The design legacy of Antoine Gabriel Quervelle
A desk associated with George Washington
By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …
Skippets
By J. S. BROWN; From The Magazine ANTIQUES, July 1978. Skippets are small boxes made to hold and protect pendent wax seals attached to important documents. Silver, silver-gilt, and gold examples were used by the United States government between 1815 and 1871, primarily on treaties with other countries that had been ratified by Congress. The skippet was suspended from the treaty by …
American folk painting, The Wiltshire collection
By RICHARD WOODWARD; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978. Paintings by America’s first artists afford an informative and entertaining view of the nation’s early years. Many of these painters received academic instruction at home or abroad, while others were either wholly untutored or obtained their training from nonacademic sources. The work of this latter group, the “folk painters,” provides an insight into …
Two hoof spoons
By ALBERT SCHER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978. When Helen Burr Smith wrote about silver spoons with hoof-shape terminals in ANTIQUES in 1944 there were only four of these interesting survivals from seventeenth-century Dutch New York households known in America. Now two more hoof spoons have come to light. Fig. 1-Silver hoof spoon, probably New York, seventeenth century. Length 6 …
The Cartier fern-spray brooches
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The beauty of the diamond contains within it the awesomeness of geological time. But for sheer scale and lavishness, diamond jewelry reached its climax during the relatively brief reign of Britain’s Edward VII from 1901 to 1910. The conventions of evening court attire made it imperative that those in possession of a fortune …
Fluent French
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | They filled every nook and cranny of a 1780 stone farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with hooked rugs and weathervanes, pottery and samplers. They reared two sons amid the blessings and constraints that come with living with the fine and rare. They devoted weekends and holidays to the hunt. And when they were …
Many paths to modernity
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | A 1947 newsreel shows throngs of men filling Delhi’s open spaces and government compounds while a voiceover in a clipped British cadence reports that “everyone ran wild with joy.”1 After almost ninety years of colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was free-albeit split. Twenty-four hours earlier, Pakistan had been carved out as an independent …
Rediscovering an art star
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …
Dealer Profile: Peter Tillou
Every so often a few wise things get said about the passions of people who are collectors (most famously in Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”). Rarely is anything of interest written about dealers, and oddly enough, almost nothing can be found on the nature of that intriguing hybrid, the dealer/collector, which brings us to the pre-eminent example of the …