from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Preservation was Pierre S. du Pont’s goal in 1906 when he purchased a derelict arboretum thirty miles to the west and south of Philadelphia. And preservation remains the most complex challenge today at what became, under du Pont’s hand, one of the premier public landscapes in North America, the internationally renowned Longwood …
On Southern Turf
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | For Mary and Hank Brockman the proper preservation of the South’s material culture includes art, architecture, artifacts and the landscape. Fig. 22. The back stairwell is hung with Depression era photographs of the American South. One wall holds elegiac images of southern mansions by surrealist photographer John Clarence Laughlin (1905-1985), whose Ghosts Along …
The Bixby House
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Largely unheralded, this Kansas City masterwork of modernism deserves its place in the pantheon of great American houses. Fig. 1. View of the entrance hall from the main stair in a 1937 photograph by R. B. Churchill. Except as noted, the photographs and renderings illustrated are in the Kem Weber Archive, Architecture and …
Miniature discoveries
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | The recent appearance of two portrait miniatures leads to new information about backcountry South Carolina artist Isaac Brownfield Alexander. Last year Elle Shushan, a leading expert on portrait miniatures, alerted curators at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) about the pending sale of a rare work by a southern artist-a delightful …
The Unknown Jewelry of Marie Zimmerman
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012
The Real Story of Sleepy Hollow
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Washington Irving could spin a tale so well that even Charles Dickens was in his thrall. “I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven,” the English novelist said, “without taking Washington Irving under my arm.”* Irving’s success was long in coming, but it enabled him to move to a …
Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …
Winter Antiques Show 2012
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. Barbara Israel Garden Antiques We are thrilled to be bringing a cache of extraordinary objects to the 2012 Winter Antiques Show, including …
Struggles many and great: James P. Ball, Robert Duncanson, and other artists of color in antebellum Cincinnati
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 In 1854 Gleason’s Pictorial, the popular, nationally circulated magazine out of Boston, published an article promoting the lavish “Daguerrian Gallery” established in Cincinnati by James P. Ball (Fig. 6), lauding his images as “unsurpassed by any in the Union.”1 In fact, Ball’s Gallery (see Figs. 2, 4) was not so unusual. Mathew Brady’s popular …
Rose Fever: The paintings of George Cochran Lambdin
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | After his death in 1896 George Cochran Lambdin was remembered by friends and memorialists alike for his paintings of roses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mr. Lambdin is known wherever there is anything known of American art as the facile princeps in this specialty.”1 At the height of the tea rose craze during …
