Loving the Gilded Age and learning how to look

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | John R. Tschirch is accustomed to being recognized. As Director of Museum Affairs for the Preservation Society of Newport County, he is in and out of the organization’s eleven historic houses so frequently that the volunteers and staff who usher nearly eight hundred thousand visitors through the mansions each year straighten when they see him …

Spirit Feel: A New Orleans Collection

Chris Waddington Art

Photography by Richard Sexton | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Africa feels close in New Orleans. You hear it in the blue notes and polyrhythmic drumming of jazz. You taste it in the okra-laden gumbos and rice dishes of the local cuisine. You see it in a host of tra­ditional arts, from the richly beaded parading costumes of …

The Huntington murals at the Yale University Art Gallery

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | On a spring morning in April 1926 a crowd stood transfixed on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, watching a wrecking ball slam into the floors and walls of the Collis P. Huntington mansion (see Fig. 3). Among them was a tall mustachioed man, Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), who stoically watched the destruction of …

Defining glamour: Syrie Maugham and Cecil Beaton

Editorial Staff Magazine

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 | The complementary relationship between Syrie Maugham and Cecil Beaton provides a remarkable record of the interplay between fashion, photography, and design in the years between the first and second World Wars. In The Glass of Fashion (1954), Beaton’s kaleidoscopic book of musings about the interconnected arts, he wrote: “When we talk about fashion …

Sparkle Plenty

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Tinsel paintings are reverse paintings on glass with crinkled, embossed, or smooth metallic foil applied behind translucent and unpainted areas. The effect is one of shimmering highlights when caught in the reflection of candle- or gaslight. The use of other reflective materials such as mother-of-pearl led to tinsel paint­ings sometimes being called Oriental, crystal, or …

Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | Its name, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, pretty well covers what this singular institution in San Marino, California, is all about. But it hardly begins to tell the story. The creation of Henry E. Huntington, a man with forward-looking business sense and retrospective tastes in art and literature, the Huntington today is …

The Kaufman Collection: The pursuit of excellence and a gift to the nation

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Photography by Gavin Ashworth | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | In my catalogue of friends, mentors, scholars, and collectors, Linda H. and the late George M. Kaufman fill all the roles. From my earliest acquaintance with them in 1974, I have been in awe of their collection and of their indefatigable focus on beauty and excellence in their Norfolk, …

At home in modernism: The John C. Waddell collection of American design

John Stuart Gordon Furniture & Decorative Arts

Photography by John M. Hall | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | The art of today must be created today,” the designer and author Paul T. Frankl wrote in 1928. “It must express the life about us. It must reflect the main characteristics and earmarks of our own complex civilization.”1 Over the past four decades, collector John C. Waddell …

Upscale Downsized

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Downsizing-a midlife rite of passage common to those whose offspring have grown up and moved out-is not a contingency that his friends would have ever dreamed possible of the abundance-loving Paul F. Walter, the New York connoisseur renowned for the scale and quality of his pathbreaking collections, which have run the gamut …

Early Color

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Color, rather than composition, subject matter, or form, is the true life force of photography. Color is the fluid essence of the quotidian, of life as it is lived in its ceaseless flux and reflux. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the early twentieth-century autochromes of Heinrich Kühn, who is …