Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Art”
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 …
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 …
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Few books are more famous than John James Audubon’s Birds of America. From the moment his birds began to emerge from the printing press in the 1820s, people marveled at their liveliness, as if the images might literally fly off the page in a ruffle of feathers. That liveliness was the product of Audubon’s genius and his love for the …
Raoul Dufy is a conspicuous example of a painter who has fallen almost completely from grace. He has not been the subject of a major American exhibition in over a generation, and his name, it seems, is rarely mentioned any more among the living. Indeed, there is no particular reason to write this article just now, since there is unlikely …