Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Art”
Although the earliest surviving illustrated botanical manuscript dates from AD 512-the Vienna Dioscurides, a copy of the important medical treatise by the first-century Greek physician and herbalist Pedanius Dioscurides-botanical illustration as a distinctive artistic genre developed in the fifteenth century with the rise of illustrated herbals, manuscripts explaining the medicinal and culinary uses of plants and flowers. After all, in …
Originally published in March/April 2014 For the past few years, while much of the art world has been gnashing its teeth over the fate of the American Folk Art Museum’s former home in midtown Manhattan, the institution itself has continued to pursue its critical work of shaping the discourse in the field. Since decamping in 2011 from the soon-to-be-demolished Tod …
Visitors approaching the grand front entrance of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art on its reopening on May 10 could be forgiven for not realizing that a major transformation has taken place. So seamlessly have the flanking wings been enlarged and the gardens in front of them so surreptitiously moved forward that it is only when inside that the impact …
By Karina H. Corrigan; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, June 2004. A single stem of chrysanthemum explodes off the page shown in Plate I. This exquisite Chinese export painting was executed abut 1823, two years after this variety of chrysanthemum, the so-called quilled orange, had been introduced into English gardens.1 Chinese plants were first brought to Europe in the late seventeenth century, but …
By Bernadette G. Callery; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, August 1989. Modern collections of botanical illustrations are treaty indebted to the patrons of the past, whose leisured curiosity and horticultural acquisitiveness enabled them to accumulate various “vegetable rarities,” and then to have those plants recorded in drawings or paintings from which published illustrations were prepared. Many of the surviving florilegia, or collections of …
We asked exhibitors at the Philadelphia Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments. Arthur Guy Kaplan Nothing evokes spring and the promise of summer like butterflies flitting around the garden. From ancient times to the …
One of the noblest buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is 903 ParkAvenue, which commands the northeast corner of the avenue at 79th Street. As it happens, this building makes two compelling claims upon your attention. First of all, it was completed exactly one century ago by Warren and Wetmore, who gave the world Grand Central Terminal a year earlier. …
The pan roast is back. The herring is coming. The famous Oyster Bar restaurant in New York’s Grand Central Terminal reopened last Thursday after a four-month renovation of its 101-year-old interior, particularly a thorough cleaning of its ceiling of interlocking vaults covered with terracotta tiles by the Guastavino firm. Seeing the tiles fully cleaned and all the edging light bulbs …
In a story that is the stuff of fairy tales, one of the missing imperial Fabergé Easter Eggs made for the Russian royal family has been found and will be on public view at Court Jewellers Wartski in Mayfair, London, in the run up to Easter. The magnificent Third Imperial Easter Egg had turned up in the hands of an …
King by Alice Neel (1900-1988), c. 1954. India ink on paper, 13.33 by 11 inches. The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin. The modern section of the Armory Show on Pier 92 (March 6-9) opened with a significant surprise: an installation curated by Susan Harris, Venus Drawn Out: 20th Century Works by Great Woman Artists. Pier 92 had …