/
Text
MAY/JUNE 2024
Paint decorated blanket chest
History of ownership in Lyme, New Hampshire,
1800 - 1835.
NATHAN LIVERANT
AND
S O N , LLC
ANTIQUES ARE GREEN
917-841-3824 • Frank@Levygalleries.com
Levygalleries.com
KAST Circa 1775
Probably Kings County (Brooklyn), New York or Possibly Bergen County
Primary Woods: Red Gum, Yellow Poplar, Mahogany Veneer Secondary Woods: Poplar, White Pine
Height: 78 3/4 inches, Width: 74 3/4 inches, Depth: 27 inches
For a kast with a very similar design layout please see Peter Kenny, American Kasten; The Dutch-Style Cupboards of
New York and New Jersey, 1650- 1800, entry 16 for a Bergen County example and entry 9 for a Kings County example.
Visit us on our website at www.levygalleries.com,
and Instagram/Facebook @levygalleries.
Our New
2024 catalog
is now available
at Levygalleries.com
Paul Manship
1885-1966
Goliath Heron, 1932
Bronze
14 ½ inches
Adjutant Stork, 1932
Bronze
14 ½ inches
Shoebill Stork, 1932
Bronze
14 x 3 ½ x 7 ¾ inches
info@bgfa.com • 212-813-9797 • www.bgfa.com
H.L. CHALFANT
FINE ART AND ANTIQUES
Mahogany Chippendale
highboy with a shell and
streamer drawer, scroll
top, carved rosettes and
urn, and flame finials.
Cabriole legs with shell
carving terminating in
claw and ball feet.
Philadelphia, PA.
Circa 1775.
1352 Paoli Pike
West Chester, PA 19380
610.696.1862
info@hlchalfant.com
hlchalfant.com
SALLY MICHEL: STRUCTURED BEAUTY
Paintings from the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation
May 8 - June 28, 2024
, c. 1957, 12 x 24 inches, oil on board
, c. 1950, 22 x 42 inches, oil on board
D. WIGMORE FINE ART, INC.
152 W 57TH ST, 3RD FLOOR, NEW YORK, NY 10019
DWIGMORE.COM
212-581-1657
Portrait of the Hawaiian Chiefess,
Liliha, Attributed to John Hayter
An extremely rare and previously lost portrait of Liliha (1802-1839), a member of the
Hawaiian Royal family and Royal Governor of the Island of O’ahu. In 1824 the Royal
family visited London and were painted by the court painter, John Hayter (1800-1895).
Lost for some 160 years, the original oil portraits of the King and Queen were found in
1986 in Ireland, and this portrait of Liliha emerged in the United States in late 2023.
Oil on canvas, 16” x 14”.
www.kellykinzleantiques.com
(717) 495-3395
WE ARE ALWAYS INTERESTED IN PURCHASING
ART BLACKBURN
APULIA HYDRIA WITH TWO FIGURES
SOUTH ITALY, 350 BC, HEIGHT 8.25”
PROVENANCE: PRIVATE COLLECTION, COLORADO / NEW YORK TRADE
A SIMPLY MARVELOUS INTACT EXAMPLE WITH STRONG DESIGN ELEMENTS AND PAINTING.
$6,400.-
ARTBLACKBURN.COM
P . O .
B O X
BUYING & SELLING
1 2 0 E A S T E L PA S O
4 8 5 , M A R FA , T E X A S
808-517-7154
7 9 8 4 3
INFO@ARTBLACKBURN.COM
M E M B E R O F T H E A U T H E N T I C T R I B A L A R T D E A L E R S A S S O C I AT I O N
Exhibiting classic American Folk Art at the American Art Fair, Bohemian National Hall, New York, May 11-14, 2024.
Austun T. Muller
ameruc an antuques, unc.
A rare & unique Middletown, Connecticut
mahogany looking glass with charming
love bird crest, circa 1820, with white pine
secondary wood and original maker’s
label for “L. C. Lyman, Wholesale &
Retail Dealer & Manufacturer of Looking
Glasses, Middletown, Conn. Gilt Frame
Looking Glasses, Mahogany, do. do., Black
Walnut do. do., a great variety of Patterns.
Also Portrait and Picture Frames of every
description. All kinds of Gilt Work done to
order at short notice.” 24 x 15 1/8 inches.
6JKUKUVJGƂTUVTGEQTFGFNCDGNQH.WMG
%NCTM.[OCP QH/KFFNGVQYP
Connecticut.
Celebrating America
www.usfolkart.com
austin@usfolkart.com | 614-395-8278
155 West Nationwide Blvd, Suite 175-A
Columbus, Ohio 43215
Don’t forget
to set sail this
summer for our
Nantucket shop
Angela
Cummings
$
$
"$ $!!
# #
INC.
Established 1912
$#$!$!!
#" "#" "
Cartier
DCA LIC #0016371
Antique Jewelry ~ Silver ~ Objets ~ Porcelain ~ Glass ~ Handmade Sterling Flatware
MAY /JUN E 2024
MAY/JUNE 2024
62
Pictures from a Lost Generation: An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery honors
the American women abroad who remade
themselves while making modernism
Elizabeth Pochoda
18
PUBLISHER’S LETTER
72
Don Sparacin
22
Personality and Purpose: Collecting
American furniture continues at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley
FIELD NOTES
Nature's Child
Elizabeth Pochoda
24
CURRENT AND COMING
80
The Met’s reinstalled Wang Galleries, sculptors
Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester
French in conversation, and Georgia O’Keeffe’s
New York in Chicago
48
James Gardner
OBJECT LESSON
Social Engineering: The refined forms and
high-minded purpose of A. W. N. Pugin’s
Gothic revivalism
88
Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle
54
Arts and Sciences: Long revered for his contributions to the field of ornithology, John
James Audubon’s artistic influences and
legacy receive proper vetting in a new book
Roberta J. M. Olson
FACETS AND SETTINGS
Tempting Providence: The RISD Museum
fleshes out its jewelry collection with smart
acquisitions and commissions from
contemporary makers that hearken back
to Rhode Island’s metalworking past
96
Jeannine Falino
58
Old Master Encore: Caribbean-born
neoclassical painter Guillaume Lethière gets
a second look at the Clark Art Institute
DIGITAL DOINGS
Patterned on the Past: At the Allan Breed
School of Woodworking in New Hampshire,
a museum-trained master craftsman
instructs the next generation in the styles
and standards of historic American furniture
Sarah Bilotta
Catching up with Curious Objects
Sammy Dalati
112
102
EVENTS
Sierra Holt
115
ENDNOTES
In Memoriam: Greg Cerio
Eleanor H. Gustafson
Masterpieces on the Mersey: Thanks to the
aesthetic discernment and farsighted provisions of an English viscount, Port Sunlight’s
Lady Lever Art Gallery today preserves one
of the most comprehensive collections of
fine and decorative arts in the UK
Barrymore Laurence Scherer
Cover: Detail of The Decameron by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), 1915–1916. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England.
Antique Silver
English
American
SHRUBSOLE
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A Pair of Royal George III Silver Candelabra
London, 1774 by Thomas Heming
Height: 14 ¼”; Weight: 118 oz. 4 dwt.
These candelabra were a gift from George III to the son and heir of the Earl of Jersey
on his christening in 1774. They are recorded in the Jewel House Delivery Book.
Jewelry
Objets d’Art
Gold Boxes
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In Memory
Gregory Cerio
Art Director Martin Minerva
Senior Editor/Digital Media Producer Sammy Dalati
Digital Manager/Editorial Research Associate Sarah Bilotta
Consulting Editor Eleanor H. Gustafson
Editor at Large Elizabeth Pochoda
Digital Media and Editorial Associate Sierra Holt
Contributing Editors Glenn Adamson,
James Gardner, Barrymore Laurence Scherer,
Brian Allen, Michael Diaz-Griffith
Publisher Don Sparacin
Special Consultant for Educational Initiatives Lisa Koenigsberg
Production Director LR Production + Design
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Board of Advisors
Richard T. Sharp, Chairman
Daniel K. Ackermann
Austen Barron Bailly
Bruce Barnes
Laura Beach
Sarah Coffin
Mack Cox
William Cullum
Joseph Cunningham
Pieter Estersohn
Linda S. Ferber
John Stuart Gordon
Leslie B. Grigsby
Ralph Harvard
Stacy C. Hollander
Margize Howell
Thomas Jayne
Eve M. Kahn
Patricia E. Kane
Peter M. Kenny
Alexandra A. Kirtley
Elizabeth M. Kornhauser
Robert A. Leath
Robert McCracken Peck
Valérie Rousseau
Tom Savage
Elizabeth Stillinger
Kevin W. Tucker
Gerald W. R. Ward
Philip Zea
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Editorial inquiries: tmaedit@themagazineantiques.com
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For billing inquiries, please email finance@themagazineantiques.com
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themagazineantiques.com
Newbury, Massachusetts Needlework Sampler – 24 ¾ x 19 inches framed.
Inscribed: Anne Kent Was Born January The 21st 1777 Wrought This Sampler 1785.
ALWAYS INTERESTED IN PURCHASING FINE NEEDLEWORK
www.AntiqueSamplers.com
156 Blood Street YLyme, Connecticut 06371 YTel: 860.388.6809Yhubers@antiquesamplers.com
Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885–1968), In Rittenhouse Square, c. 1905
Oil on canvas, 32 1/2 x 32 3/8 inches (82.6 x 82.2 cm)
www.averygalleries.com info@averygalleries.com (610) 896-0680
100 Chetwynd Drive, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 19010
PUBLISHER’S
O
LETTER
n March 16, 2024, we lost the brilliant, sometimes
and I’m confident he would have mocked me mercilessly for
curmudgeonly, but always huge-hearted editor who
my fumbling sentimentality here.
joined me in rescuing The Magazine ANTIQUES and
preserving its legacy, and I lost my friend.
As is too often the case with people in our lives, I didn’t
really take stock of what Greg Cerio meant to me until he
He would have reminded me to stop, to speak plainly and
sincerely—something he himself was so good at—and to
use this time and space to thank the many people whose
work has made this issue possible. So, in honor of Greg . . .
was gone. And so I find myself—along with the rest of the
Thank you to the diligent and gifted Sammy Dalati,
TMA staff, and so many others—trying to accept a future
who led the charge in assembling this book. Thank you
without Greg, while at the same time realizing the impact
to Eleanor Gustafson, whose invaluable counsel and com-
he had on all of us.
mand of style and grammar have brought consistency and
We have read about that impact in the tributes posted on
integrity to ANTIQUES under four editors-in-chief over fifty
social media, in emails, and in the homage crafted by our
years. And to the tireless efforts of Sarah Bilotta, who, on
friends and colleagues at Antiques and the Arts Weekly. One
top of spending the usual countless hours fact-checking,
fact about Greg is singled out for praise again and again: he
contributed a feature article of her own—all while main-
gave a voice and a platform to fresh perspectives. He recog-
taining our digital program. Thank you to Martin Minerva,
nized the importance of integrating young people into this
our esteemed art director, who always puts our best face
community. He valued young dealers, podcast hosts, video
forward. I must also extend my gratitude to our edito-
creators, and even one teenage writer. He listened. By this,
rial intern, Sierra Holt, and to former employees Danielle
he expanded our audience and attracted new patrons, and
Devine, Kat Lanza LoPalo, and Katy Kiick, who paid tribute
I can assure you that continuing to do so remains one of our
to Greg and helped lighten the writing and proofreading
main goals as we move ahead.
load as we brought our magazine to print. And I’m ever
While the TMA family has spent the past weeks grieving, we have also been hard at work producing the issue
grateful to my colleague Stacey Rigney for keeping her cool
and assembling the advertising side of our publication.
you hold in your hands, one that I think would have made
Thank you, finally, to our former editor-in-chief, Elizabeth
Greg proud. It’s a pity that he’ll never read the affectionate
Pochoda, who not only shared in my grief during Greg’s last
tributes to him in the Endnotes column [on pages 115–116],
days, but also consistently offers invaluable guidance, lending us her wisdom and expertise.
Greg and I viewed The Magazine ANTIQUES as a cornerstone of the community we serve. I’m proud that together
we ushered the magazine through its hundred-year mark
and into a new century. TMA will continue to look to the
future while honoring the past, and will remain an advocate
for the culturally significant objects around us for generations to come.
In conclusion, I ask you—reader, dealer, designer, and
scholar—to support our mission. Continue to engage with
us: read our stories, contribute new research, like, follow,
subscribe, reach out to our dealer friends, and, most important, buy antiques! Let us make the coming years a tribute
not only to Greg’s life, but to the legacy of the magazine to
which he committed his final years.
Greg Cerio holds a flame-stitched vest handmade by ANTIQUES’ second editor, Alice
Winchester, for its third, Wendell Garrett, while Don Sparacin and Betsy Pochoda look
on. Greg presented this vest to the Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library at the
2022 Antiques Dealers’ Association dinner, where TMA received the annual Award of
Merit. Photograph by Laura Beach.
