Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Art”
At first glance, the small oil portrait of a handsome man in a flowered dressing gown looked somewhat unprepossessing (Fig. 1). Hanging on the wall of a dealer’s booth at an antiques show in 2010, it had a “folksy” appeal, but wasn’t an obvious candidate for acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, as a curator in the midst …
Jack London died young, at the age of forty, yet in some ways it is amazing that he lived as long as he did. To anyone who happened to see the thirty-one-year-old London and five other inexperienced sailors cruising through San Francisco’s Golden Gate on April 23, 1907, his survival would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. His boat the …
It would probably surprise Samuel F. B. Morse, and not pleasantly, that future generations know him for his invention of Morse code and his services to telegraphy, rather than for those paintings, produced over six decades, that were the serious business of his life. Despite a strict Protestant upbringing, Morse (1791-1872) spent three years in Europe under the tutelage of …
For thousands of years, from the time of the Parthenon and the cathedrals of France down to the onset of World War II, the marriage of art and public architecture was hallowed and inviolable. Not to adorn a floor with parquetry, a wall with reliefs, or an apse or ceiling with frescoes and mosaics would have seemed a mark of …
Fewer than half the recorded landscapes in E. Maurice Bloch’s catalogue raisonné of the paintings of George Caleb Bingham have been located, making the discovery of the unre¬corded painting in Figure 1 especially noteworthy.1 The painting is in excellent condition, evidently having never been removed from its original frame while in the possession of descendants of a sibling of Bingham’s …
For art lovers, the most interesting thing in Austin, Texas, is not the LBJ Presidential Library or the grandiose State House–impressive as both of them are–but the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Texas. A fine example of a university or college museum, it has strong collections of American and Latin American art, …
Paintings by William Henry Johnson are rarely available in today’s art market, as most of his work is secure in museum and university collections. The Smithsonian American ArtMuseum, for instance, owns more than one thousand works by this noted African-American artist. Nevertheless, the relatively nascent Johnson Collection, located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has been able to acquire five works by …
By Katharine Morrison McClinton; originally published in September 1950. From time to time Mrs. McClinton contributes a note to ANTIQUES on some intriguing bypath of collecting interest. This one, which offers an appealing approach to nineteenth-century ceramics, will be incorporated in expanded form, in her forthcoming book on antiques, to be published next year by McGraw-Hill. Nineteenth-century children’s mugs have …
By Amy a. Weinstein; originally published in January 2005. Appealing to the imagination of children of all ages, the toy collection of the New-York Historical Society offers a miniature window into nineteenth-century American family life. The approximately three thousand objects that constitute the collection are made of wood, metal, paper, ceramic, and cloth and trace the social, economic, political, and …
When Virginia-born George Caleb Bingham was seven, his father lost most of the family’s fortune, and they moved to Missouri to build a new life, settling first in Franklin, on the banks of the Missouri River, and later on a farm in Saline County. Who knows what would have caught his imagination had Bingham stayed in Virginia, but there is …