Two hoof spoons

Editorial Staff Art

By ALBERT SCHER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978.  When Helen Burr Smith wrote about silver spoons with hoof-shape terminals in ANTIQUES in 1944 there were only four of these interesting survivals from seventeenth-century Dutch New York households known in America. Now two more hoof spoons have come to light.   Fig. 1-Silver hoof spoon, probably New York, seventeenth century. Length 6 …

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 …

Living with antiques, Beauregard House, a New Orleans “raised cottage”

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

By FRANCES PARKINSON KEYES; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, August 1980. I had not the slightest idea when I started, rather desperately, to look for a small apartment in New Orleans where I could spend a few days every month for a year or two, that I would end up with a main house containing twelve rooms; slave quarters containing six …

The National Academy of Design

Editorial Staff Art

The National Academy of Design, Feb. 1980By Barbara Ball Buff When Philadelphia ceased to be the capital of the United States in 1800 artists who had been attracted to the city by the prospect of portrait commissions from public figures turned to the booming port of New York. There newly wealthy merchants eagerly sought to have their portraits painted and …

The chateau of Bouges in France

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By MADELEINE JARRY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January 1980.  The charming village of Bouges is situated in the center of France, between Chateauroux and Valencay. Grouped around the chateau in the village are several low houses with slate roofs, where those who once served the chatelains lived. The last private owners of the chateau, M. and Mme. Henry Viguier, gave …

Folk art rising

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | Although the American Folk Art Museum received a great deal of press attention upon the closing of its award-winning building on Fifty-Third Street last year, the really big story was to be found in its immediate resurgence. Beginning with the hugely successful red and white quilt show at the Park Avenue Armory and …

Southern California modernism engages colonial New England

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | An advertisement placed by the Los Angeles department store Barker Brothers in the Los Angeles Times on November 13, 1929, records the earliest appearance of Porter Blanchard’s Commonwealth pattern, the first American flatware pattern to embrace modernism in both form and ornament (Fig. 3). Nine months later Barker Brothers featured Commonwealth again, in …

The boy who loved ANTIQUES

Editorial Staff Opinion

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | “While my childhood friends were engrossed in Boys’ Life, Mad Magazine, and racier fare, I eagerly anticipated next month’s issue” When my friend Betsy Pochoda invited me to write a brief celebratory essay marking the ninetieth anniversary of The Magazine Antiques, she extracted a promise that I would take a personal approach and …