By FREDERICK A. SWEET; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March 1945. Toward the end of the nineteenth century America’s art collectors were captivated by French taste and filled their gilt drawing rooms with salon figure pieces and bucolic scenes by members of the Barbizon school. Our own painters such as George Inness and Homer Martin, had to follow French trends, in order to …
Farther Afield, January-March
Before she died in 1983 in her enormous hôtel particulier on the banks of the Seine, Mona Bismarck created a foundation for art and culture in her name, and gave it, in addition to an endowment, her historic mansion on the avenue de New York. It was Bismarck’s means of creating a legacy more enduring than merely that of …
Louis C. Tiffany’s landscapes of devotion
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | Today Louis Comfort Tiffany is widely recognized as America’s leading designer of the decades around 1900, but during his lifetime he was best known primarily as a designer of religious art, particularly memorial windows. They were installed by the thousands-mostly in Protestant churches and cemetery mausoleums-and formed the bulk of his business over four decades. …
The coming storm: American landscape painting and the Civil War
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | The role of the Civil War in redefining America is well known. What is less well understood is the profound way in which the conflict changed American Art. Between 1859, when war was imminent, and the war’s end in 1865 writers and artists created their works surrounded by, and sometimes suffocated by, the impact of …