Over the past ten years Wade Lege has rescued some of the disappearing landmarks of his native Louisiana
Andy Warhol’s Pittsburgh
Collecting and researching American art have been avocations of mine since my student days at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1950s, when I commuted to school through the neighborhoods of the Hill District and past the belching steel mills on both sides of the Monongahela River. Those are fond memories still—fifty years after leaving Pittsburgh for New England—so when …
Invisible Artistry: The restoration of a late seventeenth-century London town house
Fig. 1. Outside the rear elevation of this c. 1670 house in North London are a wrought iron strapwork garden seat, c. 1820, and a pair of seventeenth-century carved stone gatepost finials. Photography by Debbie Patterson When a client asked the London antiques dealer Robert Young to visit his newly acquired house he could not have known that this visit …
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, …
Record-breaking folk art at Sotheby’s
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
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 …
A monument to Antoine Louis Barye
From The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 2006
Clare Leighton’s
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
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
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 …