Don Sparacin
In Memory of Greg Cerio
Nathan Liverant and Son offers our deep condolences to
the family, friends and colleagues of Greg Cerio.
Greg will be long remembered for his kindness, his talent as a
journalist and his dedicated stewardship of The Magazine ANTIQUES.
He left an imprint on our industry and will be sorely missed by all.
NATHAN LIVERANT
AND
S O N , LLC
glow
Frederic Church After
and the Landscape
of Memory
Sharp Family Gallery
Olana State Historic Site
May 12 - October 27, 2024
OLANA.org/Afterglow
Frederic Edwin Church, To the Memory of Cole, 1848. Oil on
canvas, 31 3/4 x 47 5/8 inches. Collection of Christopher Larson
May/June
2024
Index
of
Advertisers
American Art Fair.....................................................................51
Avery Galleries.........................................................................17
Austin T. Miller American Antiques........................................10
Art Blackburn...........................................................................8
Barnstar Rhinebeck.................................................................53
Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts....................................................2-3
Brimfield’s Heart-o-the-Mart..................................................57
Brunk Auctions......................................................................47
D. Wigmore Fine Art...................................................................6
David A. Schorsch & Eileen M. Smiles.......................................9
Debra Force Fine Art, Inc. ........................................................15
Douglas Stock Gallery..............................................................35
Drayton Hall...........................................................................60
Elle Shushan............................................................................27
Godel.....................................................................................29
Huber.....................................................................................16
Initiatives in Art and Culture................................................59
James Robinson, Inc. ...............................................................11
Jeffrey S. Evans....................................................................40-41
Jeffrey Tillou Antiques........................................................21, 31
Jenness Cortez Studio & Gallery.............................................33
Kelly Kinzle Antiques...............................................................7
Levy Galleries............................................................................1
Lillian Nassau.............................................................................5
MESDA.................................................................................14
Munson Museum....................................................................28
Nathan Liverant and Son Antiques..............................Cover 2, 19
Olana....................................................................................20
Pook & Pook............................................................................37
Questroyal Fine Art..........................................................Cover 4
S.J. Shrubsole..........................................................................13
Carved and Painted Bust of a Native American
Artist unidentified, American, late 19th c./early 20th c.
Carved pine, polychrome paint, horse hair headdress.
Over-all in excellent condition, original paint. Collection
of Dr. Donald Moylan. Most likely a bust of Tecumseh
(1768-1813) a Shawnee chief and warrior who organized
the resistance against the United States for expanding into
Native American lands. 19 ½”h, 19 ½”w, 8”d.
Spencer Marks Ltd. .........................................................Cover 3
Thomaston Place Auction........................................................45
On the Green in Litchfield, Connecticut | 860.567.9693 | www.tillouantiques.com
Field notes
Nature’s Child
O
f celebrations devoted to Beatrix Potter there
seems to be no end. In film, merchandise, and
museum exhibitions, like the one currently on
tour from the Victoria and Albert Museum at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, the woman
continues to fascinate [see Sarah Bilotta, “Current and
Coming: Peter Rabbit and Co. in Atlanta,” September/
October 2023]. But whether her twenty or so books
about Squirrel Nutkin, Johnny Town-Mouse, her alter
ego Peter Rabbit, and the rest of her tiny companions
still speak to twenty-first-century children is another
matter—one that I will try to consider here.
In the meantime, however, we have Beatrix Potter:
Drawn to Nature, a meticulous display of her lifelong
fascination with flora, fauna, and the spirit that animates
it all. Before she turned to the stories that made her
famous, Potter was, like many Victorians of the uppermiddle class, an amateur naturalist adept at collecting
and drawing ferns, fossils, mosses, and mushrooms.
But she clearly differed from her contemporaries (and
from most of us) by the intimate and vigorous ways in
which the natural world spoke to her; and that is what
inspires her drawings and her stories—in the same way
as, later in life, it fueled her vigorous campaign to save
England’s Lake District, as significant a part of her
legacy in Great Britain as Peter Rabbit.
22 ANTIQUES
Quotations from her journals and letters displayed
alongside her early scientific drawings show a young
woman passionately alive to every nuance of color and
texture in nature. No wonder she considered a scientific career, even though that was not possible for
women at the time. What she did instead was to thread
the needle between her ambition and the behavior
expected of her by her family—being dutiful especially to her class-conscious mother, living at home in
London until she married at age forty-seven, while
quietly, almost subversively, pursuing the interests
encouraged by her best (and only) companion, her
brother, Bertram. Together they maintained a rotating
menagerie of rabbits, albino rats, bats, and frogs, among
ninety-some other creatures. She confided their delights
alongside her discontent with the restrictions of home
to her journals. Numerous family vacations to country
places, especially to her grandmother’s house in Hertfordshire, occasioned journal passages of Wordsworthian ecstasy. She hated London.
Bertram also lived a bifurcated life, eventually leaving home as young men were allowed to do and secretly marrying an “unacceptable” woman, a mill hand,
while continuing to visit the family to keep up appearances until he died of alcoholism at forty-six. I mention
this because there is more than a measure of heroism
to Beatrix Potter’s survival and eventual triumph. How
did she do it? It’s all there in the little books.
I went back to the stack of twenty-four, slightly
smudged volumes we read to our daughter and she
read to herself some forty years ago. It was clear to me
that Beatrix Potter had brought her moments with
nature to each drawing and sentence. Compare her
images to those of a near contemporary like Arthur
Rackham (1867–1939), whose superb illustrations for
Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows memorably
caricature Toad, Mole, Ratty, and Badger. By contrast,
themagazineantiques.com
By Elizabeth Pochoda
Jemima Puddle-Duck, Benjamin Bunny, Squirrel Nutkin,
Peter, and the rest are not caricatures; they may wear
hats, don raingear, smoke pipes, and iron clothes, but
their anatomy is recognizable, almost scientific.
Like her art, Potter’s prose is also pungent and exact.
You can hear her speaking in a voice at once charming
and distinctly unsentimental. The books were, as she said,
“not made to order” for the marketplace; they originated
as stories for the children of a former governess, and she
didn’t mind underlining their realism with first-person
interjections: “Old Mrs. Rabbit was a widow; she earned
her living by knitting rabbit-wool mittens and muffetees
(I once bought a pair at a bazaar).” Their frequent themes
are the themes of her life: secrecy, subterfuge, rebellion
. . . and the dangers that await the adventurous—being
baked in a pie, rolled into a pudding, and so forth. Perennially appealing themes for any child, I would think.
When it came to her own menagerie, Potter was not
especially soft-hearted. She took the death of pets in
stride, and that live-and-let-die spirit infuses her books.
Jemima Puddle-Duck must accept her eggs being
gobbled by a dog and live to lay more, “but only four
of them hatched.” As with nature red-in-tooth-and-claw,
so with the marketplace: Ginger and Pickles (a tomcat
and a terrier) run a shop that extends credit to all
customers. They fail, close, and go on to other pursuits
while Tabitha Twitchett, whose shop does not extend
credit, succeeds. And then there is the Tailor of Gloucester, a man on the verge of failure whose bacon is saved
by the labor of others—a band of industrious mice
who sew all night, making garments the tailor sells to
the rich merchants of Gloucester while he “grew quite
stout, and he grew quite rich.” Life lessons for sure.
In considering what these stories might mean to children today, we shouldn’t ignore the whippings that
Benjamin Bunny and other miscreants occasionally receive.
Children know that rabbits don’t whip their young; I’m
not sure that there is anything wrong with telling them
that once-upon-a-time parents routinely did. Or is there?
If anything interferes with an appreciation of Beatrix
Potter’s tales today, it’s undoubtedly the number of
narrative distractions available to every child. Forty
years ago, there was only television (we sometimes did
not have one) and the occasional movie. By contrast,
my granddaughter, who is passionate about animals—
especially dogs and seals—has books of many more
kinds to turn to. Her appreciation of Potter is genuine,
but mild by comparison with her mother’s.
Does it matter if Squirrel Nutkin and his like vanish
from childhood? Maybe. Certainly, reading Potter’s
superb sentences aloud and encouraging close attention to the depiction of flora and fauna in the books
will, by slowing things down, open a world for the
attentive child. And since schools are especially concerned with environmental issues today, it might be a
good idea to link these stories to their author’s use of
her immense profits to fuel a successful campaign on
behalf of her country’s Lake District. Though by no
means a populist—it was the land, its farms, and its
wildlife and not so much the public she cared about—
she preserved and passed on to the National Trust some
four thousand acres.
So let the Potter celebrations roll on, in museum,
classroom, and, let us hope, at home.
Portrait of Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) by her
father, Rupert Potter (1832–1914), c. 1892.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, gift of Joan
Duke. Except as noted, photographs © Victoria and
Albert Museum, London, courtesy of Frederick
Warne and Co. Ltd.
Drawings of a hedgehog, assumed to be Mrs.
Tiggy, by Potter, c. 1904. Victoria and Albert
Museum, Linder Bequest.
MAY/JUNE 2024
Watercolor and graphite drawing of the leaves
and flowers of the orchid cactus by Potter, 1886.
Morgan Library and Museum, New York, gift of
Charles Ryskamp in honor of Eugene V. and Clare E.
Thaw on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary
of the Morgan Library and the fiftieth anniversary of
the Association of Fellows; photograph by Steven H.
Crossot, courtesy of the Morgan Library and Museum.
Colored pencil drawings of a bridge scene and
hares at play by Potter, 1876. Victoria and Albert
Museum, Linder Bequest.
MAY/JUNE 2024
ANTIQUES
23
Current and coming
A
s 2024 unfolds, it brings with it celebrations to mark
the centennial anniversary of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s American Wing. These will culminate publicly with a Met community
day on November 10, but the opening
salute to the centennial is represented
by an engaging reinstallation of the
Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Galleries
of Eighteenth-Century American Art,
unveiled in early April. The Met’s project team—headed by Sylvia Yount, curator in charge of the American
Wing—has approached this most auspicious of birthdays with a light touch and a thoughtful gaze, offering
New-look
Wang Galleries
at the Met
24 ANTIQUES
multiple vantage points from which to view the last
few hundred years. Connoisseurship, here and there
eclipsed by a narrative-driven approach to objects, is
back, but in updated form, reflecting our increasingly
nuanced understanding of the past.
Alyce Perry Englund, associate curator of American
decorative arts, supervised the reinstallation, which
takes hold near the elevator entrance on the wing’s
second floor and snakes through six rooms, ending
just beyond the Van Rensselaer Hall. Since 2012 these
spaces have evolved from a showcase for paintings to a
mixed display of paintings and decorative arts. In their
latest incarnation they champion furniture.
themagazineantiques.com
In envisioning The Calculated Curve, as the reinstallation has been titled, Englund sought contrast with
the contextual displays in the wing’s period rooms,
which remain intact. Her aim was to elevate furniture
as an artistic medium, emphasizing technical and
aesthetic considerations. As she notes, “baroque and
rococo styles are about the curve, about furniture makers engaged in problem solving to produce almost
gravity-defying forms.”
The presentation of roughly forty-five examples of
seating and case furniture, clocks, and looking glasses,
plus two finials presented as sculptural elements, is
both visually compelling and intellectually accessible,
MAY/JUNE 2024
even for visitors unaccustomed to looking critically at
furniture. Gallery text is minimal and the installation
itself is dramatically austere. Raking light accentuates
carved surfaces and shapely silhouettes. Among the first
of many gutsy pieces that visitors will encounter is a rare
triple-top New York gaming table of 1760–1790. The
geometric precision of its inlaid playing surface for backgammon and chess offers a striking counterpoint to the
whiplash curves of its serpentine front and cabriole legs.
The Calculated Curve conveys the duality of eighteenth-century furniture, with its Enlightenment mix
of scientific exactness and exuberant artistry. The
installation moves through four distinct sections—
High chest of drawers,
probably Maine or New
Hampshire, 1730–1750. All
objects illustrated are in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Bequest of Cecile L. Mayer.
Dressing table, probably
Maine or New Hampshire,
1730–1750. Sylmaris Collection,
gift of George Coe Graves.
Japanned high chest of drawers,
Boston, 1750–1760. Purchase,
Joseph Pulitzer Bequest.
ANTIQUES
25
Current and coming
“Movement, Mathematics, and
Material,” “Nature and Narrative,”
“Silhouette and Surface,” and “Design
Inspiration”—before reaching its final
grouping, “The Art of Many Hands.”
Here and in the introductory text
Englund acknowledges overlooked contributors to the
story of American furniture:
makers of color, indentured
immigrants, women, and teens.
Wing aficionados are treated
to some recent acquisitions,
among them an armchair of
about 1781 attributed to
Connecticut maker Eliphalet
Chapin, the gift of Erving and
Joyce Wolf, and a Philadelphia
card table of about 1750–1755,
the promised gift of the Wangs.
