The Magazine Antiques articles from December 2008

The Magazine Antiques archives from December 2008

Editor's letter.(Editorial)
December 1, 2008... We have a good many surprises in this issue: a little known gem of a church on the island of Jersey with an interior by Rene Lalique; the discovery that Charles Rohlfs's wife Anna Katharine Green collaborated on his remarkable furniture; an...

Rockwell Kent.(Current and coming)
December 1, 2008... The Rockwell Kent Collection at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh is a rich archive of American modernism. Established by a gift and bequest from the artist's third wife, Sally Kent Gorton, between 1974 and 2000, the collection is...

English embroidery.(Metropolitan Museum of Art collection)
December 1, 2008... This month an exhibition of some eighty of the finest examples of English embroidery from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in the galleries at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and...

Bessie Potter Vonnoh.(bronze sculptures)
December 1, 2008... Alarge retrospective exhibition of the works of the American sculptor Bessie Potter Vonnoh is now on view at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Von-noh's area of expertise--small bronzes and garden statuary associated with...

Eudora Welty.(Current and coming)
December 1, 2008... Celebrated as a writer of novels and short stories inspired by her native Mississippi, Eudora Welty was also, for a brief time, a photographer. Working under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, she traveled...

Farther afield.(still lifes exhibits Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970 and The Magic of Things: Still-Life Painting)
December 1, 2008... In The Marriage of Cadnus X and Harmony (1988), the Italian waiter and publisher Roberto Calasso proposed, "For centurics people have spoken of the Greek myths as something to be rediscovered, reawoken. The truth is, it is the rnyths that are...

The restoration of a tiny eighteenth-century ship model made by prisoners of war reveals mysteries of several kinds.(Discoveries)
December 1, 2008... To imagine a tiny ship model painstakingly carved and rigged by a homesick sailor in a damp English prison is to be reminded of the doggedness of the creative spirit. With time, incarceration, ingenuity, and only wood, bones, and hair for...

This has been a year of exceptional and beautiful books on the fine and decorative arts. Featured here are some of the best, perfect for holiday giving.(On books)(Recommended readings)
December 1, 2008... Ever since the march of progress in art was dispensed into an eclectic, postmodern void a few decades ago, there has been a flourishing industry of rediscovery, dusting off beautiful or interesting nineteenth- and twentieth-century works that...

Angels from the realms of glory, wing your flight o'er all the earth.(ANTIQUES)
December 1, 2008... The Puritans banned the observance of Christmas in early New England, and the effects of their prohibition lingered into nineteenth-century America, when the Christmas stories of Charles Dickens and Washington Irving, the poems of Clement...

The treasures Citizen Hearst; William Randolph Hearst's legend as a vulgarian with a boundless appetite for antiques has overshadowed, his talents as a collector and connoisseur.
December 1, 2008... Like Disneyland, another California fantasy built to satisfy a mogul's dream, Hearst Castle is rarely mentioned these days without its tiny trademark symbol. But unlike the kingdom of the mouse, the castle at San Simeon is one of the great...

Laliques glass church: one of Laliques greatest architectural commissions survives in a small plain church on the channel island of jersey.
December 1, 2008... The more you look at the great portal doors and altars created by the Frenchman Rene Lalique, the more he appears as a twentieth-century Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378-1455), the wonder of his age, supreme in his invention and technical mastery, and an...

Anna Katharine Green and Charles Rohlfs: artistic collaborators.
December 1, 2008... Charles and Ray Eames, Russel and Mary Wright, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Mac-donald--the artistic collaboration of such husband and wife teams is now understood as an important aspect of twentieth-century design. In some of these...

Gilbert Rohde: the man who Herman Miller; Though overshadowed by his famous successors, Gilbert Rohde was the most prescient, innovative, and elegant of America" modernists.
December 1, 2008... Instances of fakery and shady dealing aside, furniture is rarely if ever the object of ethical quandaries. But Dirk Jan (known as D. J.) De Pree (1891-1990), the founder of the Herman Miller Furniture Company, tended to view most aspects of...

Olbrich overlooked: the fallen star of fin-de-siecle modernism, Austrian architect virtuoso Joseph. Maria extravagantly gifteded but tragically short-lived. A century after his death, he still awaits his proper place in history.
December 1, 2008... As 2008 draws to its close, this year's most glaring omission on the international decorative arts scene has been any suitable centennial observance of the death of Joseph Maria Olbrich, the avant-garde Austrian architect and design polymath....

Palladio minimus: a Georgian dollhouse and the eighteenth-century miniature world.(Report)
December 1, 2008... When dining with the queen of the Brobdingnagians, Lemuel Gulliver remarked that he "had an entire set of silver dishes and plates, and other necessaries, which, in proportion to those of the queen, were not much bigger than what 1 have seen in...

Not for sale: an exquisitely made collection of miniature furniture that was bought, sold, and bought again by a connecticut antiques dealer takes up permanent residence.
December 1, 2008... The point of a gift is, presumably, to please the recipient. In this respect, the set of fortyfive miniature reproductions of antique American furniture made by Dr. Ralph H. Keeler, a New London, Connecticut, dentist, for his daughter was a...

Exhibitions symposiums lectures.(EVENTS)(Calendar)
December 1, 2008... ARIZONA Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: "One for All, and All for One: The Jumpsuit"; to February 1, 2009. CALIFORNIA Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Trust: "The Belles Heures of the Duke of Berry"; to February 8, 2009 * "Captured Emotions:...

Travel Guide.(antique dealers)(Directory)
December 1, 2008... ALABAMA Huntsville TWICKENHAMANTIQUES, Located in the Railroad Station Antique Mall, 315 Jefferson Street N., Huntsville, AL. Now in inventory are KY, TN AL, NC and SC antiques and a la'go assortment of American coin silver hol-loware and...

Calendar of shows.(Calendar)
December 1, 2008... December 12-14 Atlanta, GA. SCOTT ANTIQUE MARKET. Held the second weekend of every month. Hours: Friday and Saturday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Sunday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission; $5, good for the whole weekend. Location: Atlanta Expo Centers. For...

Calendar house.(antique shops and art restorers)
December 1, 2008... Wanted to Buy Appraisals HIGHEST PRICES PAID for 19th Century American furniture by Belter, Meeks, Herter, Hunzinger, Roux, Phyfe and Lannuier, Wooton, Moore Desks, Pottier & Stymus, and Kimbel & Cabus. Send photographs and prices to,...

Holiday greetings from Antiques and Winterthur.(Winterthur Museum and Country Estate's holiday design)
December 1, 2008... A Christmas tree hung with finials, cartouches, phoenixes, and pineapples--an antiquarian's yuletide delight? That was the initial idea for the December 1958 cover of The Magazine Antiques, but, as the editor in chief Alice Winchester...