Sewn not hooked

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | About the same time I bought Mercy Huntting’s rug at auction in 2007 (facing page, top), I was given a full run of The Magazine Antiques. Before shelving them for reference I paged through every issue, and to my surprise, found the rug illustrated in May 1951, in Florence Peto’s article “Some Early …

Seen and Heard at the European Fine Art Fair: TEFAF Day One

Editorial Staff Art

  “The museum doesn’t have a shopping list but I hope our collectors do,” said MFA Boston director Malcolm Rogers, who accompanied a group of American collectors through the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) on its opening day, March 15. “I could be tempted to collect Old Master pictures instead of contemporary art,” Whitney Museum of American Art director Adam …

Teamwork in Piedmont, North Carolina

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Dr. Thomas H. Sears Jr. and his wife, Sara, are well known in Piedmont, North Carolina, as a couple who are serious about historic preservation and collecting. Over the past forty-five years, their commitment to one another and their shared goals have enabled them to assemble one of North Carolina’s finest collections of …

Early Color

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Color, rather than composition, subject matter, or form, is the true life force of photography. Color is the fluid essence of the quotidian, of life as it is lived in its ceaseless flux and reflux. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the early twentieth-century autochromes of Heinrich Kühn, who is …

Tradition and innovation at Longwood Gardens

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 |   Preservation was Pierre S. du Pont’s goal in 1906 when he purchased a derelict arboretum thirty miles to the west and south of Philadelphia. And preservation remains the most complex challenge today at what became, under du Pont’s hand, one of the premier public landscapes in North America, the internationally renowned Longwood …

Inventing the Modern World: Decorative Arts at the World’s Fairs, 1851-1939

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | In 1851 Albert, prince consort of Queen Victoria, and the architect Henry Cole realized their grand vision of an international exhibition where the traditions, aspirations, and accomplishments of many nations were showcased.1 Hardware at the Great Exhibition by Joseph Nash (1809-1878), from Dickenson’s Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London 1852). Color lithograph. Victoria and Albert Museum, …

Miniature discoveries

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | The recent appearance of two portrait miniatures leads to new information about back­country South Carolina artist Isaac Brownfield Alexander. Last year Elle Shushan, a leading expert on portrait miniatures, alerted curators at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) about the pending sale of a rare work by a southern artist-a delightful …

The Real Story of Sleepy Hollow

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from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | Washington Irving could spin a tale so well that even Charles Dickens was in his thrall. “I don’t go upstairs to bed two nights out of the seven,” the English novelist said, “without taking Washington Irving under my arm.”* Irving’s success was long in coming, but it enabled him to move to a …

Winter Antiques Show 2012

Editorial Staff Art, Calendar, Exhibitions

We asked exhibitors at the Winter Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments. Barbara Israel Garden Antiques We are thrilled to be bringing a cache of extraordinary objects to the 2012 Winter Antiques Show, including …