from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Washington Irving could spin a tale so well that even Charles Dickens was in his thrall. “I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven,” the English novelist said, “without taking Washington Irving under my arm.”* Irving’s success was long in coming, but it enabled him to move to a …
Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …
Struggles many and great: James P. Ball, Robert Duncanson, and other artists of color in antebellum Cincinnati
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 In 1854 Gleason’s Pictorial, the popular, nationally circulated magazine out of Boston, published an article promoting the lavish “Daguerrian Gallery” established in Cincinnati by James P. Ball (Fig. 6), lauding his images as “unsurpassed by any in the Union.”1 In fact, Ball’s Gallery (see Figs. 2, 4) was not so unusual. Mathew Brady’s popular …
Rose Fever: The paintings of George Cochran Lambdin
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | After his death in 1896 George Cochran Lambdin was remembered by friends and memorialists alike for his paintings of roses. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Mr. Lambdin is known wherever there is anything known of American art as the facile princeps in this specialty.”1 At the height of the tea rose craze during …
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 …
Vose Galleries at 170
By Tom Christopher left to right: Elizabeth Vose Frey, Carey L. Vose, Abbot W. “Bill” Vose, Marcia L. Vose. Vose Galleries of Boston is that rarest of survivors: now completing its 170th year in business and still under the direction of the founding family, the firm itself predates many of the paintings that it buys and sells. Yet it …
In the American Grain: Art and Capital at Crystal Bridges
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | The small town of Bentonville, Arkansas, home to some 35,301 souls in the most recent census, is about to be transformed beyond recognition. Already it enjoys some modicum of renown as the ancestral abode of the Walton family: its late patriarch, Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, opened his first five and dime here …
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 …
Master of delight: William J. Glackens at the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2011 | Fig.1. Cape Cod Pier byWilliam J. Glackens (1870-1938), 1908. Signed “W. Glackens” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 26 by 32 inches. The works illustrated are inthe Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Gift of an anonymous donor. Behind the facade of a modern white monolith shimmering in the light of the Florida sun lies …