On April 30 the government of Kenya staged the largest ivory burn in history.
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
New light: More squares from Mrs. Miner’s carpet
Discoveries come in such unexpected ways. You can search for years for a missing piece of your puzzle without success. And then, sometimes, it falls in your lap! That is what happened last year when my friend Tom Jewett, of Jewett-Berdan Antiques, posted pictures of his Christmas decorations on Facebook. Tom and Butch Berdan go all out for Christmas at …
War, politics, and the diaspora of Irish art and design
When The Magazine ANTIQUES started publication in January 1922, it coincided with the end of the War of Independence between Ireland and Great Britain and the beginning of a self-inflicted and even more brutal Civil War among opposing factions of the Irish Republican Army that would last until 1923.1 Although ANTIQUES ’s mandate was to whet its readership’s appetite for the …
The jeweled watches of Henry Blank and Company of Newark
The origins of the New Jersey jeweler
A tale of two sofas
They were big, brawny, and bold. The near-identical sofas in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA)-once celebrated as rare examples of gilded furniture from the shop of John Henry Belter-were so visually pushy that the former curator of American arts, David Park Curry, dubbed them the “Tarleton Twins.” Today, following several years of research and an extensive conservation campaign, …
Parisian jewelry and American patrons, real and fictional
By SHIRLEY BURY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1992. The formidable skill of Parisian jewelers in interpreting the work of innovative designers was the prime cause of their international popularity. Although craftsmen elsewhere practiced the late eighteenth-century technique of open-backed, or à jour, setting, which allowed light to refract and reflect through the stones, greatly enhancing their brilliance, the contrast …
The jewelry of René Lalique
By GEOFFREY C. MUNN; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, June 1987. Even if the word genius was used as sparingly as it should be, the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century jeweler René Lalique would always be so described. Rather than a craftsman with a leaning toward the artistic, he was an accomplished artist who chose to express himself primarily in …
A long time gone: Art, the Kennedy years, and the Hotel Texas
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | On the eve of President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy’s visit to Dallas in 1963 a group of Fort Worth collectors gathered sixteen masterworks of European and American art and installed them in the presidential suite in the Hotel Texas. Fifty years later their gesture is bound to strike us as astonishing, improbable, …
Collecting American samplers in Southern California
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | Best known for its expansive sandy beaches, stately palms, and glorious golden sunsets-as well as numerous superb collections of modern and contemporary art-Los Angeles is, perhaps unexpectedly, also home to a significant number of important and excitingly diverse American decorative arts collections. While some Southern California collectors have been amassing important holdings of …