion

By Katrine Ames Here in this shell of a house, This house that is struggling to be, Hope must have been The first to move in, And waited to welcome me. But hope isn’t easy to see. This lovely tribute to the White House in Leonard Bernstein and Allan Jay Lerner’s 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would make a perfect anthem for …

Some early American crewelwork

Editorial Staff Art

By FLORENCE PETO; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May 1951. Eighteenth-century crewelwork, especially favored for bedspreads and bed furnishings, is one of the most delightful types of early American embroidery.  Though it has become very scarce, resolute seekers may still occasionally acquire a piece.      Tree of Life Design, crewelwork fragment with leaves, fruit, birds, insects, and caterpillar. New York Historical Society.   …

Farther Afield, January-March

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

  Before she died in 1983 in her enormous hôtel particulier on the banks of the Seine, Mona Bismarck created a foundation for art and culture in her name, and gave it, in addition to an endowment, her historic mansion on the avenue de New York. It was Bismarck’s means of creating a legacy more enduring than merely that of …

A Rainy Day: Frank W. Benson’s Maine Interiors

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | By the time Frank Weston Benson discovered Maine’s North Haven Island in 1900, his career was flourishing. He had been longing for a retreat where he could paint undisturbed for more than a decade. Following his return home to Massachusetts in 1885 from two years at the Académie Julian in Paris, Ben­son quickly gained notice. …

Editor’s Letter, July/August 2012

Editorial Staff Opinion

  We have something to celebrate this summer in the resurgence of the American Folk Art Museum. Pronounced dead after selling its award-winning building on Fifty-ThirdStreet in Manhattan, the museum is noth­ing of the sort, as you will see in the articles grouped here under the rubric “Folk Art Rising.” At its tidy quarters on Lincoln Square, a smooth street-level …

Folk art rising

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …

Sewn not hooked

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | About the same time I bought Mercy Huntting’s rug at auction in 2007 (facing page, top), I was given a full run of The Magazine Antiques. Before shelving them for reference I paged through every issue, and to my surprise, found the rug illustrated in May 1951, in Florence Peto’s article “Some Early …

On Southern Turf

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | For Mary and Hank Brockman the proper preservation of the South’s material culture includes art, architecture, artifacts and the landscape. Fig. 22. The back stairwell is hung with Depression era pho­tographs of the American South. One wall holds elegiac images of southern mansions by surrealist photographer John Clarence Laughlin (1905-1985), whose Ghosts Along …

Not Just Folk: Josyane and Robert Young at home in London

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | The brick exterior of the house appears virtually identical to others on its street and to much of the neighborhood of Wandsworth in southwest London. Built in the 1840s by a philanthropic charity as part of a subsidized housing project for uniformed workers (mostly from the nearby railway but also policemen and soldiers), …

Los Angeles Folk

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, Summer 2010 | Fig. 1. Frame decorated with the ceremonial symbols of the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF), American, c. 1870. Wood, paint, and gilding; height 27 ¾, width 22 ½ inches. Fig. 2. Hand-carved and painted heart-in-hand IOOF staffs, American, 1880–1930. Fig. 3. Mounted above a grain-painted Pennsylvania stand of c. 1830 is a …