Figures in a landscape: sculpture in the British garden

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts, Magazine

This article was originally published in the 1987 October issue of ANTIQUES. Pl. XIII. At the end of the beech allée at Chatsworth in Derbyshire is a colossal marble bust of William George Spencer Cavendish (1790 – 1858), sixth duke of Devonshire, on a marble column from the Temple of Minerva Sunias in Greece. No English country-house garden would be …

War, politics, and the diaspora of Irish art and design

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts, Magazine

When The Magazine ANTIQUES started publication in January 1922, it coincided with the end of the War of Independence between Ireland and Great Britain and the beginning of a self-inflicted and even more brutal Civil War among opposing factions of the Irish Republican Army that would last until 1923.1 Although ANTIQUES ’s mandate was to whet its readership’s appetite for the …

Editor’s letter, March/April 2015

Editorial StaffOpinion

The divide between “pure” art (painting and sculpture mostly) and functional art (lighting, ceramics, furniture, and so much else) comes and goes in history depending on who has the power to enforce its shaky distinctions. Just now the contemporary art market tilts toward the healthy side of the issue: a table by Urs Fischer, for instance, is a work of …

Breaking ground: British folk art at the Tate

Editorial StaffArt, Exhibitions

In 1768, when the British Royal Academy of Arts was established, it emphatically distinguished the fine arts from crafts by exiling the latter, declaring that “no needlework, artificial flowers, cut-paper, shell-work or any such performances should be admitted.” By 1948 artworks from outside the main­stream still had not overcome this prejudice, prompting the designer, writer, and folk art enthusiast Enid …

Cradle of liberty, cradle of craft

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | An impressive roster of renowned craftsmen trained and worked in Philadelphia during the twentieth century. This flourishing activity is due to the city’s long history as a center for artisans extending back to the time of its founding. The French Huguenot silversmith Cesar Ghiselin arrived in Pennsylvania in 1681 in the company of …

A lost Copley found: The New York portrait of Captain Gabriel Maturin

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | In the spring of 1771 John Singleton Copley had several good reasons to look south to New York for fresh fields to conquer. Although he had effectively joined the social ranks of his clientele by marrying into one of the leading Tory families of Boston and acquired a suitable gentleman’s estate on Beacon …

How America found its face: Portrait miniatures in the New Republic

Editorial StaffArt

  By Elle Shushan; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 2009. The stunning events of July 1804 were almost unfathomable for the citizens of the new American republic. One Founding Father had fatally wounded another. Alexander Hamilton was dead and Aaron Burr  would be indicted for murder. The duel and its aftermath marked a turning point in American culture. Fig. 17. Thomas Cole …

Past, Present, and Future at the Huntington

Editorial StaffArt

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | Its name, the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, pretty well covers what this singular institution in San Marino, California, is all about. But it hardly begins to tell the story. The creation of Henry E. Huntington, a man with forward-looking business sense and retrospective tastes in art and literature, the Huntington today is …

Upscale Downsized

Editorial StaffFurniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Downsizing-a midlife rite of passage common to those whose offspring have grown up and moved out-is not a contingency that his friends would have ever dreamed possible of the abundance-loving Paul F. Walter, the New York connoisseur renowned for the scale and quality of his pathbreaking collections, which have run the gamut …