A lantern clock made in Leek,
England by Peter Stretch and
a tall-case clock created by the craftsman after he
immigrated to Philadelphia are from the holdings of
clock collector and historian Frank Hohmann III.
Reflecting new research by Englund and shown
together in the galleries for the first time are a bonnettop high chest and dressing table likely made by the
same hand in New Hampshire or Maine that came to
the Met through different sources thirty-two years apart.
Together they are a marvel of provincial New England
design and craftsmanship.
The Calculated Curve hints at more to come. Three
examples of japanned case furniture, a japanned tallcase clock, and a japanned mirror made in Boston
between 1730 and 1760 flag Englund’s longtime
research interest in the subject. Her findings will be
published in the Winter 2025 edition of the Met Bulletin.
Audio recordings narrated by woodworkers Sharon
C. Mehrman and Leslie Dockeray, and intern Coumba
Diagne, provide additional perspectives on the furniture on view. Englund also collaborated with Met
furniture conservator Marijn Manuels on a video
Armchair attributed to Eliphalet Chapin (1741–1807), East Windsor, Connecticut,
c. 1781. Gift of Erving and Joyce Wolf, in memory of Diane R. Wolf.
Installation in the Van Rensselaer Hall as part of The Curated Curve: EighteenthCentury American Furniture. The design of the Boston side chair of c. 1765–1790 was
inspired by Plate 9 of Robert Manwaring’s The Cabinet and Chair-Maker’s Real Friend
and Companion (London, 1765). Visible through the doorway is an armchair attributed to the workshop of Solomon Fussell, Philadelphia, c. 1735–1750. Photograph
by Paul Lachenauer, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Lantern clock made by Peter Stretch (1670–1746), Leek, Staffordshire, England,
1691–1702. Sansbury-Mills and Richard Hampton Jenrette American Funds.
26 ANTIQUES
themagazineantiques.com
Actual size
James Peale (American, 1749–1831)
Gentleman with the initials S I C, signed & dated 1792
April 25–28, 2024
FINE PORTRAIT MINIATURES
www.PortraitMiniatures.com
Current and coming
discussing treatment approaches to a heavily carved
Philadelphia marble-slab table once owned by General
John Cadwalader (1742–1786).
The Calculated Curve implicitly honors all who have
made the American Wing an essential institution over
the past century. Indeed, several of the included objects
are familiar from R. T. H. Halsey and Charles O. Cornelius’s
Handbook of the American Wing, the publication that
accompanied the wing’s opening exhibition. Of that
pioneering venture, the wing’s then chairman John
K. Howatt wrote in 1985: “When they were opened
in October 1924, the American Wing’s sixteen period
rooms, three exhibition galleries, and several alcoves
caused a sensation. Here, virtually for the first time,
American antiques were presented in an orderly, chronological way.” A century later, the taxonomy is no less
important, just more evolved.
—Laura Beach
Gaming table, New York City,
1760–1790. Rogers Fund.
UTICA, NY
MUNSON.ART
Henry Alexander
(1860–1894)
Sunday Morning, 1883. Oil on canvas, 22 × 17¼ in. Signed and dated lower right
26 Village Green, Bedford, New York 10506
914 205 3695 godelfineart.com
open daily by appointment
Current and coming
of the most transformative donations in its his“O ne
tory” is how Thomas P. Campbell, CEO and director
of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, describes
the promised gift to the institution of the Bernard and
Barbro Osher Collection of American
Art. The collection not only includes
examples by many of America’s foremost artists—Winslow Homer, Thomas
Moran, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas
Eakins, William Merritt Chase, John
Singer Sargent, Charles Sheeler, and
Alexander Calder—but also introduces works by artists
not previously represented in the Fine Arts Museums,
among them Robert Blum, Frank Vincent DuMond,
Frederick Carl Frieseke, William McGregor Paxton,
Edward Henry Potthast, and John Sloan (the only
member of the Eight previously missing from the permanent collection). All sixty-one works will be on view in
American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art at
the de Young from May 18 to October 20.
American paintings
at the Fine Arts
Museums of
San Francisco
The Patio – No. 1 by Georgia
O’Keeffe (1887–1986), 1940.
© 2024 Georgia O’Keeffe
Museum / Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York. All
objects illustrated are in the
Fine Arts Museums of San
Francisco, promised gift of
Bernard and Barbro Osher;
all photographs are by Randy
Dodson.
Portrait of Samuel Jones by
Thomas Hovenden (1840–
1895), c. 1882.
30 ANTIQUES
Since it’s always interesting to learn how such
important collections are assembled, we are grateful
to associate curator Lauren Palmor, who organized
the show and wrote the accompanying catalogue,
for providing us with the following background.
The Oshers’ attraction to American painting stems
originally from Bernard’s years at Bowdoin College
in Brunswick, Maine, where he studied American art
under Philip Conway Beam, a Winslow Homer scholar
who encouraged his interest in the artist. Osher later
made some of his first acquisitions from the pioneering art dealer Edith Halpert, whose Downtown
Gallery featured works by many artists who would go
on to become icons of American modernism. “You’d
listen to her—she would show you a picture and you
bought the picture,” Osher once told Palmor. Among
his early acquisitions from the Downtown Gallery was
Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s Boy Frightened by Lightning, long
known to Kuniyoshi scholars but unlocated and studied only through archival photographs.
themagazineantiques.com
Portrait of Ellyne Goodale New England, dated 1837. Inscribed on stretcher: “Ellyne Goodale, aged 11 years. Painted by … J. Goodale
1837, daughter of…Goodale”. Oil on canvas. 36”x 27 ½, 40 ½” x 31” with frame. Provenance: Collection of Peter Tillou. Lined, minor
in-painting (lower right), otherwise in fine condition. This full-length portrait shows Ellyne wearing a blue puffy-sleeve dress while holding
a bouquet of flowers and a basket standing beside red drapery. For a nearly identical example by the same hand, Where Liberty Dwells: 19th
Century Art by the American People, Works of Art from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Tillou, plate 48.
Rare Diminutive Rhode Island Sideboard Newport or Providence, Rhode Island. Ca. 1790. Mahogany and white pine with inlaid
birch panels. Excellent condition throughout, brasses replaced in original holes, some drawer beading and veneer repairs. Provenance: James
McNab, Charleston South Carolina. 41” H x 56” W x 22” D.
On the Green in Litchfield, Connecticut | 860.567.9693 | www.tillouantiques.com
Current and coming
first property she ever owned. It is the first in a series
of views she painted of the house and courtyard,
and through color, shape, and contrast makes apparent her interest in natural building forms. Thomas
Hovenden’s Portrait of Samuel Jones depicts one of
the models for Sunday Morning (1881), a painting
already in the permanent collection. Jones, who was
born into slavery in Maryland but lived as a free man in
Pennsylvania, was in his early seventies when he met
Hovenden, and served as one of his favorite models
until Jones's death in 1882. Over the course of their
brief friendship, Hovenden made Jones the subject
In 1970 Osher co-purchased the historic San Francisco
auction house Butterfield and Butterfield, a move that
widened his collecting interests, which grew to include
key artists and movements spanning more than a
hundred years of American art history. The rest, as they
say . . .
Palmor also pointed out a few of the highlights of
the collection, among them two of the first Southwest
works by Georgia O’Keeffe to join the collection: Front
of Ranchos Church (1930) and The Patio – No. 1. The
latter depicts the artist’s house at Ghost Ranch, the
Boy Frightened by Lightning
by Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1889–
1953), 1921. © Estate of
Yasuo Kuniyoshi / Licensed by
VAGA at Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
Summer Days by Edward
Henry Potthast (1857–
1927), c. 1915.
Cat-walk by Charles Sheeler
(1883–1965), c. 1947.
32 ANTIQUES
of at least six genre paintings. In a departure from
those highly constructed scenes, in Portrait of Samuel
Jones Hovenden simply portrays Jones as himself, with
warmth and charisma.
All the works in the Osher Collection are detailed in
the eponymous catalogue from the Fine Arts Museums
of San Francisco, which will be published in May. To
celebrate its launch, Palmor will present a curator’s talk
at the de Young on May 25 at 1 pm.
American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art • Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco/de Young • May 18 to October 20 •
famsf.org
themagazineantiques.com
JENNESS CORTEZ
“Homage to Marie-Thérèse Walter” © by Jenness Cortez, acrylic on a 24” by 30” mahogany panel
When they met for the first time in Paris, in 1927, Picasso told the seventeen year old Marie-Thérèse Walter that
they would “do great things together,” and he was right. For the next decade and a half she was the muse and catalyst
for the most lyrical work of his life. In my painting reproduced above, I have chosen some of my favorite Picasso images
of Marie-Thérèse. Clockwise from upper left: Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter, ink and wash on paper, 1936, Pierpont
Morgan Library, NY; Marie-Thérèse, 1939, Private collection; Nude, Leaves and Bust, 1932, Private collection; MarieThérèse with a Garland, 1937, Private collection; 1932 Cecil Beaton photograph of Picasso in front of Nude, Leaves
and Bust; Clock, pewter and enamel London, circa 1900; Picasso’s hand painted clay vessel (I chose it as a toast to
Marie-Thérèse), 1950, Picasso Museum, Paris; Photograph: Marie-Thérèse Walter, circa 1937, photographer unknown;
The Dream, 1932, Private collection. A late 19th century Italian chest is shown below these images of Marie-Thérèse.
JENNESS CORTEZ
Private Commissions Accepted • Gallery and Studio • Averill Park, NY • Tel. (518) 674-8711
Current and coming
Augustus
Saint-Gaudens
and Daniel
Chester French
in conversation
Model for Wisconsin by Daniel
Chester French (1850–1931),
c. 1912. Chesterwood,
Stockbridge, Massachusetts,
gift of the Daniel Chester French
Foundation; except as noted,
photographs courtesy of the
Frist Art Museum, Nashville,
Tennessee.
Abraham Lincoln: The Man by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–
1907), modeled 1887, cast 1912.
Saint-Gaudens National
Historical Park, Cornish,
New Hampshire.
34 ANTIQUES
being French’s colossal likeness of the president at the
Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.
Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors
Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French,
a traveling exhibition on view at Nashville’s Frist Art
Museum until late May, was born from the creative
minds at the American Federation of the Arts, the SaintGaudens Memorial, and Chesterwood, French’s summer
home and studio in the Berkshires. The show comprises
pieces from the collections of both Chesterwood and
Saint-Gaudens’s house in New Hampshire, Aspet, both
part of the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios program
of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In fact, the
exhibition is the result of a HAHS members’ convention
at Chesterwood in 2019, where attendees from both
sites realized the similarities between the artists’ homes,
as well as their lives and careers.
I
n public parks throughout the United States, among
the foliage and greenery, sit soldiers, presidents, and
other men and women in weather-worn limestone
or patinated bronze. Often overlooked by passersby,
these sculptures remind those who do stop of the
national or local events that have shaped the country’s history. Many date from the monument-building
boom that followed the Civil War, when sculptors were
beginning to swap out warriors in heroic poses for
more solemn memorials to the dead. Born just two
years apart, beaux-arts sculptors Daniel Chester French
and Augustus Saint-Gaudens took a leading role in the
stylistic shift. The pair grew up during a period of great
change in the United States, living through the Civil
War, the inauguration and death of President Abraham
Lincoln, and the first turbulent years of Reconstruction
before they reached the age of twenty. Both sculptors
would go on to memorialize Lincoln multiple times
in similarly somber poses, the most famous example
themagazineantiques.com
Douglas Stock Gallery
One of America’s most selective dealers in antique Oriental rugs
¶´[¶´%LGMDUFDUSHW8QFRPPRQVN\EOXH¿HOGZLWKZKLPVLFDOÀRZHUV1RUWKZHVW3HUVLDFLUFD
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douglas@douglasstockgallery.com • (781) 205-9817
douglasstockgallery.com
Current and coming
as nationwide protests following the murder of George
Floyd Jr., and societal backlash against memorials and
monuments to historical figures who promoted or
defended slavery and discrimination placed public
sculptures front and center in national discourse.” As
prominent figures in American sculpture and teachers
of the next generation of sculptors, any discussion of
that era would be incomplete without note of French’s
and Saint-Gaudens’s contributions.
—Katherine Lanza LoPalo
Monuments and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus SaintGaudens and Daniel Chester French • Frist Art Museum, Nashville,
Tennessee • to May 27 • fristartmuseum.org
Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania • June 29 to
January 5, 2025 • michenerartmuseum.org
Davida Johnson Clark by SaintGaudens, 1886. Saint-Gaudens
National Historical Park.
Andromeda (study) by French,
1929. Chesterwood, gift of
the Daniel Chester French
Foundation; photograph
courtesy of the Michener
Art Museum, Doylestown,
Pennsylvania.
36 ANTIQUES
The Frist has the privilege of hosting seventy pieces
by the “friendly rivals,” in what is the first ever exhibition
to focus on French and Saint-Gaudens together. The
pair were inextricably linked by more than their age and
experiences, running in the same
circles and even hiring the same
models. The two ultimately shared
a friendship, spending time at each
other’s summer estates and New
York City studios.
