The Magazine Antiques articles from January 2009

The Magazine Antiques archives from January 2009

Editor's letter.(changes in The Magazine Antiques)(Editorial)
January 1, 2009... We have a new look for ANTIQUES this month, the work of our art director Edward "Trip" Emerson, who deserves many more compliments than he would ever allow me to set down here. Rather than praising his inspired art direction, past and present,...

January in New York: every January collectors from across the country make a pilgrimage to New York for Americana week, in particular the three major shows--the Winter Antiques Show, the American Antiques Show, and the New York Ceramics Fair--and the auctions at Christie's, Sotheby's, and now Bonhams. Following are some of the highlights of this year's events.(CURRENT and coming)
January 1, 2009... The Winter Antiques Show will celebrate its fifty-fifth year with a loan exhibition featuring a dazzling display of some of the finest works from the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, which is also the subject of articles in this...

Christic's: the Quincy family bombe chest of drawers highlights a sales of American furniture and decorative arts.(CURRENT and coming)
January 1, 2009... In spite of the faltering economy and the somewhat lackluster results of their major American paintings sales last month (only 58 percent of the lots offered at Christie's and 60 percent at Sotheby's were sold, compared to 76 percent at both...

Sotheby's: a Salem massachusetts chest-on-chest promises to make this sale of important Americana a memorable one.(CURRENT and coming)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The highlight at Sotheby's is also of the bombe variety--the Captain Edward Allen carved and figured mahogany bombe chest-on-chest. Probably made in Salem, Massachusetts, about 1780, it is the only example of its form to originate from the...

Bonhams: a Federal caned settee with a carved cornucopia crest rail will be sold at Bonhams's first ever East Coast auction of American furniture.(CURRENT and coming)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... The London-based auction house Bonhams is holding its first ever East Coast auction of American furniture and decorative arts at its New York salerooms on January 22. Among the highlights are a New York Federal carved mahogany and caned settee...

Master Drawings Week: Eighteen dealers will exhibit European works on paper spanning five centuries and a variety of mediums.(CURRENT and coming)(Brief article)
January 1, 2009... Take note, though, that January in New York is no longer all about Americana. Collectors of European works on paper should mark their calendars for the third annual Master Drawings Week in New York scheduled for January 24-31. Eighteen dealers...

A Wedgwood revival: a nineteenth-century mantel joins the Birmingham museum's stellar collection.(MUSEUM accessions)
January 1, 2009... The mantelpiece featured here is one of twelve designed for a large neoclassical Georgian house on the estate of Buckminster Park in Grantham, Leicestershire, one of the family seats of William Tollemache, ninth Earl of Dysart. In 1881 or 1882...

Farther afield.(Victoria and Albert Museum in London Russian art exhibition)
January 1, 2009... Whither Londongrad? Museum shows, auctions, and galleries attest to an interest in things Russian that will survive fads and market forces. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London celebrates Magnificence of the Tsars with a sumptuous...

Dealer profile.(Clinton Howell, art dealer and cabinetmaker)
January 1, 2009... Blogs, it is sometimes alleged, trace their ancestry back to the early 1700s, to the brawling, gossipy, partisan broadsheet newspapers that spread--virally, you might say--through Britain's newfangled coffeehouses. Anyone trying to prove the...

The new collector: of etching and Edward Hopper.
January 1, 2009... What collector of American art, new or experienced, would not relish owning a work by Edward Hopper? Given the six- to eight-figure prices Hopper's paintings command, is this a pipe dream for anyone except the very wealthy? Not necessarily....

Editorial.(history e makers from America and England)(Editorial)
January 1, 2009... The Bohemian-born, Vienna-educated immigrant Francis J. Grund admitted to a lack of "a certain mechanical perfection" in American-made products, especially compared to those made in England, where "a greater division of labour and long-followed...

New Orleans.(antique dealers)
January 1, 2009... Natives and longtime residents of New Orleans have an endearing habit of describing their city as if it were a woman, one who is by turns refined and blowsy. Her sybaritic side is notorious, and her exquisite taste in food is famous. But what...

