Farther afield: TEFAF, BADA, and the Salon du Dessin

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Europe puts its best foot forward to welcome the massive influx of international collectors and dealers who head there each spring.  The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) Maastricht attracts the largest crowds and most attention but The British Antiques Dealers’ Association (BADA) annual fair in london and Paris’s tailored Salon du Dessin, both of which follow closely on TEFAF’s heels, …

Invisible Artistry: The restoration of a late seventeenth-century London town house

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Fig. 1. Outside the rear elevation of this c. 1670 house in North London are a wrought iron strapwork garden seat, c. 1820, and a pair of seventeenth-century carved stone gatepost finials. Photography by Debbie Patterson When a client asked the London antiques dealer Robert Young to visit his newly acquired house he could not have known that this visit …

Looking both ways: A Pennsylvania collection keeps present and past in constant touch

Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley Furniture & Decorative Arts

“My husband said the house screamed for antique furniture–but I have a hard time with sameness.” This candid recollection by a lively collector provides a partial explanation of how and why she and her late husband joined their appetite for antique furniture and folk art with abstract expressionist art and contemporary sculpture. The rest of the explanation lies in the …

Talking antiques: Winter Antiques Show

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

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. ALLAN AND PENNY KATZ This artful rendering of a birdcage in the shape of the United States Capitol Building was undoubtedly made …

Uncommon women and the art of the common man

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

Collecting can be as much a declaration of independence as it is a need for possession, particularly when the objects of desire are unorthodox and the pursuer is a sentient, intelligent woman. Appreciating something different, something odd, something not sanctified or certified by art history, almost inevitably leads to discovering an identity, asserting individuality, and transporting oneself into a new …

Farther afield: Highclere Castle: The real Downton Abbey

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The staggering luxury of Downtown Abbey’s turreted house and lush grounds have mesmerized audiences as much as any of the adventures of the Crawley family and their staff The real Downton Abbey is Highclere Castle, located in Berkshire at a crossroads between Winchester and Oxford, Bristol and London. The property’s thousand acres of parklands include the remains of an Iron …

New collector: Spratling silver

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The son of Dr. William P. Spratling, a celebrated neurologist and pioneer in treating epilepsy, William Spratling had a tragic childhood, losing his mother and a sister when he was ten, and his father five years later. He went on to Auburn University in Alabama, where he majored in architecture and was apparently teaching the subject there within two years …

No Growing Pains at the Frick Collection

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Recently, an ill-considered op-ed in the New York Times, written by David Masello, took issue with the Frick Collection’s plans for an ambitious expansion. Yes, there is something formulaic, almost knee-jerk in the way in which, these days, every museum seems to feel that it must expand and debase itself to embrace bigger audiences. But there is something equally formulaic, …

Harmonic inventions

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

For most of his eighty-five years H. Peter Stern has carried within him the vision of a lost Eden. As a boy on vacation from his European boarding school he often traveled back to Bucharest by Orient Express. Ap­proaching home he thrilled to the sight of the Transylvanian plains, where farm­ers in sheepskin jackets and tall fur hats worked golden …