Record-breaking folk art at Sotheby’s

Editorial Staff Art

Sotheby’s set a record on Saturday, January 25, with the sale of the Ralph O. Esmerian Collection of Folk Art. The 228 lots reached a total of $12,955,943 eclipsing the previous record set by Sotheby’s in 1994 with the sale of the Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little Collection. Saturday’s top lot was the 1923 figure of Santa Claus by …

Glackens and Whistler: A young man’s attraction

Editorial Staff Art

When citing the formative influences on the American artist William Glackens, we tend to round up the usual suspects: Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is true that all of these painters, as well as Edgar Degas, Théophile Steinlen, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse, evoked Glackens’s admiration, and he firmly believed that Americans who wished to …

Clare Leighton’s

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2011 | In 1948 Josiah Wedgwood and Sons commissioned printmaker and author Clare Leighton to make wood engravings for a set of twelve plates depicting New England industries. Leighton was in many ways a perfect choice with strong appeal to audiences in both England and the United States. She had established her reputation in Britain …

The small gardens of Colonial Williamsburg

Editorial Staff Art

By THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 1954. The woods near Williamsburg are glorious in April and May with the crimson magenta flowers of the Judas tree, and the white and pink of the dogwood. The sweet smelling honeysuckle covers fences, embankments, and stumps. And everywhere in the town itself one can note along streets and lanes, or peeping from …

Philadelphia collects: The torch bearer

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This issue celebrates the long history of Philadelphia as the city of great artist-artisans. That history would be even more impressive had there been a Helen Drutt on the scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make sure that absolutely nothing of value was lost to posterity. What Drutt has done for …

Talking Antiques

Editorial Staff Art

Nine leaders in the field discuss the changing antiques and fine arts market.   Jane Nylander, preservationist The past speaks to Jane Nylander. She has been translating its messages for decades as curator at Old Sturbridge Village, director of Strawbery Banke, and former president of Historic New England.    Are we currently losing ground in our commitment to preserve and conserve our …

ANTIQUES Speaks for Itself

Editorial Staff Magazine

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, …

Tradition and innovation at Longwood Gardens

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Preservation was Pierre S. du Pont’s goal in 1906 when he purchased a derelict arboretum thirty miles to the west and south of Philadelphia. And preservation remains the most complex challenge today at what became, under du Pont’s hand, one of the premier public landscapes in North America, the internationally renowned Longwood …

Duncan Phyfe: A New York Story

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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 …