Window, mirror, and prism.(Corning Museum of Glass decorative arts exhibition)(Essay)
January 1, 2009... The expansionist mania that has gripped art institutions worldwide is paralleled by a confounding phenomenon: as more museums are built, the more similar they seem. Although public collections have always followed fashions in taste (and...

Seeing through modernism: from Europe to the United States, the full sweep of the modern movement in design is captured in glass at the Corning Museum.
January 1, 2009... Strolling into the modern glass gallery of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, where the display cases with pieces from 1880 to 1960 are arranged in chronological order, the aficionado of modernism feels comfortable moving quickly...

The Baptism of Pocahontas.(John Rolfe)
January 1, 2009... The legend of Pocahontas is a thread inextricably woven into our country's history. Her image has adorned everything from oil paintings to cans of chewing tobacco and is found no less than three times in the Rotunda of the nations's Capitol....

The it chair.(Frances Elkins or loop chair history)
January 1, 2009... Fashion and the public, both fickle, love the new, so it is curious that a chair designed some 250 years ago has suddenly become the "it" accessory in many trend setting houses. Furnishings do not have publicists or agents, but they do have...

A tankard by Myer Myers.(silverwares)
January 1, 2009... Myer Myers operated the most prolific silversmith's shop in New York during the third quarter of the eighteenth century and marked many of the finest American-made objects in the rococo style. He was also exceptional as the first native English...

A collection in Providence Rhode Island; a visit to Marguerite Riordan's shop in Stonington, Connecticut, was the beginning of a thirty year journey collecting American furniture and folk portraits.(Living with antiques)
January 1, 2009... A favorite Saturday Evening Post cover of 1947 illustrates two spellbound window-shoppers, noses pressed against the glass of an antiques shop in the tony coastal Connecticut town of Southport. The shop belonged to Mary Allis (1899-1987), the...

Micah Williams: some recent discoveries: the prodigiously talented Williams is proof that there are second acts in American lives.(Biography)
January 1, 2009... In the spring of 1851 a slightly built, sandy-haired man stepped out onto one of the bustling streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey. Micah Williams (Fig. 1), a former plater of silver, recently released from the Middlesex Country jail as an...

Adam Hodam's cipher book discovered: my days, my weeks, my months, my years, & fly rapid, like the whirling spheres, & around the steady pole.
January 1, 2009... From the hymn "On the swiftness of Time" Not unlike the words of the old hymn he recorded in his diary, the watercolors of Adam Hodam (or Hodom; Fig. 2) are often aswirl--with weather vanes, bells, flowers, and towering vines exhibiting the...

A "woman could paint a likeness?" A group of rarely seen folk portraits from private collections highlight the careers of women artists who were bold enough to venture forth in search of commissions.
January 1, 2009... Between 1790 and 1845 a new generation of American portrait painters emerged working in a style that departed dramatically from the one that was dominant in the country's major urban centers. Their work, characterized by a certain visual...

Exhibitions symposiums lectures.(EVENTS)(Calendar)
January 1, 2009... ARIZONA Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: "Elihu Vedder's Drawings for the Rubaiyat"; to February 8. * "One for All, and All for One: The Jumpsuit"; to February 1. CALIFORNIA Los Angeles J. Paul Getty Center: "The Belies Heures of the...

Calendar of shows.(antique trade shows)(Calendar)
January 1, 2009... December 23-January 15 New York, NY, RAMBUSCH, 110 YEARS OF DESIGNING & MAKING OBJECTS. Fourth generation family firm celebrates 110 years of custom designing and making objects for architectural interiors. Exhibition featuring current...

An icon for Yale: a miniature portrait of George Washington by Robert Field fetches nearly ten times its presale estimate and gives the Yale University Art Gallery a companion piece to its Martha.(END notes)
January 1, 2009... Not all the about the economy in general--and as related to the decorative arts and painting in particular--is bad, Late last year Skinner in Boston auctioned a miniature of George Washington by Robert Field that fetched more than...