“Armenian Girl” by Glackens, 1916. Oil on canvas, 32 by 26 inches. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia and Merion, PA. The Soda Fountain by William James Glackens (American, 1870-1938), 1935. Oil on canvas, 48 by 36 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Joseph E. Temple and Henry D. Gilpin Funds 1955. Installation view at Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art, Fort Luaderdale. Photograph by Steven …
Late bloomers: The Purple Foliage Workshop
The second quarter of the eighteenth century is thought of as the golden age of Chinese export porcelain, and with good reason. This is the period just following the introduction of the famille rose enamel, a period of innovation and experimentation when European porcelain manufacture was in its infancy and Europe was crying out for the very best that the …
Beatrix Potter, scientific illustrator
By Robert McCracken Peck Originally published in June 1996 At a time when many house museums have difficulty keeping their doors open, a small cottage in the English Lake District can barely manage to close its doors at all. Hill top (Pl. VII), the two-hundred-acre farm where Beatrix Potter lived for the last thirty-eight years of her life, is so …
By special invitation only
Ornately designed and die-cut, the golden chalice is interspersed with jewels and heraldic images; unfolding a series of eight flaps reveals several beautifully detailed vignettes depicting “Legends of the Middle Ages” (see Figs. 3a, 3b at left). The Krewe of Proteus presented this paper chalice as the invitation to their 1888 ball, an exquisite display of their chivalric theme that …
Dealer profile: Lawrence Steigrad and Peggy Stone
In 1989 Lawrence Steigrad and his wife and business partner, Peggy Stone, began dealing in Old Master paintings backed by only a thousand dollars and a few credit cards. For the first year, in case things didn’t work out, Stone continued to work as a cataloguer at William Doyle, returning home to help with research and cataloguing late into the …
The new collector: American bronzes
The Italian Renaissance taste for classical art fostered a revival of bronze statuary, wealthy connoisseurs collecting both antique statuettes and new works by artists like Donatello and Verrochio. Likewise, the nineteenth-century fascination with Renaissance art created an even larger market for bronze sculpture. Post-Civil War American sculptors, many European-trained, followed suit. Cupid by Frederick William MacMonnies (1863-1937), 1895, balances gracefully on a …
End notes: A carved ivory wrist rest
A mid-twentieth-century Chinese carved ivory double wrist rest sold at Cincinnati’s Cowan’s Auctions’ first Asian art sale on August 26 for the handsome price of $47,000 (including premium) off a presale estimate of $15,000 to $20,000. Designed as an aid for scholars in the painstaking arts of calligraphy and brush painting, wrist rests were long made in China in carved …
Art of the South at Colonial Williamsburg
It’s been more than half a century since the groundbreaking Loan Exhibition of Southern Furniture 1640-1820 held at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 1952, and much has happened since then, not just in the study of southern furniture but of the decorative arts of the region as a whole. It is time, indeed, to revisit the subject on …
Record-breaking folk art at Sotheby’s
Sotheby’s set a record on Saturday, January 25, with the sale of the Ralph O. Esmerian Collection of Folk Art. The 228 lots reached a total of $12,955,943 eclipsing the previous record set by Sotheby’s in 1994 with the sale of the Bertram K. and Nina Fletcher Little Collection. Saturday’s top lot was the 1923 figure of Santa Claus by …
Glackens and Whistler: A young man’s attraction
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 …