Originally published in the first issue of ANTIQUES, January 1922. Yes, this is ANTIQUES: Volume one, Number one; venturing into a super-modern world, a world self-consciously intent upon newness; purposefully disdainful of tradition, sublimely certain of its own special ability to invent, devise, design in and for the future, in terms of developing future requirement, without recourse to an obviously, …
Duncan Phyfe: A New York Story
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011| Fig. 1. The Shepherd Boy (also known as Landscape with Shepherd) by Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872), 1852. Signed and dated “R.S. Duncanson/1852” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 32 ½ by 48 ¼ inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Hanson K. Corning by exchange. Fig. 3. The Rainbow by Duncanson, 1859. Signed …
Rodin and America: The artist’s influence in the United States
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Fig. 1. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) by Edward Steichen (1879-1973), 1907. Photogravure (from Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly, April-July 1911); 9 ½ by 6 ½ inches. Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, gift of the William R. Rubin Foundation. By 1900 it was common to liken Auguste …
American genre painting and the rise of ‘average taste’
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Nearly a century and a half after its publication in 1867, Henry Theodore Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists is valued today mainly for its wealth of biographical data. But Tuckerman’s pronouncements summarizing the development of American art culture also deserve closer examination. Of particular interest is his reference to “average taste,” a descriptive …
American Porcelain Teabowl
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2011 | Students of American ceramic history have special reverence for the story of domestically made eighteenth-century porcelain. This tale begins with Andrew Duché’s discovery of “Carolina Clay” in the 1730s and his purported experimental production in Charleston, South Carolina, though no physical evidence of his endeavors has ever come to light. Meanwhile, some nineteen …
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 …
Shearer Loyalism and Heritage
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April/May 2010 | Figs. 1, 1a. Desk-and-bookcase made by John Shearer (active c. 1798–at least 1818), Martinsburg, Virginia (now West Virginia), 1801–1806. Inscribed “Down with the Cropper of Ireland” and “Cropper is Repenting and his Master is Angry” in the top drawer of the case. Walnut, cherry, mulberry, yellow pine, and oak; height 8 feet 10 …
The Moores
Fig. 1. Slingshots carved and painted by members of the North Carolina Cherokee tribe during the first half of the twentieth century for the tourist trade (see also Fig. 6). Fig. 2. A rare nineteenth-century gourd fiddle and two banjos by African American maker Bill Plummer (1873–1942), of Chilhowie, Virginia, hang in the den (see also Fig. 10). Fig. 3. …
Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the furniture of John and Hugh Finlay
December 2009 | On the evening of Wednesday, August 24, 1814, British troops brazenly torched much of the small capital city of Washington, including the large Virginia sandstone house built as the residence for the president of the United States between 1792 and 1800 (see Fig. 1).1 Among the losses smoldering in the rubble was an extraordinary set of painted …
James E. Freeman and the painting of sentiment
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 …