On the money (and in the air)

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

        Buncheong bottle Bottle, Korean, Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), fif­teenth to sixteenth century.  Stoneware with iron oxide underglaze decoration; height 11 inches.   WHY Kang Collection, Manhattan specialists in Korean art, sold this pear-shaped wine bottle during New York’s Asia Week in March. Priced at $25,000, it is an example of buncheong, a brushed white-slip stoneware mainly made …

American vernacular rococo

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | About 1736 John Lewis (1678-1762) of Ulster, County Donegal, Ireland, killed his impetuous young landlord, “cleaving in twain his skull,” and then fled to Philadelphia in the American colonies. The following year his wife Margaret Lynn Lewis (1693-1773) and their four sons joined him. Informed that he was still a wanted man, Lewis …

Bringing an Old house back to life

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By MARGARET NOWELL; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, February 1945. There are few more worth-while experiences than bringing back to life an old house. This is what Mr. and Mrs. John Howard Joynt have done with the handsome brick house at 601 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. Fig. 1-The house, with its gray brick wall, encloses two sides of the property, and overlooks …

A desk associated with George Washington

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The  handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …

Fluent French

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | They filled every nook and cranny of a 1780 stone farmhouse in Chester County, Pennsylvania, with hooked rugs and weathervanes, pottery and samplers. They reared two sons amid the blessings and constraints that come with living with the fine and rare. They devoted weekends and holidays to the hunt. And when they were …

Cradle of liberty, cradle of craft

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | An impressive roster of renowned craftsmen trained and worked in Philadelphia during the twentieth century. This flourishing activity is due to the city’s long history as a center for artisans extending back to the time of its founding. The French Huguenot silversmith Cesar Ghiselin arrived in Pennsylvania in 1681 in the company of …

Philadelphia collects: The torch bearer

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This issue celebrates the long history of Philadelphia as the city of great artist-artisans. That history would be even more impressive had there been a Helen Drutt on the scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make sure that absolutely nothing of value was lost to posterity. What Drutt has done for …

Loving the Gilded Age and learning how to look

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | John R. Tschirch is accustomed to being recognized. As Director of Museum Affairs for the Preservation Society of Newport County, he is in and out of the organization’s eleven historic houses so frequently that the volunteers and staff who usher nearly eight hundred thousand visitors through the mansions each year straighten when they see him …

Bay State riches: The Magazine ANTIQUES and Four Centuries of Massachusetts Furniture

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | Anxious and awestruck, I waited outside Wendell Garrett’s office in the spring of 1971. He was the managing editor of The Magazine Antiques and I was a nervous twenty-three-year-old graduate student in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. He had agreed to meet me because of my interest in early Boston woodworkers. …