When citing the formative influences on the American artist William Glackens, we tend to round up the usual suspects: Diego Velázquez, Frans Hals, Édouard Manet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. It is true that all of these painters, as well as Edgar Degas, Théophile Steinlen, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse, evoked Glackens’s admiration, and he firmly believed that Americans who wished to …
The Lunder Collection is unveiled at the Colby College Museum of Art
On July 13, the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, reopens, unveiling its nationally-acclaimed collection of more than 8,000 works of art. The addition of the Alfond-Lunder Family Pavilion, a sparkling glass structure designed by Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects, on the quintessential New England college campus, will display the impressive inaugural exhibition, The Lunder Collection: A Gift …
Charles Melville Dewey: A forgotten master of classic tonalism
November 2009 | Of all the great disappearing acts in American art history, the tonalist artist Charles Melville Dewey’s is one of the most complete and inexplicable. Few artists of the period received more glowing notices from critics or were more widely admired in elite art circles, only to have left so little in the way of a footprint. Like …
Inspired by antiques: Chinoiserie armchair
This week I came across a Georgian armchair that was recently offered at Christie’s South Kensington in a sale aptly titled “An English Look.” This chair—with its intricate fretwork, japanned wood, and fanciful imagery—typifies the style of chinoiserie that was popular in the decorative arts beginning in the 17th century as trade brought exotic new wares from Asia to the …