In June, Monuments and Myths moves
to the Michener Art Museum in Pennsylvania. Visitors there will have access to an additional sculpture not exhibited at the Frist: a large
plaster model of French’s final work, Andromeda.
French’s interpretation in marble of the Greek
myth is on view at Chesterwood, atop a rotating dais on a track leading out of the artist’s
studio that was installed so that he could work
on his sculptures en plein air.
The exhibition comes at an interesting time for
memorial sculpture. In an era of national reflection,
public monuments and memorials are being scrutinized, particularly those representing the Civil War era.
Donna Hassler, director emerita of Chesterwood, and
Rick Kendall, superintendent of the Saint-Gaudens
National Historical Park, mark the significance of the
show’s timing in their introduction to its catalogue:
“The swell of current events further shaped the project,
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A
lthough the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe are
primarily abstract, comprising basic geometrical
shapes and lines, they never fail to evoke the places
where they were made. A look at her mountain and lakeside landscapes takes one to the
shores of Lake George, a small community in
the New York Adirondacks; her still lifes of animal bones and southwestern scenery seem
to contain within them the arid countryside and clear
blue skies of her homes in New Mexico. However, years
before setting off on the transcontinental adventures
that would result in her best-known canvases, O’Keeffe
lived in the Midwest. From 1905 to 1906 she was a
student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
where she studied under Dutch-American artist John
Vanderpoel. She maintained an affection for her alma
mater throughout her career, in 1947 donating part
of the art and photography collection of her late husband, Alfred Stieglitz, to the Art Institute, which in 1943
had held her first retrospective and would exhibit her
singular brand of modernism many more times in the
subsequent decades.
In a new show opening on June 2, the Art Institute
continues to highlight O’Keeffe’s work, but by focusing
on another major city the artist once called home: New
York. Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” displays examples
from O’Keeffe’s cityscape paintings and drawings made
from 1924 to 1929, during her stay at the Shelton Hotel
in Midtown Manhattan. At that time she was just beginning her celebrated large-scale flower paintings and was
newly married to Stieglitz, the well-heeled owner of 291,
Georgia
O’Keeffe in
the big city
East River from the 30th Story
of the Shelton Hotel by
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–
1986), 1928. New Britain
Museum of American Art,
Connecticut, Stephen B.
Lawrence Fund; all photographs courtesy of the Art
Institute of Chicago.
The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.
by O’Keeffe, 1926. Art Institute
of Chicago, gift of Leigh B.
Block, © Georgia O’Keeffe
Museum/ Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.
38 ANTIQUES
the city’s trailblazing photography gallery. It was not an
easy time. O’Keeffe’s union with Stieglitz was precipitated by a difficult bout with the Spanish Flu, and marked
by serial infidelity and jealousy. O’Keeffe was also a
woman artist finding success, making her an easy target
for criticism. When the newlyweds took up residence
in the Shelton in 1924, it became her refuge. It was one
of Manhattan’s first residential buildings, and it offered
first-class amenities, such as a cafeteria where O’Keeffe
ate two meals a day and a heated pool where she swam
for exercise. The amazing views from the thirtieth floor
provided an inspirational space where she could create
her versions of the city.
“One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is
felt,” O’Keeffe once explained. Through experimentation with materials, perspective, and scale, she captured the industrial atmosphere and grand scale of the
skyscrapers while simultaneously reflecting the human
themagazineantiques.com
seen from O’Keeffe’s apartment. The skyscraper stands
like a column of darkness that lightens as it nears the
busy street, outlined by glittering Lexington Avenue
trailing away to the north. O’Keeffe remarked about
the scene, “Lexington Avenue looked, in the night, like
a very tall thin bottle with colored things going up and
down inside it.”
In the exhibition will be over ninety paintings, pastels, drawings, photographs, and ephemera from the
1920s and 1930s, drawn from the Art Institute’s collection and loaned from other institutions, such as the
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and Nebraska’s
Sheldon Museum of Art. The range of items on view
encompasses not only O’Keeffe’s urban subject matter but New Mexico–inspired canvases such as Cow’s
Skull with Calico Roses, making the exhibition the
first to emphasize the artist’s total output from the
period. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue
with essays from the show’s curators, Sarah Kelly
Oehler and Annelise K. Madsen.
“My New Yorks would turn the world over,” O’Keeffe
once mused. The Art Institute of Chicago is making this
a reality.
—Sierra Holt
Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” • Art Institute of Chicago •
June 2 to September 22 • artic.edu
New York, Night by O’Keeffe,
1928–1929. Sheldon Museum
of Art, University of
Nebraska-Lincoln, Nebraska
Art Association Thomas
C. Woods Memorial; photograph by Bill Ganzel.
East River from the Shelton
(East River No. 1) by O’Keeffe,
1927–1928. New Jersey State
Museum, Trenton, purchased
by the Association for the
Arts of the New Jersey State
Museum with a gift from
Mary Lea Johnson.
experience in the city. In The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y.,
the viewer looks up into the daytime sky, the hotel
towering in the frame and glaring sunspots reflecting
from the windows. “I went out one morning to look
at it [the Shelton Hotel],” O’Keeffe recalled in her 1976
book Georgia O’Keeffe, “and there was the optical illusion of a bite out of one side of the tower made by the
sun, with sunspots against the building and against
the sky.” The dusky scene in New York, Night shifts the
perspective to line up with the crenelated roof of the
Hotel Beverly (now the Royal Sonesta Benjamin), as
MAY/JUNE 2024
ANTIQUES
39
The Collection of Katherine “Kitty Sue” Pease
Los Angeles, CA
Visit us and bid at
jeffreysevans.com
Specialists in Southern decorative arts, Americana, folk art, 18th to 20th
c. glass and ceramics, and fine antiques of all types. Conducting monthly
catalogued auctions as well as providing appraisal and museum services.
June 21, 2024
Always accepting quality consignments.
Please contact Janice Hannah at (540) 434-3939, ext. 102
or consign@jeffreysevans.com to request a free evaluation of your property.
2177 Green Valley Lane | Mt. Crawford, VA 22841 | VAF #782
540.434.3939 | jeffreysevans.com | info@ jeffreysevans.com
Premier Americana
Visit us and bid at
jeffreysevans.com
Specialists in Southern decorative arts, Americana, folk art, 18th to 20th
c. glass and ceramics, and fine antiques of all types. Conducting monthly
catalogued auctions as well as providing appraisal and museum services.
June 20–22, 2024
Always accepting quality consignments.
Please contact Janice Hannah at (540) 434-3939, ext. 102
or consign@jeffreysevans.com to request a free evaluation of your property.
2177 Green Valley Lane | Mt. Crawford, VA 22841 | VAF #782
540.434.3939 | jeffreysevans.com | info@ jeffreysevans.com
Current and coming
I
n 1901 Maynard Dixon, accompanied by fellow artist Edward
Borein, set off on horseback
from Oakland, California, to seek
diversion in the Great
Basin. He’d learned to
ride horses as a boy,
taught by Mexican
cowboys in the San
Joaquin Valley ranching community where he’d grown up.
He would paint horses, too, wild
ones, on the journey that skirted
Nevada—his first time in the
state—and passed through
eastern Oregon before concluding in Boise, Idaho. One of his
watercolors from the trip, of a
cowboy breaking in a mustang
in some dusty desert corral,
ended up as the cover of the
March 22, 1902, issue of Harper’s
Weekly. Confidently conceived
and executed, it makes a proud
addition to the visual tradition of
celebrating man’s triumph over
Maynard
Dixon’s
Nevada
nature. But ten years after the closing of the frontier, at a time when automobiles were already
beginning to supplant horses in California, the
“taming of the West” was beginning to take
on new, uncomfortable meanings for Dixon,
a tension that would drive him out of his
San Francisco home and into the wilderness at
frequent intervals for the rest of his life.
Dixon found many of the answers he was
seeking in Nevada, returning to the state again
and again to paint cowboys, sagebrush-covered
plains, mesas, ranches, cottonwood trees, and
herds of horses in the years between his 1901
journey and 1939. That story is being told for the
first time this summer in Sagebrush and Solitude:
Maynard Dixon in Nevada, an exhibition of 150
sketches, ephemera such as manuscript poems
by the artist, and paintings—many of which
have never been seen before—on view at the
Nevada Museum of Art.
Largely self-taught, Dixon’s early work from
Nevada bears an unmistakable impressionist stamp. That would change following the
1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition
42 ANTIQUES
Mountains in Sunset Light
[Humboldt County, Nevada]
by Maynard Dixon (1875–
1946), 1927. Michael J. and
Kathleen A. Boyce, Boyce Family
Trust. All photographs courtesy
of the Nevada Museum of Art,
Reno.
Signal Station [Boulder Dam
Project] by Dixon, 1934. John
and Geraldine Lilley Museum of
Art, University of Nevada, Reno.
Old Homesite by Dixon, 1937.
Brigham Young University
Museum of Art, Provo, Utah,
gift of B. Darrel and R. Reed Call.
Bien Venido y Adios, selfportrait by Dixon, 1927.
Private collection.
Tired Men by Dixon, 1934.
Private collection.
themagazineantiques.com
in San Francisco, where Dixon was exposed to a
sampling of the post-impressionism, cubism, and
futurism then sweeping Europe. Shortly thereafter
he met and married the pioneering documentary photographer Dorothea Lange. The pair would
become mainstays of the Bay Area artistic and literary scene that also included photographers Ansel
Adams and Imogen Cunningham, her printmaker
husband Roi Partridge, novelist Charles Erskine
Scott Wood, and Japanese American landscape
painter Chiura Obata.
Except when Dixon skipped town. “He was always
going ‘for a month or six weeks,’ but he never came
back inside of four months,” Lange recalled. “His
trips were practically disappearances as far as San
Francisco life was concerned.” Dixon’s protracted
escapes to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada
in search of “sagebrush inspiration,” as he called it,
became indispensable as he sorted out his diverse
artistic inspirations and influences. The flattened
surface and bold, geometrical designs of his mature
style, which began to emerge by the early 1920s,
pull from modern graphic ideas, but in a way that
was carefully integrated with Dixon’s penchant for
realism. Strong high-altitude light flashes across his
canvases like a strobe, providing justification for the
neat, cloisonné-like outlines surrounding and setting off Dixon’s trees, horses, men, and mountains.
Painting when the sun was lower in the sky allowed
him to reintroduce into his art careful Renaissancestyle modeling—such as for the straining muscles
of horses or the twisted trunks of golden-leaved cottonwoods—that had been called into question by
Edouard Manet fifty years before.
MAY/JUNE 2024
Dixon’s best-known paintings can seem slick and commercial, not as forward-looking as the abstractions of
other artists of the southwest, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, or
New Mexico’s transcendental painting group of a bit later.
This legibility was recognized and patronized by advertisers like Standard Oil and the Public Works of Art Project,
which commissioned Dixon to document the construction of the Boulder Dam (renamed after Herbert Hoover
years later) in 1934, for which he embarked on a final painting excursion to Nevada before his divorce from Lange
the following year. Dixon’s less popular work is harder to
place, suffused with a stark melancholy that’s reminiscent
of Edward Hopper. Dixon would return to Nevada twice
more before 1939, after which he was forced to retire, on
account of his emphysema, to the dry heat and mild winters of Arizona, where he died in 1946. His paintings of the
Great Basin remain as a testament to a region in which all
but the most monumental was in a state of flux.
Sagebrush and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada • Nevada Museum of
Art, Reno • to July 28 • nevadaart.org
ANTIQUES
43
Current and coming
T
here’s a blue dragon that lives in an exhibition at
the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.
The winged beast is caught in mid-roar, arching its
neck with angry eyes, exposed teeth, and
a bright red tongue curling from its mouth.
No, this isn’t a scene in a medieval painting;
the dragon is an Italian glass ornament
on a compote dish, its long blue tail and
body wrapped around the vessel’s stem.
This beast, as well as a collection of forty-nine other
mythical creatures (neighing Pegasuses and dragons
caught in mid-flight) and real-life animals (sinuous
dolphins, seahorses, swans, and serpents), all expertly
imagined in glass, are the focus of the exhibition
Fantastic Creatures of the Venetian Lagoon: Glass
1875–1915.
Venetian
glass in
Virginia
turned-businessman Antonio Salviati and glassmaker
Giuseppe Barovier, whose works are represented in
the Chrysler show, revitalized the industry by founding firms to manufacture and sell Venetian glass.
Instead of starting over with new designs, these companies sought inspiration from traditional Venetian
glassware that featured forms from antiquity and the
Middle Ages.
The items on display at the Chrysler are drawn
from a 2022 donation by Marjorie Reed Gordon of
eighty works from her personal collection. “When
I saw that more than half of the objects were ornamented with dragons, dolphins, and other fabulous
creatures,” explains the exhibition’s curator, Carolyn
Swan Needell, “it became clear to me that there was
a fabulous show waiting to happen.” Although these
creatures typically terrify, at the Chrysler Museum of
Art they’re too beautiful to look away from.
