from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | Fig. 3. Lake George Autumn by Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986), 1922. Oil on canvas, 15 by 27 inches. © 2013 Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Museums are a fairly recent development in human history, dating back scarcely more than two hundred years. But the founding of such institutions has accelerated so …
How the West was seen
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, November/December 2013 | The Last of the Buffalo by Albert Bierstadt, c. 1888. Signed “AB[conjoined]ierstadt” at lower right. Oil on canvas, 60 ¼ by 96 ½ inches. The challenge of Go West!: Art of the American Frontier is to present us with a century (1830-1930) of familiar and unfamiliar images and to help us see them …
Betsy Bonaparte in Baltimore
Portrait of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte [1785–1879] by Firmin Massot (1766–1849), 1823. Oil on canvas. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore. As the heroine of a novel, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte might have suited Edith Wharton or possibly Henry James. We could also think of her as an early version of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Born in Baltimore, the oldest daughter of a wealthy …
William Kent in New York
The Gallery, Chiswick House by William Henry Hunt (1790–1864), 1828. Watercolor. © Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth; reproduced by permission of the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. The Bard Graduate Center (BGC) and London’s Victoria and Albert Museum are presenting another of their comprehensive examinations of a renowned and versatile English designer. William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, now at the BGC, and its accompanying …
Clare Leighton in Virginia
The Bird Cage (for Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree) by Leighton, 1940. Wood engraving on paper. On view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Leighton was raised in England, where she was well known for her illustrations of classic books by authors such as Emily Brontë and Thomas Hardy and for her impressive writings and wood engravings about …
Saint-Gaudens in Washington, D.C.
Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), 1900. Patinated plaster. U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art. On July 18, 1863, one of the first Union Army units of African-American soldiers stormed Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor. Led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the …
Victoriana at Lyndhurst
Part of a ten-piece suite of parlor furniture designed by the Herter Brothers (probably Gustave Herter), 1869, installed at Lyndhurst by Jay Gould in 1882. Sturges photograph, courtesy of Lyndhurst. Three Parlors, a new display of three sets of Victorian parlor furniture, is on view at Lyndhurst through the end of 2013. The exhibition will include works, many in storage …
Tiffany in Chicago
Dragonfly lamp by Tiffany Studios, shade designed by Clara Driscoll (1861–1944), c. 1902–1906. Blown glass, patinated bronze. Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Chicago; photograph by John Faier. The distinguished Chicago philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus has pursued Louis Comfort Tiffany’s “quest of beauty” since the early 1980s, when he bought his first stained-glass window attributed to the master artist. Over the next …
Spanish American Riches in Brooklyn
Folding screen with the Siege of Belgrade (front), Mexican, c. 1697–1701. Oil on wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Brooklyn Museum, gift of Lilla Brown in memory of her husband, John W. Brown, by exchange. Objects in gold and silver, inlaid and gilded furniture, sumptuous fabrics, Asian porcelains, dazzling portraits-the Spanish colonial elite had it all, and flaunted it proudly within the …
Catherine the Great in Georgia
Censer, Russian, late seventeenth century. Silver and parcel gilt. Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens, Washington, D. C. Crowned empress of Russia in 1762, Catherine II was determined to change the perception throughout Europe that Russia was a cultural backwater. Having lived at court since 1744, when she became engaged to the future Peter III, Catherine had immersed herself in Russian …