Treasury Notes

Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …

Making friends with fraktur: Some thoughts on the exhibition Drawn with Spirit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

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

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …