Chantilly: The Musée Condé remembers Henri IV

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Chantilly: The Musée Condé remembers Henri IV. The Musée Condé at the Château de Chantilly, less than an hour north of Paris and accessible by the RER train line, commemorates the four hundredth anniversary of the assassination of the French king Henri IV with an exhibition devoted to this perennially popular monarch. Rich in paintings of the family, lovers, enemies, …

Celebrating the ‘Decodence’ of the SS Normandie

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

Unlike other major exhibitions of the art deco period, DecoDence: Legendary Interiors and Illustrious Travelers Aboard the SS Normandie, which opens today at the South Street Seaport Museum, isn’t an over-the-top display. Instead, it’s a balanced, and entirely engrossing, collection of furnishings, ephemera, and architectural elements that graced the legendary ocean liner. Among the show’s highlights: photographs that document the …

Falling for antique Mizpah jewelry

Editorial Staff Art

It’s easy to fall in love with Victorian jewelry. The combination of beauty and sentimentality in objects such as mourning brooches made of facetted jet and Etruscan beaded bangles is nearly unparalleled, while the symbolism in 19th-century jewels makes them especially alluring for collectors. Names, inscriptions, and the coded languages of flowers and stones all contribute to their significance. One …

Breaking tradition: Ceramics by Michelle Erickson

Editorial Staff Art

One upcoming highlight of the New York Ceramics Fair is a lecture and demonstration by ceramic artist Michelle Erickson, who was featured in our September 2009 issue. On Saturday at noon Erickson will show visitors how an early 18th-century Moravian squirrel bottle was made—a subject which she explored for the 2009 issue of Ceramics in America, and which coincides with …

Ceramics 101: A sampling of antique English wares

Editorial Staff Art

With the dizzying array of wares on display this week at the New York Ceramics Fair, it seems like an opportune time to review some of the basics of the medium. Though most of our readers are familiar with names like Wedgwood and Grueby, we’ve rounded-up a few quintessential examples of English ceramics as an introduction to the widely varied …

Top Lots: 2009 Year in Review

Editorial Staff Art

TOP WARHOLWhat: 200 One Dollar Bills by Andy Warhol, 1962Where: Sotheby’s New York (November 11, Contemporary Art Evening Sale)Estimate: $8-12 millionSold For: $43.7 million A large-scale masterpiece from Warhol’s first series of silkscreened paintings, 200 One Dollar Bills was also from the artist’s second earliest group of serial works. Originally from the collection of Robert and Ethel Scull, the work …

A courtly 17th-century amber and ivory casket

Editorial Staff Art

Because the Detroit Institute of Arts had no works sculpted in amber, I have as the curator been keen to acquire a significant object in this precious material once called “the gold of the Baltic.” Long regarded as having mythical origins and medicinal and magical powers, northern European amber is ancient fossilized resin that was primarily found floating on the …

The Hidden Magic of Henry Davis Sleeper’s Beauport

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

December 2009 | Beauport, with its labyrinth of small rooms, layers of objects, and false doors, is a playhouse and a place that exists as a dream. The small rooms change shape, lead one to another without a quickly understood plan or even a simple hallway. There are doors, windows, paneling, tables, chairs, and art taken from long-gone houses, different …

Ralph D. Curtis: A nineteenth-century folk artist identified

Editorial Staff Art

November 2009 | In 1973 at an auction in Ellenville, New York, an early nineteenth-century portrait of a woman wearing a lace bonnet, holding a red book, and seated in a high-back chair sold for what was then an unusually high price of nine thousand dollars. The picture, painted on tulipwood, was unsigned and is believed to have come from …