Premiering tonight on PBS (check here for local listings), Elbert Hubbard: An American Original offers a sweeping profile of the arts and crafts visionary and founder of East Aurora, New York’s Roycroft community. Charting the controversial and often contradictory course of Hubbard’s personal and professional lives, this documentary film by Paul Lamont includes wonderful archival footage as well as interviews …
Dealer Profile: John H. Surovek
With the country edging out of a recession, a newly elected Democratic president wrestling with a huge deficit, and art buyers seemingly sitting on their hands, the Palm Beach Post sent a reporter to John H. Surovek’s Worth Avenue gallery to ask him how he, and collectors in the well-invested but deeply illiquid town, were coping with what the Post’s …
Eye candy
Having immersed himself in bygone foodways and culinary techniques for decades, author, food historian, and master of antiquated cookery Ivan Day is the man to call when England’s great historic house museums look to re-create the grand feasts of earlier centuries. He has whipped up historically accurate food and settings at Chatsworth, Waddesdon Manor, Hardwick Hall, and many others. While …
Vintage finds for football season
For many, fall’s crisp air beckons the arrival of one very important ritual—watching the game. The glare of the television can be seen, and shouts and cheers can be heard as friends and family gather in living rooms across the country to enjoy America’s time-honored tradition of football. September to January, the season for watching tackles, fumbles, throws, and touchdowns, …
Guest Blog: Hollister Hovey
As part of our recurring series of guest bloggers (see earlier contributions by Art Inconnu and The Curated Object) today we are pleased to feature Hollister Hovey, a blogger with panache for turn-of-19th-century antiques and collecting. The New York Times recently named her among the “New Antiquarians” shaping the current vogue for vintage Victoriana. We asked Hovey to curate a …
This Week’s Top Lots: November 8 – 13
* Skinner Boston/November 8, American Furniture and Decorative Arts The top lot was William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset with the Ice Bound Panther that sold for $259,000 (estimate $80,000-100,000). Other top lots were a pair of gilt and mirrored pier New York tables that sold for $54,510 (estimate $12,00-18,000), and a federal bookcase by Joseph Murphy of South Berwick, Maine that …
Winterthur Chic
Although not typically associated with the trend-setting designs of the 20th century, today the Winterthur Museum in Deleware hosts its third annual design conference Chic It Up—which features a stellar roster of historians and curators, all giving talks on interior design from the 1940s. Among the speakers are: Donald Albrecht, curator at the Museum of the City of New York, …
Finding beauty, creating harmony: The art of William F. Jackson
November 2009 | William Franklin Jackson was an artist who spent most of his career in an out-of-the-way city that was more concerned with politics and economic development than art. Sacramento, California, was little more than a frontier outpost when he arrived in 1863, although it was already the capital city of a state with almost unlimited potential for growth. …
Great Estates: Fonthill in Doylestown, Pennsylvania
Located on sixty acres in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Fonthill, the home of Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), one of the leaders of the American arts and crafts movement, stands as a testament to handcrafted goods, replete with relics dutifully gathered by Mercer in the wake of the industrial revolution.Mercer, a Bucks County native, graduated from Harvard in 1879. After receiving a law …
James E. Freeman and the painting of sentiment
November 2009 | Thoughout his half-century-long artistic career in the United States and Italy, James E. Freeman (Fig. 2) specialized in creating paintings of sentiment that sought to cross the boundaries dividing different cultures and social classes by engaging emotions, encouraging empathy, and ultimately prompting beneficence.1 Sentimentalism flourished in the antebellum period as a sort of bridge between the overt …