By Cynthia A. Drayton Mikhail Romanov was crowned Czar in 1613. The Romanov family then ruled Russia for the next three hundred years until the 1917 assassination of Nicholas II. To mark the four hundredth anniversary of the Romanov’s ascension to the throne and the family’s patronage of both Fabergé and the decorative arts, there are exhibitions, an auction, and …
Maine destination
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | Sharon Corwin remembers her first introduction to Maine in 2003. It was April. And dark. “Moose Crossing” signs punctuated the indistinct landscape as she headed north on I-95. In the light of day, Corwin, a Berkeley-trained art historian who came to the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville as its first Lunder …
Freedom and the abstract truth
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | The story of Marica and Jan Vilcek is the story of one couple’s long pilgrimage into the cultural heart of this country. It begins during the mid-1960s in the wake of the Kennedy assassination and just when the most volatile decade of the American century was coming to a boil. In some ways …
Reverie on a pair of Japanese screens
By Michael R. Cunningham; from the Magazine ANTIQUES, July 2001 The idea of landscape in the West has historically been aligned with geography. The appearance of a given earthbound place in a painting or photograph normally initiates for the Western viewer an immediate response of physical orientation. We wish to understand the particular environmental conditions and perhaps the terrain …
Georges Hoentschel and his world
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | The life of the Parisian decorator, collector, one-time architect, and ceramist Georges Hoentschel (Fig. 2), head of the renowned furnishing firm Maison Leys, coincided with a period of far reaching change in France. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the devastation of the civil war (la commune), the Third Republic (established after …
Painters of the Hudson River school
By FREDERICK A. SWEET; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March 1945. Toward the end of the nineteenth century America’s art collectors were captivated by French taste and filled their gilt drawing rooms with salon figure pieces and bucolic scenes by members of the Barbizon school. Our own painters such as George Inness and Homer Martin, had to follow French trends, in order to …
SARAH GOODRIDGE
By AGNES M. DODS; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May 1947. THE WORK OF SARAH GOODRIDGE, one of the lesser known miniature painters of New England, has been increasing steadily in popularity for some years. Although her claim to fame rests mainly on her miniature of Gilbert Stuart, a diligent search of the countryside has brought to light many excellent likenesses from …
Some early American crewelwork
By FLORENCE PETO; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May 1951. Eighteenth-century crewelwork, especially favored for bedspreads and bed furnishings, is one of the most delightful types of early American embroidery. Though it has become very scarce, resolute seekers may still occasionally acquire a piece. Tree of Life Design, crewelwork fragment with leaves, fruit, birds, insects, and caterpillar. New York Historical Society. …
The small gardens of Colonial Williamsburg
By THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 1954. The woods near Williamsburg are glorious in April and May with the crimson magenta flowers of the Judas tree, and the white and pink of the dogwood. The sweet smelling honeysuckle covers fences, embankments, and stumps. And everywhere in the town itself one can note along streets and lanes, or peeping from …
Eighteenth-Century Jewelry
By JOHN HAYWARD; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1955. Most aspects of eighteenth-century arts and crafts have been the subject of detailed and exhaustive research in the course of the past fifty years. The jewelry of the period, however, has been somewhat neglected in favor of Renaissance jewelry (so called, though much of it dates from the first half of the seventeenth …
