Colonial Williamsburg will convene its sixty-third annual Antiques Forum between February 20 and 24, 2011. The theme this year, Decorative Arts Forensics: How We Know What We Know, is intended to shed light on some of the fascinating advances in techniques for historical research and scientific investigation that have opened new avenues of verification for curators, collectors, and scholars. The …
Moving Forward at Bayou Bend
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2010. Houston has been called a wholesale city—a great place to do business and buy big. It feels as though it is lounging flat out, like some huge deflated blimp. The very notion of commercial/residential zoning remained problematic until rather recently, and less than a generation ago smallish escort service motels sat cheek-by-jowl near great …
The Emperor’s Secret Garden
Fig. 1. Mural of an interior scene from the Yucuixuan (Bower of Purest Jade) in the Qianlong Garden, Beijing, c. 1776. Ink and colors on paper, 10 feet, 4 ¾ inches by 12 feet, ⅜ inch. Many artists from the ateliers of the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1796) contributed paintings to the scene, among them Yao Wenhan (active c. 1739–1752), who …
Grant Wood
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2010 | In the following passage from Grant Wood: A Life (Knopf, 2010), R. Tripp Evans’s new biography of the man behind American Gothic (1930), the author examines a critical work from the artist’s mid-career: 1934’s Dinner for Threshers. Fig. 1. Dinner for Threshers by Grant Wood (1891–1942), 1934. Signed and dated “Grant Wood, 1934” …
Query: Seeking Stretch
The early Philadelphia clockmaker Peter Stretch (1670–1746) and his two clockmaking sons, Thomas (1697-1765) and William (1701-1748), are the subject of a forthcoming catalogue raisonné to be published by the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate in Delaware. Peter Stretch was born in Leek in Staffordshire, England, and apprenticed with his older brother Samuel, a clockmaker who specialized in lantern clocks …
Charles Deas West
During the 1840s Charles Deas, a scion of the wealthy antebellum Izard family of South Carolina, painted dramatic images of the American West that captured the young nation’s uncertainty about its future—and the imagination of a vast viewing public. Late in the decade, however, he slid into insanity (he spent almost half of his fortyeight years in asylums), and both …
Helen Turner
Orphaned at thirteen, Helen M. Turner overcame enormous obstacles to become one of the most successful American woman artists of the first half of the twentieth century. A daughter of the South, she worked in the impressionist style across a range of genres, specializing in subjects that portrayed the woman’s sphere, from still lifes of dressing-table tops to figures in …
Haute couture
The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville is the only venue in the United States for an acclaimed traveling exhibition from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s world-renowned costume collection. The show, which opened in London in 2007 and has been seen in Australia, Hong Kong, and elsewhere, centers on the glamorous decade of Paris and London couture between …
French painting
Visitors to the left coast this summer can get a taste of the left bank, thanks to exhibitions on view at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The de Young Museum is showing the stunning Birth of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay, which includes some one hundred iconic examples from that Paris museum, which is partially closed for …
Monticello
Monticello A lot has been happening recently at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia, making a visit more worth while than ever. For starters, based on extensive archaeological and documentary evidence, the upper chamber of the South Pavilion has been newly furnished to reflect its many purposes as a bed and sitting room when Jefferson brought his bride to Monticello …