Rediscovering an art star

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …

Cradle of liberty, cradle of craft

Editorial Staff Furniture & 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 …

Loving the Gilded Age and learning how to look

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | John R. Tschirch is accustomed to being recognized. As Director of Museum Affairs for the Preservation Society of Newport County, he is in and out of the organization’s eleven historic houses so frequently that the volunteers and staff who usher nearly eight hundred thousand visitors through the mansions each year straighten when they see him …

Dated English delftware and slipware in the Longridge Collection

Editorial Staff Art

By Leslie B. Grigsby. Originally published in June 1999. The Longridge Collection of ceramics is English pottery Valhalla. Nestled in a New England house with rare English and Continental treen, medieval ivory and metalwork, and early furniture and carvings, this extraordinary collection of ceramics can be divided into two main groups: about 440 pieces of tinglazed earthenware (delftware) and 100 …

Sarah Goodrich: Mapping places in the heart

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | In a time of cultural awakening when Boston was hailed as the Athens of America, Sarah Goodrich (Fig. 3) was the city’s pre-eminent portrait miniaturist, creating indelible likenesses for more than a quarter-century between 1815 and 1850. Favored by such notable patrons as Daniel Webster, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Edward Everett, and William Lindall Winthrop, she …

The coming storm: American landscape painting and the Civil War

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | The role of the Civil War in redefining America is well known. What is less well understood is the profound way in which the conflict changed American Art. Between 1859, when war was imminent, and the war’s end in 1865 writers and artists created their works surrounded by, and sometimes suffocated by, the impact of …

MESDA and the Study of Early Southern Decorative Arts

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

It has become almost a folk legend among decorative arts scholars: the story of Joseph Downs (1895 – 1954), then curator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, announcing at the 1949 Williamsburg Antiques Forum that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.”1 The comment prompted an offended woman from Kentucky …

City Barnes

Gregory Cerio Art

Architecture, by Greg Cerio | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Let’s set aside any recap of the Sturm und Drang that accompanied the move of the Barnes Foundation from its home in suburban Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, to central Philadelphia, as well as the uproar over the legal legerdemain that erased many of the strictly defined codicils in the …

Captain Elias Pelletreau, Long Island Silversmith, Part 1

Editorial Staff Art

By MABEL C. WEAKS; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May 1931. Southampton, Long Island, is the place where Captain Elias Pelletreau was born, May 31, 1726. There, today, in the old cemetery, may be seen an ancient brown tombstone thus inscribed: “On Memory of Capt. Elias Pelletreau who died Nov. 2, 1810 in the 85, year of his age.” That he …