Reverie on a pair of Japanese screens

Editorial Staff Art

  By Michael R. Cunningham; from the Magazine ANTIQUES, July 2001 The idea of landscape in the West has historically been aligned with geography. The appearance of a given earthbound place in a painting or photograph normally initiates for the Western viewer an immediate response of physical orientation. We wish to understand the particular environmental conditions and perhaps the terrain …

Painters of the Hudson River school

Editorial Staff Art

By FREDERICK A. SWEET; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March 1945. Toward the end of the nineteenth century America’s art collectors were captivated by French taste and filled their gilt drawing rooms with salon figure pieces and bucolic scenes by members of the Barbizon school. Our own painters such as George Inness and Homer Martin, had to follow French trends, in order to …

SARAH GOODRIDGE

Editorial Staff Art

By AGNES M. DODS; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May 1947. THE WORK OF SARAH GOODRIDGE, one of the lesser known miniature painters of New England, has been increasing steadily in popularity for some years. Although her claim to fame rests mainly on her miniature of Gilbert Stuart, a diligent search of the countryside has brought to light many excellent likenesses from …

A desk associated with George Washington

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The  handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …

Skippets

Editorial Staff Art

By J. S. BROWN; From The Magazine ANTIQUES, July 1978. Skippets are small boxes made to hold and protect pendent wax seals attached to important documents. Silver, silver-gilt, and gold examples were used by the United States government between 1815 and 1871, primarily on treaties with other countries that had been ratified by Congress. The skippet was suspended from the treaty by …

George IV and the arts of France

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

By Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Deputy surveyor of the Queen’s Works of Art Originally published by The Magazine ANTIQUES in May 1966. From the day that George IV, as Prince of Wales, first took up residence at Carlton House when he came of age in 1782, to his death in 1830, he collected French works of art on a scale previously …

The Huntington murals at the Yale University Art Gallery

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | On a spring morning in April 1926 a crowd stood transfixed on Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, watching a wrecking ball slam into the floors and walls of the Collis P. Huntington mansion (see Fig. 3). Among them was a tall mustachioed man, Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), who stoically watched the destruction 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 …