A guide to fall symposiums

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

To celebrate the fall season we’ve compiled an extensive—though not exhaustive—list of several upcoming symposiums that present an exciting and diverse roster of talks related to art history, decorative arts, design, and visual culture. We hope that you will have a chance to attend some. October 1-2, 2009“A Long and Tumultuous Relationship”: East-West Interchanges in American Art Smithsonian American Art …

Behind the Screen: Bright Star with Charlotte Watts

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

As meditation on the doomed love affair between the poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) and Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), Jane Campion’s Bright Star is not a typical period film.  Critics have praised this intimate, unadorned romance since it premiered at Cannes this spring, as set decorator Charlotte Watts tells us, recreating its sets—all the way down to the upholstery nails—was …

The present learns from the past

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

September 2009 | The Shelburne Museum and The Magazine ANTIQUES have a long history together. Within a year of the museum fully opening in 1953, Alice Winchester, the magazine’s editor, introduced it to her readers as “one of the…most unusual museums” in the country, its “collection of collections” assembled over a lifetime by Electra Havemeyer Webb, whom she described, with …

Margrieta van Varick’s East Indian goods

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

September 2009 | At the time of her death in 1695 in the bucolic village of Flatbush, New York, the textile merchant Margrieta van Varick (nee Visboom, 1649-1695), the widow of the minister Rudolphus van Varick (1645-1694), owned an astonishing array of exotic goods from around the world: Chinese porcelain, Turkish carpets, Japanese lacquerwork, ebony chairs, Dutch paintings, Indonesian cabinets, …

Eyre Hall on Virginia’s Eastern Shore

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

September 2009 | Photography by Langdon Clay | “Eyre Hall…all through its venerable existence but another name for everything elegant, graceful and delightful in Old Virginia life.” Fanny Fielding’s nostalgic reminiscence of Eyre Hall during the ownership of John Eyre depicts a place we would recognize today.1 Still to be found are “the timely-clipped hedges of box and dwarf-cedar,” “the …

Great Estates: Ash Lawn-Highland in Charlottesville, Virginia

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The onset of crisp autumn air can only mean one thing: apple season is finally here, making it a great time to head to the Piedmont region of Virginia, where dozens of varieties of apples are ripe for the picking.  And while you’re there, why not take in a helping of Virginia’s history?  You can do both on Carters Mountain …

Great Estates: Homewood Museum in Baltimore, Maryland

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Homewood Museum, a National Historic Landmark on the campus of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, is one of the country’s finest Federal period houses. Based on a Palladian five part plan, it was built beginning in the summer of 1800, when Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and one of the wealthiest men in …

Site Source: Danish-furniture.com

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Furniture & Decorative Arts, Magazine

Recent issues of The Magazine ANTIQUES have delved into the history and collecting of 20th-century design. The September 2008 article “The lost generation of Danish design” by Gregory Cerio is just one example. For readers interested in learning more about Denmark’s design masters the website Danish-furniture.com offers a fine introduction. The non-commercial website was launched by Dansk Møbelkunst, a Copenhagen-based gallery …

Maynard Parker’s modern architecture & interior photography

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

The Huntington Library recently launched a new online database that makes accessible the archives of Los Angeles-based architectural and garden photographer Maynard L. Parker (1901-1976). Parker contributed images to many of the nation’s premiere home design publications from the late 1930s through the early 1970s including House Beautiful, Architectural Digest, Better Homes & Gardens, and Sunset. He traveled across the …

This Week’s Top Lots: August 8 – 14

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

*  The top lot of the August 8 sale of the estate of Joseph Stanley at Rago in Lambertville, New Jersey was an 18th century slant front desk that sold for $42,700 (estimate $1,200-1,500). Other top lots were an English Chippendale-style sofa that sold for $18,300 (estimate $2,000-3,000), and a set of Regency parlor furniture that sold for $17,080 (estimate …