Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Discovery”
As part of our recurring series of guest bloggers (see earlier contributions by Art Inconnu and The Curated Object) today we are pleased to feature Hollister Hovey, a blogger with panache for turn-of-19th-century antiques and collecting. The New York Times recently named her among the “New Antiquarians” shaping the current vogue for vintage Victoriana. We asked Hovey to curate a …
Located on sixty acres in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Fonthill, the home of Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), one of the leaders of the American arts and crafts movement, stands as a testament to handcrafted goods, replete with relics dutifully gathered by Mercer in the wake of the industrial revolution.Mercer, a Bucks County native, graduated from Harvard in 1879. After receiving a law …
Clifford Wallach is a widely recognized expert in the field of tramp art—a branch of folk art in which objects are constructed from chip carved wood. As an antiques dealer, scholar, and author of two books on the subject, Tramp Art: One Notch at a Time (1998) and most recently Tramp Art: Another Notch, Folk Art From the Heart (2009), …
Hilary Swank’s portrayal of pioneering aviatrix Amelia Earhart in the new film Amelia has been turning heads—but the real star of Mira Nair’s biopic might just be the gorgeous vintage planes. As the film’s visual consultant, Toronto-based Paul Austerberry spent months researching classic aircraft. He talked to The Magazine ANTIQUES about that process, and explained why flying a late-1930s eight-seater …
Sometimes you have to move every object in a collection to fully appreciate it. In January the curatorial team at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts did just that. We moved virtually every exhibited object in the museum’s galleries and opened our new 45-minute guided tour, called Southernisms: People and Places, in one week’s time. Exhausted, and with sore …
Pittock Mansion, a French Renaissance revival style house situated 1,000 feet above downtown Portland, Oregon, was built between 1909 and1914 for newspaper owner Henry Lewis Pittock and his philanthropist wife, Georgina Martin Burton Pittock. The 16,000- square-foot mansion, located on over forty-six acres of parkland, features forty-four period rooms that incorporate original furnishings into a restored interior. Visitors to Pittock …
Always envious of the grand historic interiors featured in our Great Estates column, we wanted to take a cue from the period décor and find ways to recreate the look in even the smallest apartment. A recent peek inside Homewood Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, which boasts boldly painted floorcloths, elegant Federal period furniture, and stunning juxtapositions of color, seemed the …
The versatile jewelry designer and metalsmith Marie Zimmermann (1879-1972) is the subject of a forthcoming monograph sponsored by the American Decorative Art 1900 Foundation. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1879, Zimmermann’s training in the arts began with courses in drawing, painting, and modeling at the Art Students League in New York likely followed by courses in art metalwork at …
As meditation on the doomed love affair between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Jane Campion’s Bright Star is not a typical period film. Critics have praised this intimate, unadorned romance since it premiered at Cannes this spring, as set decorator Charlotte Watts tells us, recreating its sets—all the way down to the upholstery nails—was …
Connoisseurship of the vessels produced by the Grueby Faience Company and the Grueby Pottery has been surprisingly slow to develop over the past forty years, during which time collections, exhibitions, and scholarly publications have featured them as exemplars of the American art pottery movement. As early as 1900 Keramic Studio noted that “no collection would be perfect without a piece …