American artists as they saw themselves

Editorial Staff Art

November 2009 | In The American School (Fig. 1) Matthew Pratt portrays himself seated at his easel, the sharp profile of his head silhouetted against the canvas, which bears his signature at bottom left. Holding a palette and maulstick to steady his hand, Pratt presents himself as a painter—an astonishing act of bravado as he had just arrived in England …

Dealer Profile: David Lavender

Editorial Staff Art

One of the surprises of the huge Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé sale this past February was the splendid selection of objets de vertu the two men had gathered for their twentieth-century Kunstkammer. The way in which this assemblage contravened recent trends in collecting was on my mind as I waited to see the London dealer David Lavender, whose …

Editor’s letter, October 2009

Editorial Staff Opinion

A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization’s historic houses­—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, …

Timeless Tudor: Bradley Court in Gloucestershire

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

October 2009 | Photography by Nic Barlow | Tucked in the lee of a wooded scarp, looking down on a valley and beyond, to Wales, Bradley Court stands in its beautiful garden in Gloucestershire, a story of historical harmony and form. Originally a manor house belonging to the Berkeleys of nearby Berkeley Castle, the house was apparently built in l559, …

Eyre Hall on Virginia’s Eastern Shore

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

September 2009 | Photography by Langdon Clay | “Eyre Hall…all through its venerable existence but another name for everything elegant, graceful and delightful in Old Virginia life.” Fanny Fielding’s nostalgic reminiscence of Eyre Hall during the ownership of John Eyre depicts a place we would recognize today.1 Still to be found are “the timely-clipped hedges of box and dwarf-cedar,” “the …

This Week’s Top Lots: August 15 – 21

Editorial Staff Art

*  The top lot of the August 15 & 16 sale of marine, China trade, and sporting art at Northeast Auctions in Portsmouth, New Hampshire was Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s A Check-Keep Your Distance that sold for $381,000 (estimate $100,000-200,000). Other top lots were a 19th-century carved figurehead of a woman attributed to John Rogerson that sold for $183,000 (estimate $120,000-180,000), …

Trench Art of the Great War

Editorial Staff

August 2009 | During World War I the popular French magazine Le Pays de France sponsored a series of competitions for the best art pieces created by French soldiers. The magazine called these objects l’artisanat des tranchées. Translated into English as trench art, this term has been used ever since to describe a wide variety of war souvenirs made from …

Endnotes: Low-tech rising

Editorial Staff

Low-tech risingAs a child, I made many discoveries in my grandmother’s house. My favorite of these was her Underwood No. 4 Standard Typewriter, made in 1911. Today, this typewriter sits near my desk. It is both a reminder of my grandmother and a handsome example from the field of vintage office equipment-typewriters, adding machines, telephones, glass-domed Edison stock tickers, and …

The Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 100 years later

Editorial Staff

July 2009 | A cross between a world’s fair, a historical pageant, and a land and water carnival, the landmark Hudson-Fulton Celebration held in New York over two weeks in late September and early October 1909 was organized to commemorate two separate but related events: the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that came to bear his …

New European museums and permanent displays

Editorial Staff

AmsterdamHermitage Amsterdam On June 19 Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and President Dimitri Medevev of Russia are scheduled to preside over the opening ceremonies for the ambitiously expanded Hermitage Amsterdam. The museum, housed in the Amstelhof, built between 1681 and 1683 as a charitable home for the elderly, will reopen to the public on June 20. A satellite of the …