The Care of Pewter

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  By John W. Poole [Originally published November 1938; posted in conjunction with Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s “American Pewter,” March/April 2013.] IN ADDITION to the desirability of maintaining the value of personal property, the owner of antiquities possessing historical and cultural significance owes a very definite obligation to posterity. In some fields, little or none of this responsibility may be shifted …

Philadelphia collects: City folk

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 |  Twenty-five years ago in these pages, Beatrice B. Garvan wrote about an anonymous collection of Pennsylvania folk art that was already more than a quarter-century in the making. Garvan was struck by the coherence of the assemblage that was ever in flux, by the sense of motion generated by the collectors’ unyielding search …

1735-1790: Painters, Paintings, & the American South

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | The history of the paintings and painters associated with the American South begins in the sixteenth century with maps and natural-history drawings created by the first artist-explorers to arrive in the region. By the mid-seventeenth century the southern colonies also boasted portraiture and other types of paint­ings, all of which increased in number …

Monumental confidence: restored Roosevelt murals

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | One hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, the act of monumental commemoration was a relatively simple affair. A victory in battle or the founding of an institution was seen, at least as re­garded the monument in question, to be completely good. A massacre or natural catastrophe was assumed to be completely bad. Anyone deserving …

Curiously Carved: Pictorial Sources of Scrimshaw

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Contrary to persistent stereotypes characterizing seamen in the Age of Sail as a barbaric rabble-unruly, illiterate ruffians devoted to the pursuit of disreputable vices-nineteenth-century Yankee whalemen were characteristically literate and, as a class, avid readers. Whaling voyages were matters of two, three, or even four years’ duration, including months at sea between landfalls; …

Spirit Feel: A New Orleans Collection

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Photography by Richard Sexton | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Africa feels close in New Orleans. You hear it in the blue notes and polyrhythmic drumming of jazz. You taste it in the okra-laden gumbos and rice dishes of the local cuisine. You see it in a host of tra­ditional arts, from the richly beaded parading costumes of …

Forces for the new: Collectors and the 1913 Armory Show

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Fig. 14. Self-Portrait by van Gogh, c. 1887. Oil on canvas, 15 ¾ by 13 ⅜ inches. Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, gift of Philip L. Goodwin in memory of his mother, Josephine S. Goodwin. On February 17, 1913, the most important art event ever held in America-the International Exhibition of …

Delftware from a St. Louis collection

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BY REKA NEILSON FISHER, Curatorial assistant, Saint Louis Art Museum THE CREAMICS COLLECTION of Mr. and Mrs. George S. Rosborough Jr., of Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, is mainly devoted to English earthenware of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Initially they collected early nineteenth-century yellow-glazed earthenware, but then they turned to earlier wares, particularly delftware, which attracted …

Dated English delftware and slipware in the Longridge Collection

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By Leslie B. Grigsby. Originally published in June 1999. The Longridge Collection of ceramics is English pottery Valhalla. Nestled in a New England house with rare English and Continental treen, medieval ivory and metalwork, and early furniture and carvings, this extraordinary collection of ceramics can be divided into two main groups: about 440 pieces of tinglazed earthenware (delftware) and 100 …

A lost Copley found: The New York portrait of Captain Gabriel Maturin

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2012 | In the spring of 1771 John Singleton Copley had several good reasons to look south to New York for fresh fields to conquer. Although he had effectively joined the social ranks of his clientele by marrying into one of the leading Tory families of Boston and acquired a suitable gentleman’s estate on Beacon …