Current and coming: The Scene

Editorial Staff Magazine

When it opened last fall on Newport’s swank Bellevue Avenue, the Audrain Automobile Museum was immediately up to speed (metaphors drawn from car culture are inexcusable but somehow inevitable with the Audrain), exhibiting a small but head-turning group of rare pre-World War II luxury cars, such as a fire-engine red 1930 Pierce-Arrow Convertible with a custom fitted compartment for your …

Disturbers of the Peace

Editorial Staff Exhibitions, Magazine

Arthur Bispo do Rosário at the Colônia Juliano Moreira, photograph by Walter Firmo, 1985. Private collection; © Walter Firmo, image courtesy Livre Galeria. One sign of an important exhibition may be its ability to move us into unfamiliar territory. By that measure, as by others, the recent show at the American Folk Art Museum, When the Curtain Never Comes Down, …

Farther afield: A Lost Paradise: The Clandon Park Fire

Editorial Staff Magazine

  Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni created a magnificent Palladian residence for Thomas, the 2nd Baron Onslow, in the 1720s on the estate outside of Guildford, in Surrey, south of London, that the baron’s great-grandfather Richard Onslow, the MP for Surrey, had purchased in 1641. The dignified restraint of Leoni’s exterior hid a luxuriant interior oozing with Georgian glamour. Its most …

Farther afield: The Magna Carta turns 800

Editorial Staff Magazine

A dedicated website (magnacarta 800th.com) showcases the exhibitions, tours, and special events across the U.K. this season in celebration of the eight hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta. The British Library’s exhibition provides the most penetrating inquiry into this historic document and displays the two manuscript copies of 1215 conserved there. The show places them into context …

Figures in a landscape: sculpture in the British garden

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts, Magazine

This article was originally published in the 1987 October issue of ANTIQUES. Pl. XIII. At the end of the beech allée at Chatsworth in Derbyshire is a colossal marble bust of William George Spencer Cavendish (1790 – 1858), sixth duke of Devonshire, on a marble column from the Temple of Minerva Sunias in Greece. No English country-house garden would be …

War, politics, and the diaspora of Irish art and design

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts, Magazine

When The Magazine ANTIQUES started publication in January 1922, it coincided with the end of the War of Independence between Ireland and Great Britain and the beginning of a self-inflicted and even more brutal Civil War among opposing factions of the Irish Republican Army that would last until 1923.1 Although ANTIQUES ’s mandate was to whet its readership’s appetite for the …

End notes: Sylvia L. Yount takes charge of the Met’s American Wing

Editorial Staff Magazine

Based as we are in New York, the staff of The Magazine ANTIQUES has a fond if not proprietary tendency to look upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art, especially its American Wing, as our “local” museum. So when we heard the news that the redoubtable Morrison H. Heckscher was retiring after forty-eight years, thirteen of them as head of the …

A spirited conversation: The European and American Galleries at the Harvard Art Museums

Editorial Staff Art, Magazine

When visitors enter the renovated and reinstalled Harvard Art Museums on the north side of Harvard Yard, they will find a series of galleries that invite a new way to approach the history of American art. The first and second floors of the Fogg Museum galleries in the 205,000-square-foot facility designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop bring together the …

On high seas: Jack London’s photography on the cruise of the Snark

Editorial Staff Art, Magazine

Jack London died young, at the age of forty, yet in some ways it is amazing that he lived as long as he did. To anyone who happened to see the thirty-one-year-old London and five other inexperienced sailors cruising through San Francisco’s Golden Gate on April 23, 1907, his survival would have seemed nothing short of miraculous. His boat the …

The Scene, January/February 2015

Editorial Staff Magazine

In anticipation of this year’s Winter Antiques Show loan exhibition, Ahead of the Curve: The Newark Museum 1909–2015, students from East Side House Settlement—the Winter Antiques Show’s beneficiary since the show started in 1954—toured the museum. Students at the Newark Museum’s Ballantine House. Photo by Jay Savulich.  The Winter Antiques show is known for its sophisticated lending exhibitions, festive opening-night …