A new exhibition examines the luxury arts of the ancient Americas
Handle with Care #4
The fourth installment of our web-only column on ceramics and glass.
A William Henry Rinehart Leander comes to the surface
William Henry Rinehart was among the considerable group of American artists—both sculptors and painters—who took up residence in Italy, perhaps initially for additional training and exposure to the world of classical antiquity, but ultimately because it was the ideal place to get commissions from both American and European tourists.
Tokens of friendship, tools of diplomacy
Presentation medals in the Age of Exploration
Dispatch 15: UNDER WESTERN EYES
The fifteenth edition of Dispatches, a new sporadical email newsletter about the arts of the past as they live in the present day by Elizabeth Pochoda, Advisory Editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES.
“Pleasure in the beautiful ‘thing as such’ “
Fashion and the Wiener Werkstätte
The Met snares a splendid piece of southern stoneware
Face jugs crafted in the mid-nineteenth century by slaves and freedmen working in the Edgefield District of South Carolina are among the rarest and most historically significant of American folk art ceramics. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York recently acquired a superb one.
On books: The Atlas of Ancient Rome
It seems to be, or should be, a law of intellectual life that the more obscure a discipline, the better the scholarship that it inspires. Its very obscurity, like a dragon guarding a valued horde, repels all but the most valiant and serious scholars. Compare a Wikipedia article on Khloé Kardashian with one on Pius IX and you will get the idea.
Revealing portraits
On view at the National Gallery of Art, Fragonard’s tetes de fantaisie evince some of the earliest stirrings of modernism.