The art and antiques trade has helped attract many talented people working in the decorative arts to the area. Meet a few of them.
Masterful Mixing at the Hammer
We asked Ann Philbin, director of the Hammer Museum, to tell us how she’s maintaining focus on the museum’s distinguished collection of European and American paintings and works on paper, while fostering the burgeoning contemporary art scene in Los Angeles.
Montgomery Place, touched by greatness
While notable for many reasons, the Montgomery Place estate in Annandale-on-Hudson is most distinctive for having enjoyed the attention of two famed American tastemakers of the mid-nineteenth century: architect Andrew Jackson Davis and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing.
Bard College: a trove of architectural gems
Dating to 1860, when it was founded by philanthropist John Bard in association with leaders of New York City’s Episcopal Church, Bard College wins plaudits for its lively liberal arts curriculum. But what strikes the casual visitor is the architectural diversity of the school’s five hundred-acre campus in Annandale-on-Hudson, which features buildings that range in style from the neoclassical to the ebullient modernity of Frank Gehry.
The bouillabaisse of design influences on an early American silver soup tureen
A few years ago, one of two silver soup tureens ordered by Thomas Gibbons in 1810 came on the market, after remaining for nearly two centuries in the possession of his descendants.
Edgewater, paradise for a preservationist
What the name of the house lacks in poetry it makes up in simplicity.
The City of Hudson, New York
In September 1609, in search of a northwest passage to Asia, Henry Hudson and his crew sailed their ship the Half Moon up a course of water that the locals then called Mohicanituk (“River That Flows Both Ways”).
Clermont and the Livingston Family
They sit along the east bank of the Hudson River in Dutchess and Columbia counties like so many pearls on a necklace: some three dozen estates built by the Livingston family and their relations.
The Thomas Cole House: Birthplace of the Hudson River School
The English-born artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848) tolerated no ill comparisons to his adopted home in upstate New York. As he wrote to a friend in 1842: “Must I tell you that neither the Alps nor the Apennines, no, nor even Aetna itself, have dimmed, in my eyes, the beauty of our own Catskills?”
Olana: Frederic Church’s living masterpiece
To visit Olana State Historic Site is to step inside the questing and ever curious mind of the great nineteenth century American painter Frederic Edwin Church. The ornate villa and meticulously designed grounds of the surrounding estate rank as one of his most superlative works, revealing his diverse interests and far-flung influences, as well his love for the pastoral Hudson …