Though it’s a distinct handicap when a major retrospective of a great artist is missing one of his best—and certainly best-known—paintings, it says something that the exhibition Delacroix at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York loses little of its force despite the fact that July 28, 1830: Liberty Leading the People stayed home at the Louvre.
Master of Magnificence
At the Frick, a sumptuous and revelatory exhibition on the seventeenth-century designer Luigi Valadier
Heavenly earthenware at the Frick
The colorful earthenware known as faience is an especially appealing category of French ceramics. Beginning this fall, the Frick Collection is exhibiting one of the finest private collections of early faience.
The unfashionable delights of Raoul Dufy
Raoul Dufy is a conspicuous example of a painter who has fallen almost completely from grace. He has not been the subject of a major American exhibition in over a generation, and his name, it seems, is rarely mentioned any more among the living. Indeed, there is no particular reason to write this article just now, since there is unlikely …
Georges Hoentschel and his world
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The life of the Parisian decorator, collector, one-time architect, and ceramist Georges Hoentschel (Fig. 2), head of the renowned furnishing firm Maison Leys, coincided with a period of far reaching change in France. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the devastation of the civil war (la commune), the Third Republic (established after …
From the Archives: Philadelphia Empire furniture by Antoine Gabriel Quervelle
The design legacy of Antoine Gabriel Quervelle
Fluent French
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | They filled every nook and cranny of a 1780 stone farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with hooked rugs and weathervanes, pottery and samplers. They reared two sons amid the blessings and constraints that come with living with the fine and rare. They devoted weekends and holidays to the hunt. And when they were …
Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue (1931-2013)
© Lucy Dickens / National Portrait Gallery, London The noted authority on eighteenth-century French furniture and Sèvres porcelain, Sir Geoffrey de Bellaigue, Surveyor Emeritus of the Queen’s Works of Art died on January 4, 2013. The pinnacle of Sir Geoffrey’s research and study was the three-volume catalogue, French Porcelain in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, published in 2009. …