This Week’s Top Lots: November 8 – 13

Editorial StaffArt, Furniture & Decorative Arts

* Skinner Boston/November 8, American Furniture and Decorative Arts The top lot was William Bradford’s Arctic Sunset with the Ice Bound Panther that sold for $259,000 (estimate $80,000-100,000). Other top lots were a pair of gilt and mirrored pier New York tables that sold for $54,510 (estimate $12,00-18,000), and a federal bookcase by Joseph Murphy of South Berwick, Maine that …

James E. Freeman and the painting of sentiment

Editorial StaffArt

November 2009 | Thoughout his half-century-long artistic career in the United States and Italy, James E. Freeman (Fig. 2) specialized in creating paintings of sentiment that sought to cross the boundaries dividing different cultures and social classes by engaging emotions, encouraging empathy, and ultimately prompting benefi­cence.1 Sentimentalism flourished in the antebellum period as a sort of bridge between the overt …

Creating the West in art

Editorial Staff

July 2009 | For about two generations now, a group of American museums has been exploring the nature and significance of western art. It was exactly fifty years ago, in the dusty but prim and busy town of Cody, Wyoming, near Yellowstone National Park, that the Whitney Gallery of Western Art (sister institution to New York’s Whitney Museum of American …

Frick favorites with Charlotte Vignon

Editorial Staff

We were delighted to learn that the Frick Collection recently appointed Charlotte Vignon to its first curatorship dedicated to the museum’s distinguished decorative art holdings. Vignon, who will complete her PhD dissertation at the Sorbonne this fall, previously held fellowships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and is currently the Andrew W. Mellon curatorial …

New European museums and permanent displays

Editorial Staff

AmsterdamHermitage Amsterdam On June 19 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and President Dimitri Medevev of Russia are scheduled to preside over the opening ceremonies for the ambitiously expanded Hermitage Amsterdam. The museum, housed in the Amstelhof, built between 1681 and 1683 as a charitable home for the elderly, will reopen to the public on June 20. A satellite of the …