Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Opinion”
For a change from the ordinary we asked artist and illustrator Nathan Fox, whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and New York Magazine, to create a special gatefold cover for our January/February issue that interprets the venerable Winter Antiques Show. Fox’s extraordinary illustration captures many familiar faces and sights from the show—from a Tiffany lampshade to …
Several years ago I visited the Reverend Peter Gomes, Harvard University’s chaplain and professor of Christian morals, to interview him about the way he had furnished Sparks House, the residence Harvard provides for its preacher. I was struck by the exuberance of his rooms, their voluptuous colors—golds, reds, and greens—their antiques—Yankee, French, Scottish, English—the dramatic spiral stairwell lined with wallpaper …
I first encountered the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities in the 1970s, when I was a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire. Wanting to learn more about the material world of seventeenth-century New England, I signed up for an architectural tour led by Abbott Lowell Cummings. It must have been in the fall. I remember …
Who can forget the excitement of seeing Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker as a child? The magical “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” in Act II left an indelible mark on me that still stirs up fond memories from my childhood. First performed in 1892 in St. Petersburg (illustrated above), the ballet’s popularity did not spread to the United States until …
There is a great deal of fretting these days about the future of collecting and the dearth of young collectors. Were there ever many young collectors? Probably not. It takes the perspective of age (as well as the accumulation of capital) to do what the best antiques collectors do: value a folk art painting or a tall-case clock for the …
Here is a point that had somehow eluded me until now: eighteenth-century American furniture—a John Townsend chest-on-chest, a Philadelphia tea table—was already bold, original, and world class while American painting was still struggling for stature and its own voice. This discrepancy dawned on me while reading Carrie Rebora Barratt and Barbara Weinberg’s article in this issue about the stories American …
A few months ago Eleanor Gustafson and I spent a day as guests of Historic New England. We had wanted to see what I like to think of as the bookends of that organization’s historic houses—the 1938 Gropius House in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with its spare, modernist decor and bracing use of industrial materials, and the rambling, mysterious Beauport in Gloucester, …
One of the things I admire about Electra Havemeyer Webb was her instinctive sense that the cultural designations of high-, low-, and middlebrow were silly. I do not mean to suggest that Webb was a prophet of late twentieth-century multiculturalism or that she could have argued for the relative merits of a beautifully carved duck decoy vis à vis a …
The Philadelphia Museum celebrates the memory of its former director
Get ready with us for the Brimfield Antique Show!