—Sierra Holt
Fantastic Creatures of the Venetian Lagoon: Glass 1875–1915 •
Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia • to August 18 • chrysler.org
Detail of a dragon compote by
Giuseppe Barovier (1853–1942)
for Salviati Dott. Antonio or
Artisti Barovier, Italian, c. 1877–
1914. All objects illustrated are
in the Chrysler Museum of Art,
Norfolk, Virginia, gift of Marjorie
Reed Gordon.
Red dragon vase made by Artisti
Barovier or Fratelli Toso, Italian,
c. 1900–1914.
Pegasus compote made by
Artisti Barovier or Fratelli Toso,
c. 1895–1914.
44 ANTIQUES
If it is these pieces’ forms and colors that make them
eye-catching, their craftsmanship demands respect.
Glassworkers expertly sculpted the zoological forms
from hot glass and dusted them with gold. Next, they
precisely affixed the dragons and other creatures to
blown glassware. The figures are designed to appear
as if they’re moving, imbuing the vases, cups, and
bowls they’re mounted on with a sense of life.
The period covered by the show, which followed
the Habsburg Empire’s 1815–1866 occupation of
northern Italy, was a time of renewal for Venice.
Austrian rule had devastated the Venetian glass
industry to promote its own glass trade in Bohemia
(the modern-day Czech Republic). Once Venice
joined the Kingdom of Italy, advocates like lawyer-
themagazineantiques.com
Current and coming
silky waterfalls against jagged rocks. Once in a great
while, he blends a tiny human subject into the vast
frame, Thomas Cole–style. In an era when photography was still largely seen as a tool of documentation,
rather than as an art, O’Sullivan developed the principles of contrast and comparison that would reframe
landscape photography for the next century.
This is the first time that the Speed’s full collection of
albumen prints from O’Sullivan’s Surveys West of the
One Hundredth Meridian series will be shown together,
after its recent conservation. As noted on the museum’s
website, the exhibition explores the “impact of American
westward expansion on indigenous tribes encountered
by O’Sullivan and the ways the landscape has changed
in the past 150 years.” When we reflect on these photographs and the vastness of nature, it is difficult not to
contextualize ourselves as the tiny human figures in a
changing landscape.
—Sarah Bilotta
Capturing the West: Timothy O’Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer •
Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky • to August 25 •
speedmuseum.org
O’Sullivan’s
Old West at
the Speed
Shoshone Falls, Snake River,
Idaho by Timothy H.
O’Sullivan (c. 1840–1882),
1874. All objects illustrated
are in the Speed Art
Museum, Louisville,
Kentucky, gift of the
Louisville Free Public Library,
restored by income from the
Marguerite Montgomery
Baquie Memorial Trust.
Ancient Ruins in the Cañon
de Chelle, New Mexico by
O’Sullivan, 1873.
46 ANTIQUES
E
arly photographer Timothy O’Sullivan left behind
very little in the way of biographical documentation: no birth certificate, no marriage record. The best
evidence of his life is his vast archive of images of
Civil War– and Reconstruction-era America, which he
observed with pioneer-like curiosity.
After the war, where he toiled on the front lines as
an apprentice to Mathew Brady, O’Sullivan attached
himself to various federal survey expeditions then
beginning to penetrate far into the American West.
The work he created on these journeys became what
he is remembered for: evocative homages to unadulterated nature. The awe-inspiring swaths of empty
land in O’Sullivan’s images feel especially poignant
as Americans come to grips with the environmental
consequences of the settlement and urbanization of
remote areas of our country.
The Speed Art Museum addresses this dynamic
in the new exhibition Capturing the West: Timothy
O’Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer. The show focuses
on the images O’Sullivan created as a member of
the United States Geographical Surveys West of the
One Hundredth Meridian, works that would inspire
generations of future photographers, including Ansel
Adams. The photographs in the series play with the
balance of light and shadow, movement and stillness.
O’Sullivan paints craggy shrubbery against soft sand,
themagazineantiques.com
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Object lesson
Social Engineering
THE REFINED FORMS AND HIGHMINDED PURPOSE OF A. W. N. PUGIN’S GOTHIC REVIVALISM
A
s the boy, suspended from a rope tied around
his middle, was lowered through a hole in the
roof of the church, past soaring trusses and
arches, his eyes slowly grew accustomed to the dimness. Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin’s father held
the other end of the rope, gently depositing his son
on the floor of an ancient Gothic church near Rouen,
France. The church had weathered the storm of the
French Revolution—with its sanctioned dechristianization—remarkably well, and the boy could not help but
be impressed with the handicraft of the pious men who
had built the structure nearly four centuries before. He
would spend the rest of his life evangelizing on behalf
of what he saw there.
Lincoln Cathedral, one of the finest examples of Gothic architecture in the world. At
age nine Pugin produced his first Gothicinspired sketch of a proposed building, proudly
inscribing it “my first design.” Less than a decade into
his life, the Gothic style had already sunk its roots deep
in his mind.
Born in the midst of the Napoleonic Wars, Pugin
grew up in a time of seismic changes. The French
Revolution of a generation before had called into
question certain foundational ideas and elements
of the Western European worldview. It was like gravity had suddenly been switched off and the world
turned upside down, leaving no one able to predict
what tomorrow would look like. Pugin was raised on
a steady diet of family tall tales, one of which had his
father crawling out of a heap of corpses thrown in a
pit near the Place de la Bastille, swimming across the
Seine, and escaping to England. If our bedtime
stories shape our worldview, this was one hell of
a penny dreadful.
A commercial illustrator who fled the French Revolution for England, the elder Pugin, Auguste Charles
(1762–1832), had belayed his son and pupil through
the roof of the church so that he might gain a better
sense of the splendid engineering and design, down
to the minutest details. Pugin was himself a proponent
of reviving the long-out-of-fashion Gothic style that
characterized Western European architecture from the
twelfth to the sixteenth century, and the lessons on
that subject that he would give to his son began early.
When Pugin was six years old his parents took him to
48 ANTIQUES
themagazineantiques.com
By Benjamin Davidson and Pippa Biddle
ing that something precious had been lost,
that a golden age had winked out without
anyone noticing. As Pugin grew up, he
cast around for something that could ground
him amid the chaotic changes that his country was
experiencing. Returning to the Gothic tradition that
had long fascinated him architecturally, he became
convinced that a person’s beliefs and behaviors are
shaped by the built environment, and that traditions
served as an anchor, not a shackle. The Reformation
had, he held, not only unmoored contemporary
Britons from their collective past but led directly to
revolutionary and social upheavals. If Britain could
re-forge the links to that old tradition, it might be possible to switch gravity back on.
Pugin’s early training as a draftsman in his father’s
firm prepared him perfectly for a design career. At
fifteen years old he was handling commissions for
designs for the goldsmiths Rundell and Bridge, and
Portrait of Augustus Welby
Northmore Pugin (1812–
1852), c. 1840. National
Portrait Gallery, London;
photograph by Dcoetzee on
Wikimedia Commons.
Dining room chair from
the Speaker’s House,
Palace of Westminster,
designed by Pugin,
c. 1847, made by
Holland and Sons, 1859.
Metropolitan Museum of
Art, purchase, gift of Irwin
Untermyer, by exchange.
Oak writing table with
iron pulls designed by
Pugin, 1840. Photograph
courtesy of H. Blairman and
Sons Ltd., London.
Oak drawing table
designed by Pugin,
c. 1840s. This table with
painted shields on either
end was owned by Pugin
himself. H. Blairman
and Sons photograph.
For the majority of his childhood Pugin
worked as his father’s assistant, and when
he was twelve they traveled together on a
sketching trip to northern France. They visited Gothic sites around Rouen, and Pugin strove
to come to grips with the rules of engineering behind
the buildings he so admired—this is what led to him
hanging suspended through a hole in the roof of that
ancient church. Young Pugin would take to heart the
lessons he learned from that eccentric exercise and
others like it. Theory and facade had their place, but
how the object—be it a building, a plate, a table, or a
clock—felt in the hand, or stood up against gravity in
the real world, mattered most of all.
Over the next two decades A. W. N. Pugin developed
from a boy spelunking in the manmade caverns of
Europe to an energetic proponent of the Gothic revival
style. Today, he remains one of the great heroes of the
British cultural pantheon.
When some hear the term “Regency Britain” their
minds immediately go to the splendor on display in
such TV shows as the Netflix hit Bridgerton. But the
majority of British citizens in the nineteenth century
did not enjoy the London Season—for most it was a
time of poverty and squalor. There was a pervasive feel-
MAY/JUNE 2024
ANTIQUES
49
Object lesson
Carved oak center
table attributed
to Pugin, c. 1840s.
Photograph
courtesy of
Bonhams, London.
Gothic-revival panel
designed by Pugin,
c. 1840s, with
painting depicting
St. Philomena.
Bonhams photograph.
50 ANTIQUES
for furniture at Windsor Castle. Within five years Pugin
was designing theater sets for the Royal Opera House
in Covent Garden. This was his first foray into largescale work, and he learned valuable lessons on how to
design for dramatic impact. In 1834 he converted to
Catholicism—a risky move, given the long-established
antipathy in Britain toward the faith of Rome—and
gained access to a new set of patrons. For instance, John
Talbot, sixteenth earl of Shrewsbury, had him design
alterations and additions to his residence, Alton Towers,
which soon led to many more commissions. Around the
same time, Pugin built a country seat, a modest Gothic
revival house he named St. Marie’s Grange.
In 1836 Pugin published his treatise Contrasts,
which espoused his aesthetic theory and argued for
the revival of the medieval Gothic style in addition to
“a return to the faith and the social structures of the
Middle Ages.” Living in a Gothic house, surrounded by
Gothic material culture, would, he believed, lead one to
better and holier actions.
In the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, a pavilion
called the Royal Court, decorated by Pugin with
medieval-looking artifacts, caused a sensation at the
very heart of the avowedly “modern” showcase. Pugin
used the opportunity to market a line of Gothic-revival
objects, made more affordable by Victorian technological advances, in a non-ecclesiastical context. By selling
people on a consciously Gothic lifestyle and mode of
expression, he hoped to usher in the more pious age
he’d sought for two decades.
Still committed to traditional craft, Pugin employed
new technology to speed up production, but stopped
short of entirely mechanizing it. This was key to matching the superb quality of the original Gothic pieces
against which both Pugin and John Hardman, his metalworker and right-hand man, measured their own work.
For Pugin, honesty in material and process were critical and interrelated. The direct carving method used
by medieval craftsmen made decorative elements appear natural, as if occurring by the
will of the stone itself. This practice can be
seen in the wonderful simplicity of the drawing table of Pugin’s design that was shown by
H. Blairman and Sons of London at the 2024 Winter
Show in New York. The piece was Pugin’s own, which
accounts for the table’s low height—Pugin was only
5 feet, 2 inches tall, and decorative arts scholar Clive
Wainwright surmised that he stood at it to draw.
The table is not minimalist in the manner of
our contemporary Scandi-style. Rather it is
forthright in the expression of its purpose.
Embellishments are executed without excessive affectation. A similar spirit can be found in
the oak writing table with iron pulls Pugin designed
themagazineantiques.com
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Object lesson
Chandelier designed by Pugin,
made by John Hardman and
Company, 1853. H. Blairman
and Sons photograph.
52 ANTIQUES
for the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy (now Sisters of
Mercy), Handsworth, Birmingham. There is a quiet
confidence in the lines and curves of the piece, leaving one feeling that, although there is much about it
that is decorative, none of it is extraneous. It exemplifies how familiar Pugin was with bona fide Gothic
originals, as the same type of table appears frequently
in illuminated manuscripts and would feel at home
among pieces built for Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis in
the twelfth century.
Pugin was one of the first to design in a Gothic style
that actually drew on Gothic originals, a point of pride
that he returned to in critiques of his predecessors and
his contemporaries. In The True Principles of Pointed
or Christian Architecture, published in 1841, he lampooned undisciplined pastiches of Gothic style: “We
find diminutive flying buttresses about an armchair,
everything is crocketed with angular projections,
innumerable mitres, sharp ornaments, and turreted
extremities. A man who remains any length of time
in a modern Gothic room, and escapes without being
wounded by some of its minutiae, may consider himself extremely fortunate.”
Such acerbic comments infuriated many of his less
competent contemporaries. The earlier Georgian
Gothic was so much more Georgian than Gothic that,
once you notice it, the historical inaccuracy becomes
glaring. Pugin does not spare himself from criticism,
either, spending a good deal of time pointing out
the follies of his own early efforts. His 1827 design
for the dining room sideboard and canopy in George
IV’s private apartments at Windsor Castle, now in the
collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, is garishly encrusted with as many Gothic-esque elements
as would fit, to Pugin’s future embarrassment. Pieces
from his later career demonstrate the way he slowly
developed his “true principles” of Gothic revival,
emphasizing structural honesty. By the end of his
life he’d found the perfect balance, and even in relatively elaborate designs such as the dining room chair
made about 1847 for the Speaker’s House, Palace of
Westminster, the decorations manage to harmonize
with the structure of the seat. It does not require a
mass of superfluous ornament to attest to its Gothic
character. This simplicity and straightforwardness are
what made Pugin’s work so influential to later designers. His ideas proved an inspiration to the arts and
crafts of William Morris and William Price, and to the
modernism of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier.
