Prince Demah Barnes: Portraitist and slave in colonial Boston

Editorial StaffArt

At first glance, the small oil portrait of a handsome man in a flowered dressing gown looked somewhat unprepossessing (Fig. 1). Hanging on the wall of a dealer’s booth at an antiques show in 2010, it had a “folksy” appeal, but wasn’t an obvious candidate for acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, as a curator in the midst …

On high seas: Jack London’s photography on the cruise of the Snark

Editorial StaffArt, Magazine

Jack London died young, at the age of forty, yet in some ways it is amazing that he lived as long as he did. To anyone who happened to see the thirty-one-year-old London and five other inexperienced sailors cruising through San Francisco’s Golden Gate on April 23, 1907, his survival would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. His boat the …

Habsburg flash and filigree

Editorial StaffExhibitions

The splendor of the house of Habsburg was always inversely proportionate to its prowess on the field of battle. Under Maximilian I of Austria and his grandson Charles V of Spain, the dynasty waged continuous battles from Cuzco to Constantinople and from Scandinavia to the shores of Africa. During this time, the external manifestations of its magnificence were fairly restrained, …

Farther afield: TEFAF, BADA, and the Salon du Dessin

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

Europe puts its best foot forward to welcome the massive influx of international collectors and dealers who head there each spring.  The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht attracts the largest crowds and most attention but The British Antiques Dealers’ Association (BADA) annual fair in london and Paris’s tailored Salon du Dessin, both of which follow closely on TEFAF’s heels, …

Morse at the Huntington Library

Editorial StaffArt

It would probably surprise Samuel F. B. Morse, and not pleasantly, that future generations know him for his invention of Morse code and his services to telegraphy, rather than for those paintings, produced over six decades, that were the serious business of his life. Despite a strict Protestant upbringing, Morse (1791-1872) spent three years in Europe under the tutelage of …

Living with Thomas Jayne

JANE LEARLiving with Antiques

The most surprising interior in London is Sir John Soane’s Museum. The sheer density of paintings, sculpture, furniture, architectural fragments and models, Greco-Roman marbles, and much more appears largely as it did when the renowned early nineteenth-century architect lived there, arranging and rearranging his art, artifacts, and antiquities. What elevates the profusion from an eccentric jumble to a splendid, startlingly …

Invisible Artistry: The restoration of a late seventeenth-century London town house

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

Fig. 1. Outside the rear elevation of this c. 1670 house in North London are a wrought iron strapwork garden seat, c. 1820, and a pair of seventeenth-century carved stone gatepost finials. Photography by Debbie Patterson When a client asked the London antiques dealer Robert Young to visit his newly acquired house he could not have known that this visit …

Looking both ways: A Pennsylvania collection keeps present and past in constant touch

Alexandra Alevizatos KirtleyFurniture & Decorative Arts

“My husband said the house screamed for antique furniture–but I have a hard time with sameness.” This candid recollection by a lively collector provides a partial explanation of how and why she and her late husband joined their appetite for antique furniture and folk art with abstract expressionist art and contemporary sculpture. The rest of the explanation lies in the …

The Scene, January/February 2015

Editorial StaffMagazine

In anticipation of this year’s Winter Antiques Show loan exhibition, Ahead of the Curve: The Newark Museum 1909–2015, students from East Side House Settlement—the Winter Antiques Show’s beneficiary since the show started in 1954—toured the museum. Students at the Newark Museum’s Ballantine House. Photo by Jay Savulich.  The Winter Antiques show is known for its sophisticated lending exhibitions, festive opening-night …

Talking antiques: Winter Antiques Show

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

We asked exhibitors at the Winter Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments. ALLAN AND PENNY KATZ This artful rendering of a birdcage in the shape of the United States Capitol Building was undoubtedly made …