Antiques.

Of all the great things that the English have invented and made a part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, and the one they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country-house.

Henry James, "An English New Year," Nation, January 12, 1879

Behind the staid facades of historic houses, we tend to think of the "well-filled" rooms inside as a kind of museum exhibit of "period rooms" divided into clearly definable sections, each period with its own illustrative characteristics. In fact, every age is more in the nature of a mosaic, made up of innumerable pieces of continuity and change, of past and present, in which the variety of the individual pieces is endless. The hope of the decorative arts historian is, of course, that a pattern will emerge from these pieces. To this end, as early as 1924 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its American Wing to the public. But Homer Eaton Keyes, the founder and first editor of this magazine, immediately recognized the problems of trying to re-create a room of the past and began the argument for a process of refinement that has informed the development of the period room ever since. As the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. reminded us, "History is never a closed book. ... it is forever in the making."

As much as, if not more than, any period room, the nineteenth-century watercolors in the collection assembled by Eugene and Claire Thaw featured in this issue give us a vivid and accurate feeling of having been transported back through time. In many of them, coziness and clutter have replaced stylishness. Everything ...