Three New Orleans museums and two community cultural institutions draw visitors from afar by keeping the focus on indigenous artistry. Detail of the feathers and beadwork on one of the many ornate Mardi Gras Indian suits on display at the Backstreet Cultural Museum in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans. Photograph courtesy of Meghan Henshaw and the Backstreet Cultural Museum. Visit …
Superfluity & Excess: Quaker Philadelphia falls for classical splendor
The fruits of extensive research on Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s 1808 house and furniture for William and Mary Waln begin with their impact on the aesthetic of the city itself
Sites along the Schuylkill
The story goes that the Dutch, sailing up the Delaware River, missed the marshy entrance to its largest tributary. Upon discovering their mistake, the Europeans dubbed the waterway the Schuyl Kill, or “Hidden River.” The Dutch were soon squeezed out of Pennsylvania by the Swedes and then the English, but the name somehow stuck, showing up as the “Scool Kill …
Rockwell Kent and Edward Hopper: Looking out, Looking Within
Consider Rockwell Kent’s paintings of land and sea as modern American mindscapes—poetic distillations of remote places that probe the mysteries of life. Kent hoped viewers would lose themselves in contemplation before his haunting visions.1 “Essentials only ought to go into painting,” he insisted. “I want the elemental, infinite thing; I want to paint the rhythm of eternity.”2 He perceived the …
A Bronx Tale: Exhibitors from the Winter Antiques Show tour East Side House Settlement, the show’s beneficiary
East Side House Settlement (ESHS) Administrative Building, 337 Alexander Avenue, in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, New York. Photographs by Ahron Foster. “Take the work that you love, whatever it is, and angle it towards justice.” –Ta-Nehisi Coates September 29, 2015: On this beautiful Indian summer day two quite …
The Whitney After All
Some things just aren’t meant to fit in. The Whitney Museum of American Art certainly sounds like an august institution. But it was born on a scruffy back street in Greenwich Village at a time when “bohemian” meant “disreputable,” and during its six decades uptown—most of them at Madison Avenue and Seventy-Fifth Street, in the moneyed precincts of the Upper …
Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire
Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni created a magnificent Palladian residence for Thomas, the 2nd Baron Onslow, in the 1720s on the estate outside of Guildford, in Surrey, south of London, that the baron’s great-grandfather Richard Onslow, the MP for Surrey, had purchased in 1641. The dignified restraint of Leoni’s exterior hid a luxuriant interior oozing with Georgian glamour. Its most …
Figures in a landscape: sculpture in the British garden
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 …
The allure of Leeds House: An unparalleled private collection finds its ideal home in Philadelphia
Last winter, one of America’s great private collections slipped quietly from its urban home of nearly two decades in upper Manhattan to the splendor of a historic estate in Philadelphia. Preparing to move the peerless arts and crafts furniture, metalwork, glass, and ceramics, not to mention the sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, consumed the prior autumn months. Art handlers …
Palaces for the People: Guastavino and the Art of Structural Tile
The pan roast is back. The herring is coming. The famous Oyster Bar restaurant in New York’s Grand Central Terminal reopened last Thursday after a four-month renovation of its 101-year-old interior, particularly a thorough cleaning of its ceiling of interlocking vaults covered with terracotta tiles by the Guastavino firm. Seeing the tiles fully cleaned and all the edging light bulbs …






