Taking Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman Jr.’s The Decoration of Houses as his starting point, in his new book the master decorator displays the many improvisations he has rung from historic models and classical principles
Treasury Notes
With a boost from Broadway, the caretakers of Hamilton Grange cast new light on the charms of Alexander Hamilton’s once bucolic home. The Broadway musical Hamilton has created something of a second American Revolution, reviving American promise in the person of a penniless bastard orphan who washed up on these shores and be came…Alexander Hamilton! It is this reprise of …
Black dolls
Dolls are the only toys made in our image, the only human-like creatures children are given dominion over.
Making friends with fraktur: Some thoughts on the exhibition Drawn with Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
If you are fraktur ignorant, fraktur agnostic, or fraktur allergic, this is an exhibition that should win you over. From its opening moment where a huge curving wall enlarges a small 1834-1835 gem of Adam and Eve attributed to Samuel Gottschall, the visitor is primed for seduction. How cunning of this artist to have depicted Eve being seduced by a …
Harmonic inventions
For most of his eighty-five years H. Peter Stern has carried within him the vision of a lost Eden. As a boy on vacation from his European boarding school he often traveled back to Bucharest by Orient Express. Approaching home he thrilled to the sight of the Transylvanian plains, where farmers in sheepskin jackets and tall fur hats worked golden …
Freedom and the abstract truth
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | The story of Marica and Jan Vilcek is the story of one couple’s long pilgrimage into the cultural heart of this country. It begins during the mid-1960s in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and just when the most volatile decade of the American century was coming to a boil. In some ways …
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 …
Right place, right time: The Grigson-Didier house in New Orleans
Photography by Don Freeman | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2012 | To understand the world of James Donald Didier you should pay attention to his silence. This is a man who sees history; too much talk and too many questions will only extinguish what the eye should behold and the spirit feel. The Grigson-Didier house of 1835 in New Orleans, …
Editor’s Letter, September/October 2012
Our country’s regional wars may be over, but in the 1960s when the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) began, they were very much alive. Southern writers for instance were still working through the story of loss while northerners remained dubious about the value of southern culture. MESDA took a different path. The idea that the South did not …
Fortunate Son: Reading the memoirs of Albert Sack
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2011 | “I was a good student up through 6th grade but then my priorities became play, friends, and girls. Mother kept a beautiful home. Dad was prosperous in carving out his career which interested me not at all.” Card table, John and Thomas Seymour. Boston, c. 1794. Courtesy of the Brant Foundation, Inc. Sideboard, …
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