Winter Antiques Show This year’s fifty-sixth annual Winter Antiques Show will feature six new exhibitors—including two who specialize in early twentieth-century decorative arts, New York’s Liz O’Brien and Lost City Arts—to complement the always stunning array that is the show’s signature. Its loan exhibitions are also always remarkable in the way they transform a very small space into a lively …
The taste for Gothic
To wealthy American collectors during the Gilded Age, the appeal of medieval and early Renaissance art was considerable. Seeing themselves as the new aristocracy and wanting to re-create for themselves the prestige and trappings of European nobility, they sought objects that they felt embodied the chivalry, piety, luxury, romance, and magnificence of that distant age. Gothic Art in the Gilded …
Cartier and America
Organized to celebrate the firm’s one hundred years in the United States, Cartier and America, which opened last month at San Francisco’s Legion of Honor, explores the history of the house of Cartier from its first great successes as the “king of jewelers and the jeweler to kings” at the end of the nineteenth century through the 1960s and 1970s, …
Photography in New York
The New York dealer of fine photographs Hans P. Kraus Jr. celebrates his gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary this year with a display of iconic works entitled Silver Anniversary: 25 Photographs, 1835 to 1914, opening today. Even readers who are less familiar with photography dealers will recall Kraus’s impressive booth at the 2009 Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory, which …
Degas and music
It will probably not come as a surprise to many to learn that the French impressionist painter Edgar Degas enjoyed music and often attended performances several times a week. After all, the artist’s sculpture The Little Fourteen-Year-Old-Dancer of about 1880 and his many paintings of ballerinas in class, at rehearsal, backstage, and on stage are among the best-known works of …
American impressionism
American impressionism, in particular Connecticut impressionism, is the focus of the current exhibition at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut, which has recently been promised the major gift of the collection of its trustee Clement C. Moore. The collection, which will be on view through October 18, includes major works by notable members of the Lyme Art Colony, …
Wine as inspiration
Since classical Greece, philosophers have been extolling the virtues of a glass of good wine. Socrates supposedly advised: “So far as drinking is concerned, you have my hearty approval; for wine does of a truth moisten the soul and lull our griefs to sleep.” According to the thirteenth-century theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas: “Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a …
Bessie Potter Vonnoh
The eminent American sculptor of domestic and feminine subjects, Bessie Potter Vonnoh, is the subject of a retrospective exhibition—long overdue—on view at the Cincinnati Art Museum through September 6. Featuring some thirty-five pieces of her small sculpture and garden statuary from 1895 to 1930, most in bronze but a handful in terra cotta, as well as portraits of the artist …
Massachusetts quilts
Recently more than two dozen of the most significant quilts discovered to date by the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project went on view at the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell in the exhibition Massachusetts—Our Common Wealth: Quilts from the Massachusetts Quilt Documentation Project, which runs through September 20. So far, some six thousand quilts have been documented as a result …
The Hudson-Fulton Celebration, 100 years later
July 2009 | A cross between a world’s fair, a historical pageant, and a land and water carnival, the landmark Hudson-Fulton Celebration held in New York over two weeks in late September and early October 1909 was organized to commemorate two separate but related events: the three-hundredth anniversary of Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that came to bear his …
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