To understand the world of James Donald Didier you should pay attention to his silence
MESDA and the Study of Early Southern Decorative Arts
It has become almost a folk legend among decorative arts scholars: the story of Joseph Downs (1895 – 1954), then curator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, announcing at the 1949 Williamsburg Antiques Forum that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.”1 The comment prompted an offended woman from Kentucky …
The (America) House that Mrs. Webb Built
Aileen Osborn Webb (Mrs. Vanderbilt Webb) came from a family of art patrons
The chateau of Bouges in France
By MADELEINE JARRY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January 1980. The charming village of Bouges is situated in the center of France, between Chateauroux and Valencay. Grouped around the chateau in the village are several low houses with slate roofs, where those who once served the chatelains lived. The last private owners of the chateau, M. and Mme. Henry Viguier, gave …
The discovery of William Black
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2012 | When the late southern decorative arts expert and author John Bivins Jr. published his 1968 book on early North Carolina firearms, he noted that, “among surviving implements…of early America and the South, few art forms have stirred the imagination more than the American longrifle.”1 Created by craftsmen working in rural communities, long rifles …
The Kaufman Collection: The pursuit of excellence and a gift to the nation
Photography by Gavin Ashworth | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | In my catalogue of friends, mentors, scholars, and collectors, Linda H. and the late George M. Kaufman fill all the roles. From my earliest acquaintance with them in 1974, I have been in awe of their collection and of their indefatigable focus on beauty and excellence in their Norfolk, …
At home in modernism: The John C. Waddell collection of American design
Photography by John M. Hall | from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2012 | The art of today must be created today,” the designer and author Paul T. Frankl wrote in 1928. “It must express the life about us. It must reflect the main characteristics and earmarks of our own complex civilization.”1 Over the past four decades, collector John C. Waddell …
Upscale Downsized
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2012 | Downsizing-a midlife rite of passage common to those whose offspring have grown up and moved out-is not a contingency that his friends would have ever dreamed possible of the abundance-loving Paul F. Walter, the New York connoisseur renowned for the scale and quality of his pathbreaking collections, which have run the gamut …
Teamwork in Piedmont, North Carolina
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 …
On Southern Turf
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | For Mary and Hank Brockman the proper preservation of the South’s material culture includes art, architecture, artifacts and the landscape. Fig. 22. The back stairwell is hung with Depression era photographs of the American South. One wall holds elegiac images of southern mansions by surrealist photographer John Clarence Laughlin (1905-1985), whose Ghosts Along …