Curiously Carved: Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Contrary to persistent stereotypes characterizing seamen in the Age of Sail as a barbaric rabble-unruly, illiterate ruffians devoted to the pursuit of disreputable vices-nineteenth-century Yankee whalemen were characteristically literate and, as a class, avid readers. Whaling voyages were matters of two, three, or even four years’ duration, including months at sea between landfalls; …

Delftware from a St. Louis collection

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BY REKA NEILSON FISHER, Curatorial assistant, Saint Louis Art Museum THE CREAMICS COLLECTION of Mr. and Mrs. George S. Rosborough Jr., of Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, is mainly devoted to English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Initially they collected early nineteenth-century yellow-glazed earthenware, but then they turned to earlier wares, particularly delftware, which attracted …

Dated English delftware and slipware in the Longridge Collection

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By Leslie B. Grigsby. Originally published in June 1999. The Longridge Collection of ceramics is English pottery Valhalla. Nestled in a New England house with rare English and Continental treen, medieval ivory and metalwork, and early furniture and carvings, this extraordinary collection of ceramics can be divided into two main groups: about 440 pieces of tinglazed earthenware (delftware) and 100 …

How America found its face: Portrait miniatures in the New Republic

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  By Elle Shushan; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 2009. The stunning events of July 1804 were almost unfathomable for the citizens of the new American republic. One Founding Father had fatally wounded another. Alexander Hamilton was dead and Aaron Burr  would be indicted for murder. The duel and its aftermath marked a turning point in American culture. Fig. 17. Thomas Cole …

The Huntington murals at the Yale University Art Gallery

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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 …

Amistad and after: Hale Woodruff’s Talladega murals

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 |  The new exhibition Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College offers unprecedented access to murals that for more than seventy years have resided at the historically black school in Alabama-and a compelling lesson in American history. It is the culmination of a collaboration between Talladega and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, which …

The Peabody Essex Museum’s collection of Chinese export ceramics

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 |  The objects shown are selected from the nearly three hundred examples featured in William R. Sargent’s monumental Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics from the Peabody Essex Museum, published earlier this year. CHARGER, Jingdezhen,1600-1620. Porcelain; diameter 17 ½ inches. Museum purchase. The shield bearing a seven-headed hydra bifurcated by a banderole with the Latin motto Saptenti …

Sparkle Plenty

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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 …

Southern California modernism engages colonial New England

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | An advertisement placed by the Los Angeles department store Barker Brothers in the Los Angeles Times on November 13, 1929, records the earliest appearance of Porter Blanchard’s Commonwealth pattern, the first American flatware pattern to embrace modernism in both form and ornament (Fig. 3). Nine months later Barker Brothers featured Commonwealth again, in …

City Barnes

Gregory Cerio Art

Architecture, by Greg Cerio | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Let’s set aside any recap of the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the move of the Barnes Foundation from its home in suburban Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, to central Philadelphia, as well as the uproar over the legal legerdemain that erased many of the strictly defined codicils in the …