Bringing back Olana

Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

The fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Church’s exotic masterpiece  finds it and its spectacular landscape more popular than ever with lovers of art, architecture, and ecology.   View looking south to the Hudson River from the bell tower of the main house at Olana. Andy Wainwright 2004.  Just south of Hudson, New York, a signpost on Route 9G marks the …

Eminent Victorians

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Photography by Alan Kolc | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. The brick house, handsomely trimmed in brownstone, dates from 1866, one of six iden­tical buildings in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district. Situated a few streets away from Inde­pendence Hall, it was once the home of Brevet General Henry Harrison Bingham (1841-1912), a Congres­sional Medal of Honor laureate for …

Japanese bamboo art: A living tradition

Editorial Staff Art

Basket weaving is one of the most ancient of all decorative crafts. It is thought that the idea to create vessels by interweaving twigs was conceived around the same time as the idea to chip shards of flint into arrowheads. Fragments of Neolithic-age pottery reveal that long before the invention of the wheel, potters molded clay around woven basket forms, …

American pewter

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April, 2013 | Pewter is effectively the mirror alloy of bronze: the lat­ter is an alloy of copper with a little tin, while pewter is the result of smelting tin with a little copper. The large tin content imparts the silver-gray color-indeed the more tin, the more silvery the appearance. Pewter has been worked from ancient …

The comeback: The National Academy reopens with six new exhibitions

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | The National Academy reopens with six exhibitions designed to reclaim its pivotal role in American art and architecture. Many who stroll along New York’s Museum Mile surely break their stride at the handsome Beaux Arts facade at 1083 Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. They slow down …

The Man Who Could Do Everything: Louis C. Tiffany at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | View of the Daffodil Terrace from the courtyard. Cohrssen photograph.   View of the Living Room gallery from the Reception Hall gallery, showing the hanging turtleback-glass globes and shades, a lunette window, and panels from the Four Seasons window. Cohrssen photograph.   Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) in a photograph by Blank and Stoller, …

Venetian glass

Editorial Staff Art

Fazzoletto (handkerchief) vase designed by Fulvio Bianconi (1915–1996) for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 11 inches. Photograph by courtesy of Glass Past, New York.    Right: Fazzoletto vase designed by Bianconi for Venini and Company, Murano, c. 1950. Glass, height 7 ¼ inches. Gardner and Barr photograph. Pair of footed vases made by Salviati Dott. Antonio, Murano, c. …

Chinese Export Porcelain

Editorial Staff Art

Chinese export porcelain is one of the oldest and mostvenerable areas of serious collecting. The term Chinese export refers to porcelain made and decorated in China betweenthe sixteenth and twentieth centuries specifically forthe Western market. The Chinese first exported porcelain tothe Middle East in the fourteenth century, but it was not untilPortugal established sea routes to China that this materialmade …