When a piece designed by Pugin comes on the
market, his fame pushes the price up. While a chair or
table “in the style of Pugin” can quite easily be found
for $100 to $500, a center table attributed to Pugin
sold at Bonham’s London in 2013 for £5,000. In 2023 a
Pugin-designed painted panel depicting St. Philomena
sold for $6,400 at Bonhams, and at Bamfords auction
in Derby the same year a Pugin chandelier for St. Giles
Roman Catholic Church in Cheadle went for £12,500,
double the low-range estimate.
Shortly before dying, purportedly from overwork, at
the age of forty, Pugin reflected on his career with disappointment. “I have passed my life in thinking of fine
things, studying fine things, designing fine things, and
realizing very poor ones.” Perhaps the ideal was unattainable, but as he wrote to Hardman in about 1851,
“my writings, much more than what I have been able
to do, have revolutionized the taste of England.” About
this Pugin was entirely correct, part of why he remains
among the most important designers and thinkers of
the nineteenth century.
themagazineantiques.com
Facets and settings
By Jeannine Falino
Tempting
Providence
THE RISD MUSEUM
FLESHES OUT ITS
JEWELRY COLLECTION
WITH SMART
ACQUISITIONS AND
COMMISSIONS FROM
CONTEMPORARY
MAKERS THAT
HEARKEN BACK TO
RHODE ISLAND’S
METALWORKING PAST
Bee Wing Lace neckpiece
by Luci Jockel (1991–), 2021.
Honeybee wings, PVA glue.
All objects illustrated are in
the RISD Museum, Providence,
Rhode Island. Museum
purchase, gift of Joseph
A. Chazan in honor of John
W. Smith.
54 ANTIQUES
W
ith more than one hundred thousand objects
from around the globe, the Museum of
Art, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD
Museum) is a public-spirited museum with a strong
teaching component. Yet, like many American museums, it has been slow to build its jewelry collection.
Until now.
Associate curator of decorative arts and design
Emily Banas is assessing the ornaments that are scattered among the museum’s departments with an eye
to meaningful expansion. She hopes that her efforts
will enable the RISD Museum to join other institutions
across the country that have begun to recognize the
importance of this art form.
The school has long enjoyed a strong connection
to the jeweler’s art. Classes on jewelry and silverware design have been part of the curriculum since
its founding in 1877. By 1903 a three-year course
offered freehand drawing, modeling, designing,
and other more complex metalsmithing tasks such
as die cutting, as well as academic lessons on the
history of ornament. The school’s educational offerings followed the example of the South Kensington
School of Art and Museum (today’s Victoria and
Albert Museum) in England, which trained students
to work as designers, modelers, and manufacturers
in American industry. Since Providence was home to
a number of metal industries, the largest being the
themagazineantiques.com
Portrait of a Young Girl by
Cornelis de Vos (1584–1667),
c. 1633–1635. Oil on canvas,
47 ¾ by 32 inches. Gift of
Manton B. Metcalf.
Gorham Manufacturing Company, this was a welcome development.
One historic ornament that Banas recently added
to the collection is a gold brooch with matching
earrings that incorporate brilliant green beetle
shells. Insects were frequently the subject of jewelry
beginning in the middle of the nineteenth century in
Europe and elsewhere, and beetles were of particular
interest. The ancient Egyptians believed that the daily
rising and setting of the sun was mirrored in the work
of beetles, who rolled tiny balls of dung away for consumption or to use as repositories for their eggs. For
MAY/JUNE 2024
this reason, the beetle became a symbol of the eternal
circle of life, and, by extension, a signifier of protection
and good fortune that still survives in Egyptian ornaments, funerary art, and amulets. As budding naturalists and specimen collectors, and armchair students
of ancient civilizations, Victorians saw to it that the
beetle became one of the most popular insects to
appear in jewelry, design, and fashion of that era.
Along with such thoughtful acquisitions, Banas has
commissioned jewelry from several artists, mostly
graduates of the school’s department of jewelry and
metalsmithing, to create original works informed by
the museum’s wide-ranging collections. The results
are exhilarating, fascinating, and quite beautiful.
The wings of honeybees are the subject and
substance of the Bee Wing Lace neckpiece made by
Luci Jockel. The bees lived in hives on school property and many had died of natural causes during the
2019–2020 winter. Jockel used their wings to create
a form of modern mourning jewelry that honors the
lives of these tiny, overlooked creatures who do so
much for humanity.
For inspiration, Jockel turned to examples of lace in
the museum’s collection, such as the delicate collars
fashioned in Flanders or Italy that appear in Dutch
portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Jockel’s completed necklace has a Federal flair with its
elliptical shape and large bow, and uses only glue to
create links between the bee wings. The incomprehensible delicacy of the neckpiece is a reminder that the
bee population is a fragile one, struggling to survive in
the face of pesticide use and climate change.
Another commission was for a necklace and
matching pair of earrings by Valerie James. The
ornaments are a meditation on and homage to the
Providence silver industry and its talented engravers. Using the museum’s highly regarded collection
of Gorham silver, James created earrings shaped
like the blades of Gorham fruit knives, and a scallopedged necklace drawn from the many contours of
Set of earrings and brooch,
1860–1899. Gold with
Brazilian beetle shells. Helen
M. Danforth Acquisition Fund.
Fruit knife from the Furber
service, Gorham
Manufacturing Company,
1879. Silver, gilt silver;
length 6 ¾ inches. Gorham
Collection, gift of Textron Inc.
ANTIQUES
55
Facets and settings
as leather. During the pandemic, Weston created
jewelry in the form of large leaves to acknowledge the popularity of houseplants as a means
of coping with confinement during this
stressful period. Finding similar inspiration in
the lush and richly colored wallpapers earmarked for the exhibition, she selected
images of flowers and leaves from the
papers and recombined them into a new
composition on anodized titanium in a
colorful, flexible neckpiece.
Curators and artists, along with the
author, are finding that introducing
a bit of the old world to the new has
yielded impressive results. Here’s to
future commissions!
Standards (Compote/Entrée Dish)
necklace and Standards (Fruit
Knives) earrings by Valerie James
(1994–), 2023, with (top right)
detail of the necklace, showing
maker’s mark engraved in
nineteenth-century style. Sterling
silver, 24-karat gold foil; earrings
3 ³/₈ by ³/ inch (each). Gift of
Joseph A. Chazan.
Romantic Subjects necklace by
Mallory Weston (1986–), 2023.
Anodized titanium, leather,
cotton. Helen M. Danforth
Acquisition Fund.
56 ANTIQUES
platters and trays produced by the company. The
diamond flash of the bright-cut, hand-engraved
decoration of the necklace, which was assembled
from fragments of shiny metal and is further enlivened with the occasional gilded surface, acknowledges a clear debt to the past while remaining
attractive for a modern audience.
A final commission brought unlikely materials
together to scintillating effect. In preparation for a
forthcoming exhibition on historic wallpapers at the
museum, Banas invited Mallory Weston to interpret
the vast and lavish prints that will be on display in a
work of her own design. Weston creates large-scale
wearable jewelry that combines lightweight, anodized titanium in vivid colors with textile techniques for
securing those elements to a flexible substrate, such
themagazineantiques.com
Brimfield’s
2024
2024
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Don’t Miss This Top-Quality Early Brimfield Show
Be at the gates by 8:45am on Wednesday, July 10, where
“Shoppers rush in as the gates open to the Heart-O-The-Mart.”
~ USA Today
“Heart-O-The-Mart gets high marks for the quality of the merchandise there.”
~ Antiques and The Arts Weekly
“Connoisseurs of the previously-owned share their hunting grounds in Paris, Berlin
DQG%ULPÀHOG0$,QVLGHU·V7LS 7KHEHVWVKRZVLQFOXGH+HDUW27KH0DUWµ
~ Wall Street Journal
w w
Opening Dates
Opening
Day
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Sept. 4
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Digital doings
By Sammy Dalati
Catching up with Curious
Objects
It’s been almost seven years since
The Magazine ANTIQUES launched
its podcast Curious Objects. The show
is going stronger than ever, and
last fall we made the decision to
increase its frequency from monthly
to weekly. Amidst the recent flurry
of activity, we caught up with the
show’s host, Benjamin Miller.
By now there are over one hundred episodes of the podcast.
What’s the best place for new listeners to start?
Silver punch bowl
made for the Delancey
family, New York,
c. 1730. New-York
Historical Society, gift of
Alice Izard Lowndes Ayers.
Art deco sapphire and
diamond two-stone ring
with calibré sapphire
and diamond borders, in
platinum, René Boivin,
France. c. 1935. Photograph courtesy of Kentshire
Galleries, New York.
Benjamin Miller: I would recommend an episode that’s
close to my heart: “Once Upon a Bowl,” a story about
a trio of silver objects that belonged to the Delancey
family of New York in the 1700s, and which came to my
attention through an incredible series of coincidences.
A favorite from the early days of the podcast is the
episode with Paul Becker, a luthier in Chicago. Through
him I had the opportunity to handle one of the oldest
violins in the world, made by Antonio and Hieronymus
Amati in 1620.
Tell us about how the project has evolved for you over these
seven years.
Back in the mid-2010s I had done a couple of articles for
the magazine that got me interested in the idea of writing about antiques. I realized that many of the very best
storytellers in the antiques world are dealers. They’re
great storytellers, but not necessarily great writers. So
the original idea was to sit down with a dealer, put a
mic on the table, and see what happened. What I’ve
been thinking about more in the last year or so is how
to start connecting with a broader, more general audience. Along those lines, something we’ve started doing
recently is advice episodes. For Valentine’s Day this
year we did one with Matt Imberman of the New York
jewelry firm Kentshire, where he gave tips on buying
vintage engagement rings.
Any topics you’d particularly like to cover in the future?
There’re so many fields that we haven’t covered yet.
We’ve done very little work with Latin American, African,
or Native American material. I’d love to do an episode
about automata—but that might be a little hard in an
audio medium. There are many quirky fun things that we
haven’t tapped into yet—I don’t think we’re going to run
out of topics anytime soon.
Parting thoughts?
The driving force behind the
podcast really is the idea that the
objects that we care about are built
on stories and vice versa. What fascinates all of us about the fine objects
that we engage with is the layer upon
layer upon layer of human complexity
that is implicit in each of them. The podcast
is about digging through those layers, uncovering the hidden stories that bring these pieces
to life for us, and thereby give us another way of
falling in love with them.
58 ANTIQUES
themagazineantiques.com
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America’s oldest preserved plantation open to the public.
Museum Galleries | Historic House | Active Archaeology
Charleston, South Carolina | draytonhall .org
MAY/JUNE 2024
featuring...
Pictures from a Lost
Generation
By Elizabeth Pochoda
An exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery honors the
American women abroad who remade themselves while
making modernism
62
ANTIQUES
he stars are aligned in the museum
world just now: the Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism is drawing crowds heretofore ignorant of the
international scope of the movement, as well as its
vast range of talent. The interwar period is also the
focus of a revelatory exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. Brilliant Exiles:
American Women in Paris 1900–1939 brings together images of fifty-seven women—the famous,
the lesser known, and the utterly forgotten figures,
both Black and white, who left home for Paris,
where they changed the face of modernism in, as
the catalogue has it, “art . . . literature, dance, publishing, fashion, music, journalism, and theater.” A
bold claim? Yes, and a convincing one.
The National Portrait Gallery is, of course, the ideal
venue for displaying the figures of this lost generation, for unlike the well-known male members of the
celebrated Lost Generation, the ways in which these
women dressed and presented themselves for camera
and canvas were often deliberate and essential signs
of their singularity. (Who, after all, can remember or
cares what John Dos Passos looked like?) From Sylvia
Beach (Fig. 1), publisher of Ulysses, to the cabaret star
Florence Emory (1890/1892–1932), personal style
was the outward and visible sign of personal reinvention, liberation—and accomplishment. The sheer
variety of individual fashions on view is proof of that.
Paris made them, and they undoubtedly changed
Paris (though possibly not for Parisian women, but
that is something for the French to research). Paris
was the city where Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria
Louise Virginia Smith (1894–1984), better known
as Bricktop, would teach the Charleston and the
Black Bottom to Cole Porter and the Prince of
Wales; Paris is where the modernist writer Djuna
Barnes (1892–1982), had she not gone there,
would have gone mad . . . or madder. A significant
number of the brilliant exiles were bisexual like
T
Barnes or lesbian like Natalie Barney (1876–1972),
whose salon was both a haven and a launching pad
for women (and men) of various sexual persuasions
and accomplishments, Edna St. Vincent Millay
(1892–1950) and Peggy Guggenheim (Fig. 7) being among the better known included here.
