from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The life of the Parisian decorator, collector, one-time architect, and ceramist Georges Hoentschel (Fig. 2), head of the renowned furnishing firm Maison Leys, coincided with a period of far reaching change in France. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the devastation of the civil war (la commune), the Third Republic (established after …
Two hoof spoons
By ALBERT SCHER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978. When Helen Burr Smith wrote about silver spoons with hoof-shape terminals in ANTIQUES in 1944 there were only four of these interesting survivals from seventeenth-century Dutch New York households known in America. Now two more hoof spoons have come to light. Fig. 1-Silver hoof spoon, probably New York, seventeenth century. Length 6 …
The Cartier fern-spray brooches
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The beauty of the diamond contains within it the awesomeness of geological time. But for sheer scale and lavishness, diamond jewelry reached its climax during the relatively brief reign of Britain’s Edward VII from 1901 to 1910. The conventions of evening court attire made it imperative that those in possession of a fortune …
Many paths to modernity
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | A 1947 newsreel shows throngs of men filling Delhi’s open spaces and government compounds while a voiceover in a clipped British cadence reports that “everyone ran wild with joy.”1 After almost ninety years of colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was free-albeit split. Twenty-four hours earlier, Pakistan had been carved out as an independent …
Rediscovering an art star
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …
Dealer Profile: Peter Tillou
Every so often a few wise things get said about the passions of people who are collectors (most famously in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”). Rarely is anything of interest written about dealers, and oddly enough, almost nothing can be found on the nature of that intriguing hybrid, the dealer/collector, which brings us to the pre-eminent example of the …
A Demonstration in Pewter Making
By L. M. A. ROY [Originally published September 1949 ; posted in conjunction with Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s “American Pewter,” March/April 2013.] Mr. Roy’s model for this pictorial demonstration was John G. Herrock, “whose family,” he says,” were tinkering with tools from the time they came to Maine in 1799.” Besides pewter, he makes violins, reproductions of colonial furniture, wrought iron, jewelry, and …
American pewter
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April, 2013 | Pewter is effectively the mirror alloy of bronze: the latter is an alloy of copper with a little tin, while pewter is the result of smelting tin with a little copper. The large tin content imparts the silver-gray color-indeed the more tin, the more silvery the appearance. Pewter has been worked from ancient …
Philadelphia collects: City folk
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | Twenty-five years ago in these pages, Beatrice B. Garvan wrote about an anonymous collection of Pennsylvania folk art that was already more than a quarter-century in the making. Garvan was struck by the coherence of the assemblage that was ever in flux, by the sense of motion generated by the collectors’ unyielding search …
Monumental confidence: restored Roosevelt murals
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | One hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the act of monumental commemoration was a relatively simple affair. A victory in battle or the founding of an institution was seen, at least as regarded the monument in question, to be completely good. A massacre or natural catastrophe was assumed to be completely bad. Anyone deserving …