The portraits will draw us in, but the wall labels
and excellent catalogue copy by curator Robyn
Asleson (with essays by Zakiya R. Adair, Samuel N.
Dorf, Tirza True Latimer, and T. Denean SharpleyWhiting) will keep us here, eager to learn about such
visually enticing figures as the African American
opera singer Lillian Evanti (Fig. 2) and to discover
far more about those we think we know like Isadora
Duncan (Fig. 8) and Josephine Baker (Figs. 3, 4).
Later in life Baker was to look back at sailing past
Liberty Island on her first trip abroad in 1925. She
might have been speaking for any number of brilliant exiles when she wrote, “What was the good of
having the statue without the liberty. . . . I preferred
the Eiffel Tower, which made no promises.”
Fig. 1. Sylvia Woodbridge Beach [1887–
1962] by Berenice
Abbott (1898–1991),
1928. Gelatin silver
print, 3 ¾ by 3 ⅛
inches. National
Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Fig. 2. Lillian Evanti
[1890–1967] by Loïs
Mailou Jones (1905–
1998), 1940. Oil on
canvas, 42 by 32
inches. National
Portrait Gallery, gift
of Max Robinson.
64
ANTIQUES
Fig. 3. Josephine Baker [1906–1975] by Paul Colin (1892–
1985), 1927. Signed “PAUL/ COLIN” at lower right.
Lithograph with pochoir coloring on paper, 18 ½ by 12 ½
inches (sheet). National Portrait Gallery, bequest of
Jean-Claude Baker.
Fig. 4. Josephine Baker by Stanislaus Julian Walery (1863–
1935), 1926. Gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ by 6 ⅜ inches
(image). National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 5. Anaïs Nin [1903–1977] by Natashia Troubetskoia
(active c. 1932), c. 1932. Oil on canvas, 76 by 43 ½
inches. National Portrait Gallery.
Fig. 6. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney [1875–1942] in
Bakst Costume with Fleurs du Mal by Howard Gardiner
Cushing (1869–1915), 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 104 ¼
by 63 inches. Private collection.
MAY/JUNE 2024
65
Fig. 7. Peggy Guggenheim [1898–1979] by Alfred Courmes (1898–1993), 1926. Signed and dated
“A. Courmes/ août 1926” at lower left. Oil on canvas, 39 ⅜ by 25 ⅞ inches. Musée franco-américain
du château de Blérancourt, France.
66
ANTIQUES
Fig. 8. Isadora Duncan [1877–1927] by Abraham Walkowitz (1880–1965). Signed “A. Walkowitz” at bottom. Ink,
watercolor, and pencil on paper, 14 by 8 ½ inches. Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC,
Joseph H. Hirshhorn Bequest.
MAY/JUNE 2024
67
Fig. 9. Self-Portrait by Anne Estelle Rice (1877–1959), c. 1909–
1910. Oil on canvas, 30 inches
square. Private collection.
Fig. 10. Portrait of Emily Crane
Chadbourne [1871–1964] by
Tsuguharu Foujita (1886–1968),
1922. Tempera and silver leaf on
canvas, 35 ¼ by 57 ½ inches. Art
Institute of Chicago, gift of Emily
Crane Chadbourne.
68
ANTIQUES
Fig. 11. Gertrude Stein [1874–1946]
by Pablo Picasso (1881–1973),
1905–1906. Oil on canvas, 39 ⅜ by
32 inches. Metropolitan Museum of
Art, bequest of Gertrude Stein.
Fig. 12. Self-Portrait by Loïs
Mailou Jones (1905–1998), 1940.
Casein on board, 17 ½ by 14 ½
inches. Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Washington, DC, bequest
of the artist.
MAY/JUNE 2024
69
Fig. 13. Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
[1890–1960] in Hat, photographer unknown, c. 1922–1929.
Gelatin silver print, 6 by 4 inches
(image). Rhode Island College,
Providence. James P. Adams Library Special Collections.
Fig. 14. Self-Portrait by Louise
Heron Daura (1905–1972), 1929.
Signed and dated “Louise Heron
Daura/ Paris 1929” at upper right.
Oil on board, 23 ½ by 18 ⅝ inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, gift of
Martha Randolph Daura.
Fig. 15. Caresse Crosby [1892–
1970] by Polia Chentoff (c. 1890–
1933), 1927. Signed “P Chentoff”
at lower right. Oil on canvas, 18 ⅛
by 15 inches. Southern Illinois
University Carbondale, Special
Collections Research Center.
Fig. 16. Self-Portrait by Romaine
Brooks (1874 –1970), 1923. Oil
on canvas, 46 ¼ by 26 ⅞ inches.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the artist.
70
ANTIQUES
MAY/JUNE 2024
71
Personality
and
Purpose
I
By Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley
n late January 2019, after years of surveying, researching,
and refining the furniture collection through acquisitions
and de-acquisitions, I began to write the Philadelphia
Museum of Art’s first-ever catalogue of its early
American furniture collection. Conservation
analysis and treatments were either complete
or in process, and Gavin Ashworth had taken
more than three hundred photographs, while
the remaining works would be shot by the
museum’s photographers.
I elected to write the entries successively to
keep the style and tone parallel throughout,
and by August 5, 2019, I had finished the
entries and notes on 297 works and written
the first draft of the introductory essay.
As fate would have it, as soon as the entries
were written and the catalogue was ready to
print, furniture that refined or filled gaps began
to be offered as gifts and for sale. Several pieces
are still undergoing conservation and being photographed, but a selection of these new acquisitions follows. I am keen on pieces that engage the visitor—that
have interesting personalities combined with purposeful
narratives that connect to the PMA’s collection on view in our
dazzling new galleries of early American art.
Collecting American furniture continues
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Rush-seated chair, New
Castle County, Pennsylvania (now Delaware),
1690–1710. Ash, maple,
poplar, rush; replacement upholstery; height
49, width 19 ½, depth
14 inches. All objects illustrated are in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Gift of Anne H. and
Frederick Vogel III.
A
part from the trapezoidal seats, scrolls and Scurves (what William Hogarth called the “line
of beauty”) dominate the design of these chairs.
Made at a time when high-relief, rococo carving
began to punctuate and even delineate the forms,
the artistry here relies completely on profile. The
most prominent features are the so-called “ears”
that extend out from the stiles and are in the shape
of a scroll, or volute, which was borrowed from
classical Greek architectural capitals in the Ionic
style. The ancient Greeks adopted the shape from
the spiral of a ram’s horn, and its pleasing form
was incorporated in architecture and furniture
as a flourish that, as here, finishes a curve. In the
construction of these chairs, the volutes are located
on the ends of the crest rail, but they are shaped
to protrude as if they are the final extensions of
the stiles. Though straight, the lower edge of the
front rail is shaped with a single, protracted double
curve and is framed by brackets with a simple cusp,
and uncarved cabriole legs of the same S-shape.
Perhaps the showiest flourish is the three-pronged
(so-called trifid) feet, but it is the personality that
the protruding ears lend to these chairs
chai that makes
them so appealing.
E
arly colonial New England seating furniture
niture
was imported into the Delaware Valley
ey so
extensively that Philadelphia-area chairmakers
rs advertised that they made “Boston chairs.” And while
early seating made in Philadelphia is rare, that made
in the New Castle, Pennsylvania (now Delaware),
ware),
area is as rare as hen’s teeth. This banister-back
-back
chair is one of three from a set with a history
ry in
the Gill family of Haddonfield, New Jersey,1 with
distinctive features that are outliers in Philadelphia
lphia
and instead point to being made by Scandinavian
avian
artisans working in what they called New Amstel:
mstel:
its primary materials (maple and ash), the narrow
arrow
rails, the arrangement of the stretchers, and thee profiles of the turnings (attenuated shafts, crisplyy cut
rings, and vases capped by scribed balls and arrows).
ows).
These Scandinavian artisans—primarily Swedish,
edish,
such as Jan Henrikson (d. 1689), who was referred
ferred
to as “John Hendrixon the Torner”—thrived
ed in
New Castle.2 While this chair and the otherr two
from the set share stylistic details and construction
ction
nuances with the handful of other chairs with New
Castle histories, the extraordinary crest rail—with
ith
its cut-through composition and carved decoration—distinguish this set.
Chairs, Philadelphia, 1745–1755. Walnut, yellow pine; replacement upholstery;
height (of each) 40, width 21, depth 17
inches. Gift of Martha Hamilton and I.
Wistar Morris III.
hen I first saw this chair, I could barely
contain my excitement at the opportunity
to acquire it for the museum. Related to the PMA’s
set of chairs made in 1809 by Thomas Whitecar
(1784–1822),3 the extraordinary carving of the
double sphinxes that form the back and the Xstretchers confirmed to me that Philadelphia neoclassical seating has a richer, more complex, and
more French-leaning history than has been typically ascribed to it. Despite the stretchers in mahogany
instead of gilt brass, the design faithfully follows the
c. 1802 plate 77 of Meubles et Objets de Goût, the
serial publication by French designer Pierre de la
Mésangère (1761–1831). Since Egyptian sphinxes
lack wings, these are specifically Greek—composed
of the body and tail of a lion, the wings of a bird,
and the head of a woman. Scholar Robert F. Trent
and I are knee deep in research on the design of
this chair and others we have discovered, with the
hope that we might expand the understanding
of the lengths to which Philadelphia patrons and
artisans went to mimic the cosmopolitan designs
of Napoleonic France.
W
Chair (one of
two), Philadelphia, 1755–1765.
Mahogany, tulip
poplar, yellow
pine; replacement
upholstery; height
40, width 22 ½,
depth 22 inches.
Gift of Drs.
George H. and
Sheryl F. Talbot.
74
ust when I thought the PMA had enough chairs
from the 1750–1770 period, in walked these
two examples that underscore the craftsmanship of
Philadelphia design from these decades. While the
strapwork banister, or splat, follows the quintessential Philadelphia pattern, the chairs are distinguished by the carved scallop shells on the ends and
center of the crest rail and extra carved details on
the banister and above the knees. But most beguiling is the highly unusual carved husk on the splat,
depicted as it is nearly fully flowering. Originally
from a set of eight, these chairs descended to the
donors from one of two sets of great-great-greatgrandparents from Philadelphia—either Robert
(1734–1806) and Mary White Morris (1749–
1827) or Colonel John (1733–1808) and Elizabeth
Davis Nixon (d. 1795).
J
ANTIQUES
Klismos chair, Philadelphia, 1806–1810.
Mahogany, ash (recently upholstered);
height 33 ½, width 17 ¾, depth 18 ¾
inches. Purchased with the Halberstadt
Fund for American Decorative Arts.
Pair of trick-leg card tables, Philadelphia,
c. 1810. Mahogany, oak, tulip poplar,
white cedar, brass; height (of each) 28 ½,
width 36, depth 17 ¾ inches. Purchased
with the Frank Joseph Saul, Joseph Donald
O’Keefe Fund, and with the proceeds from
the sale of deaccessioned works of art.
had long been searching for a Philadelphia
trick-leg table when these—a pair—showed up
mid-pandemic in the 2020 online Philadelphia
Show. The so-called trick-leg feature inside the pillars enables two of the three legs to swing outward
when the leaves are unfurled, reducing the effort
needed to open the tables. The mechanism was
most likely brought to Philadelphia from New
York by imported furniture or journeymen artisans
I
enticed to Philadelphia for work.4 Only a handful
of Philadelphia trick-leg tables are known, including the satinwood examples documented to George
G. Wright (1780–1853).5 A thin crossbanding of
blonde wood emphasizes the shape of the tables’ rails
and, with great care (and expense), the veneers on the
tops are book-matched, allowing for the tables to be
used three ways: closed and stored along a wall, open
and in use, or set back-to-back to form a center table.
MAY/JUNE 2024
75
Child’s sofa, Philadelphia, c. 1825. Mahogany, mahogany veneer, tulip poplar; replacement upholstery and brass nails; height 20, width 32 ½,
depth 12 ½ inches. Purchased with funds contributed by Anne Hamilton and Hannah L. Henderson.
French bedstead attributed to Richard Parkin (1787–1861), Philadelphia, 1830s. Maple with rosewood inlay; height 38 ¾, width 43 ⅜,
length 78 ¾ inches. Purchased with the proceeds from the sale of deaccessioned works of art.
76
ANTIQUES
iniature furniture can be irresistible, especially
when we realize that it is perfectly gauged to
the size of a child. The quality of the carving and
the joinery suggest that this child’s sofa was made by
one of the finer Philadelphia cabinetmaking shops
of the 1820s. Its significance is heightened because
the shell-ended arms, lion’s-paw feet, framed back,
scrolled crest rail, and “poofy” upholstery profile
replicate full-size Philadelphia sofas of the period that
are not represented in the PMA collection. The form
serves as a reminder of the extent to which children
playacted in adult roles, while also disabusing visitors
of the myth that cabinetmakers made samples.
M
rench bedsteads were popular for daytime
reclining in fashionable Philadelphia houses
beginning in the 1820s. This example is diminutively sized—today it would be called a single
bed—and has decoration on all sides, meaning
it was intended to be placed in the center of an
elegant parlor. The maple is inlaid with a purplehued rosewood with classical motifs of palmettes,
anthemia, husks, and scrolls. The sophisticated
and pared-down elegance—including the turned
bosses—suggest it was made in the Philadelphia
shop of English émigré cabinetmaker Richard
Parkin, who leased the shop of Joseph Barry
(1757–1838) at 134 South Second Street in 1833
and renamed it “Egyptian Hall.” Parkin favored
the work of English Regency cabinetmaker and
sculptor George Bullock (1777–1818), and
this bed demonstrates how Parkin interpreted
Bullock’s sleek aesthetic using “Tracings from
Thomas Wilkinson from Designs of the late
Mr. George Bullock, 1820.”6
F
brackets have a riot of carving, all centering on a
mask: flowers (individual and in garlands); scallop
shells with corollas (sometimes called cabochons);
gathers of acanthus leaves; fish scales and diapering along the open expanses; attenuated C-scrolls
stretched like chewy candy to frame the elements;
and tightly wound scrolls. The stage-like shelves—
or, in French, étages—are backed by a mirror to
amplify the ceramics, glass, small sculptures, and
textiles that would be displayed on them; at the top
a lion bears his fangs. Related to ones at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of
Art, and the High Museum, this Roux-attributed
étagère not only defines the rococo revival style, but
also relates it to the 1760s lion’s-mask sideboard
table in PMA’s collection.
Étagère attributed to
Alexander Roux
(1813–1886), New
York, c. 1855. Rosewood, tulip poplar
and other secondary
woods; silvered glass;
height 88, width 78,
depth 30 inches.
Purchased with proceeds from the sale of
deaccessioned works
of art, and with the
Center for American
Art Fund, and with
funds contributed
by Frederick M.
LaValley and John
N. Whitenight and
Joseph A. O’Connor.
hen he arrived in New York in
1837, French ébéniste Alexander Roux brought the talent to make
exuberant furniture in the so-called
modern French style of this rosewood étagère. With its roots in the
eighteenth-century French rococo,
the style was one of several revivals
prevailing in the 1840s and 1850s
and was also known as French antique,
Louis XIV, or Louis XV. By the time this
étagère was made, Roux had more than
a hundred artisans working in his shop,
making the highest quality furniture in
modern Renaissance, Gothic, and rococo
revival styles. The voluptuous S-curves
that form the legs, stretchers, and shelf
W
MAY/JUNE 2024
77
C
ombining two designs found in plate 563 of
Pierre de La Mésangère’s Meubles et Objets de
Goût, this Boston-made French secretary displays
figured mahogany veneer that creates an exuberant pattern across an otherwise flat front. The side
columns are formed by two tapered shafts capped
by exquisitely rendered ormolu mounts imported
from France. Concealed behind the drawers inside
are secret compartments that are accessed through
hidden spring actions. While many French secretaries had their original wooden tops removed and
replaced with a marble slab, this example retains its
original wooden top. Research is ongoing to reveal
the rest of the signature, “Joseph F. [illegible].” This
finely executed secretary provides a much needed
(and relatively petite) pendant to our classical Philadelphia furniture.
High chest of drawers,
Rhode Island, 1750–1770.
Mahogany, maple, white
pine, brass; height 88 ½,
width 39, depth 21 ½
inches. Purchased with
museum and subscription
funds from the Charles F.
Williams Collection and
bequest (by exchange) of
Harriet Pauline Hughes,
Mrs. Harry Markoe, and
John W. Pepper.
L
ike their fellow artisans in Philadelphia,
Rhode Island’s joiners and cabinetmakers (including many Quakers) excelled at
making majestic high chests using richly
figured mahogany, complex moldings, and
just enough carved decoration. Roughly
contemporary with the PMA’s exemplary
1755 Newport high chest signed by joiner
Christopher Townsend (1701–1773) and his
son John (1872/1833–1809), this example is
more whimsical in design: its overtly anthropomorphic design, including its feet that are
rendered as boots, makes it a welcome addition
to engage visitors and encourage their visual
skills while adding levity to eighteenth-century
furniture! The boot-like feet connect the high
chest to similarly carved feet on the museum’s
Philadelphia chair with a history of ownership
by James (1674–1751) and Sarah Read Smith
Logan (1692–1754) of Stenton.
78
ANTIQUES
French secretary, Boston, 1818–1825. Mahogany, mahogany
veneer, white pine, ormolu; height 60 ½, width 36, depth
19 inches. Purchased with the Miller-Worley Fund for
Excellence in American Art.
O
n December 21, 1874, German émigré cabinetmaker George W. Ahrens of Chicago filed
an application with the United States Patent Office
for an “Improvement in Extension-Tables . . . to afford a compact storage-place for the movable leaves
when the table is wholly or partially contracted .
. . with slots [in the legs] to receive the movable
leaves.” The patent (no. 160,562) was granted on
March 9, 1875, and Ahrens produced this table for
the 1876 Centennial Exhibition as an example of
both his patent and his ability to create exuberantly
decorated inlaid surfaces. Not surprisingly, the table
earned an award for “originality of design and excellence of inlay.” The woods—both naturally colored
and figured as well as dyed—replicate patterns seen
in printed textiles, upholstery, ceramics, and glass
that exemplify the “art for art’s sake” taste of the aesthetic movement. Notably, the light and dark wood
patterns on the turned feet were formed by gluing
together (or laminating) several planks of wood and
turning them on a lathe. The table demonstrates
how artisans pulled out all the stops to create masterworks for display at international exhibitions like
the Centennial. The PMA, founded the same year as
the latter and as an outgrowth of it, opened in 1877
in the fair’s Memorial Hall.
1 Two are in the Newark Museum in New Jersey, acc. nos. 65.236 a, b.
2 Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730: An In-
terpretive Catalogue (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), cat. no. 74.
3 Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, American Furniture 1650–1840: Highlights from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (New Haven and London:
Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale University Press, 2020), nos. 128–
131. 4 Philadelphia’s 1811 Journeyman Cabinet and Chair Makers’
Pennsylvania Book of Prices (Philadelphia, 1811) is the earliest known
reference to trick-leg tables, indicating that they were being made in
Philadelphia prior to 1811. 5 Clark Pearce, Catherine Ebert, and
Alexandra Alevizatos Kirtley, “From Apprentice to Master: The Life
and Career of Philadelphia Cabinetmaker George G. Wright” in American Furniture 2007 (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation, 2007),
pp. 110–131. 6 Carswell Rush Berlin, “‘A Shadow of a Magnitude’:
The Furniture of Thomas Cook and Richard Parkin” in American
Furniture 2013 (Milwaukee: Chipstone Foundation, 2013), pp. 156–
95 and Fig. 43.
ALEXANDRA ALEVIZATOS KIRTLEY is the MontgomeryGarvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art
Extension dining table with leaves made by George
W. Ahrens (1836–1896), Chicago, 1876. Inscribed
“G. Ahrens/ Pat. Mar. 9th 1875” in marquetry on
panels on one end of table frame. Walnut, maple,
and various light and dark fruitwoods, oak, steel,
and brass; height 29 ½, width 43, depth (closed)
26 inches. Purchased with the Miller-Worley Fund
for Excellence in American Art.
MAY/JUNE 2024
79
Caribbean-born neoclassical painter Guillaume Lethière
I
f Guillaume Lethière
had gone by his father’s
surname, Guillon, then
the three great Gs of French
Empire painting—Gros, Gerard
and Girodet—could have added
a fourth. Lethière is represented
By James Gardner
in many eminent collections
(among them the Hermitage, the
Louvre, and half the provincial
museums of France), but he is
known mainly to scholars of the
art of the Napoleonic era. For
this reason, it is a welcome surprise that the Clark Art Institute
in Williamstown, Massachusetts,
is mounting a full-scale retrospective of the man from June
15 to October 14—with more
than one hundred paintings,
drawings, and bronzes, including
works by contemporaries—that
will travel next to the Louvre.
There was, however, a potent
reason why Lethière could not
take his father’s surname, at least
at first: he was the illegitimate
third child of Pierre Guillon, a
white plantation owner in the
French Caribbean possession of
Fig. 1. Brutus Condemning His Sons to
Death by Guillaume Lethière (1760–
1832), c. 1788. Oil on canvas, 23 ⅜
by 39 inches. Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts.
gets a second look at the Clark Art Institute
Guadeloupe, where he was born. His mother,
Marie-Francoise Pepeyë, was possibly enslaved at
the time of his birth, before she became a “free
woman of color,” a mulâtresse afranchie. The name
Lethière is derived from Le Tiers, meaning “the
third (son).” The artist officially became Guillaume
Guillon Lethière only in 1799 when, following
the abolition of the Code Noir (which regulated
the lives of minorities under the ancien régime),
his father was at last able to recognize him legally.
Given Lethière’s mixed parentage and his Caribbean origins, the present exhibition can certainly be
seen within the context of the Great Reckoning, as
it is often called, which has lately inspired museums
throughout the world to reexamine their relationship to minorities, especially those of African descent. As such the show takes its place beside a fine
exhibition mounted last year by the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic
Painter, devoted to an artist whom Diego Velásquez
had owned and trained, before emancipating him.
Fig. 2. Oath of the Ancestors, c. 1822. Oil on canvas, 10 feet 2
inches by 89 ¾ inches. Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien,
Port-au-Prince, Haiti; photograph RMN-Grand Palais / Art
Resource, NY.
Fig. 3. Torso or Half-Length Figure, c. 1785. Oil on canvas,
39 ⅜ by 31 ⅞ inches. Beaux-Arts de Paris; photograph courtesy
of Beaux-Arts de Paris / RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Like all the eminent painters
of the French Revolution and the Empire, Lethière
was born into the ancien régime and he was very much
a product of that earlier age. He is essentially to be seen
as an Old Master, and his was the last generation of
humanity to which that label could be plausibly applied
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ANTIQUES
ethière appears to have been proud of
his roots, or, at the very least, in no way
ashamed of them. Oath of the Ancestors
(Fig. 2), one of the more arresting works at the
Clark, celebrates, two decades after the fact, the
new nationhood of Haiti. In it a pair of generals of African descent, Alexandre Pétion and
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, embrace one another as
they stand before an altar. Their glances are lifted
heavenward toward a very pale God the Father,
while the shackles of servitude lie at their feet, and
behind them a crowd has gathered to proclaim
their liberty.
What is curious about Lethière, however, is that,
despite his origins and his ethnic appearance, neither
fact seems to have hindered his career at any point.
L
Before becoming a painter—and a history painter,
no less—he graduated from the École des Beaux
Arts (to use its present name) and placed second in
the prestigious Prix de Rome, which allowed him
to spend four years at the famous French Academy
of Rome, whose director he would later become at
the behest of Napoleon himself. And when Lethière
emerged from his rigorous training he was ready
and most willing to celebrate the powers that be,
especially the Bonapartes, with their multitudinous
brood eager for portraits and their numerous battles
that cried out for commemoration. Lethière was
especially close to the emperor’s older brother
Joseph, for a time king of Naples and later king
of Spain. Ingres’s magnificent portrait of Lethière
in middle age, drawn in Rome in 1815 (Fig. 6),
MAY/JUNE 2024
Fig. 4. Erminia and
the Shepherds, c. 1795.
Oil on canvas, 31 ¼ by
40 ½ inches. Dallas
Museum of Art, Foundation for the Arts
Collection, Mrs. John
B. O’Hara Fund.
83
84
ANTIQUES
Fig. 5. Homer Singing
His Iliad at the Gates of
Athens, 1814. Oil on
canvas, 78 by 96 ⅞ inches.
Nottingham City Museums
and Galleries, England.
positively pulsates with physical, material, and
spiritual success.
Like all the eminent painters of the French
Revolution and the Empire, Lethière was born
into the ancien régime and he was very much a
product of that earlier age. He is essentially to be
seen as an Old Master, and his was the last generation of humanity to which that label could be
plausibly applied. Although some of the moodiness of the so-called romantic rebellion seeps in
around the edges of his later works, Lethière’s
oeuvre is marked by a remarkable continuity over
half a century of diligent and consistent labor.
Only toward the very end of his career do we find
a hesitant relaxation of his relentless self-mastery,
a slight loosening of the brushstrokes in Lafayette
Introducing Louis-Philippe to the People of Paris
(1830–1831).
ar more typical is Lethière’s Torso or HalfLength Figure (Fig. 3), which fully embodies all the aspirations of late eighteenthcentury academic painting in regard to the human
figure. Even more ambitious is the crowded Brutus
Condemning his Sons to Death (Fig. 1), now part
of the Clark’s collection. Included in the present
exhibition is another version of the same work,
executed nearly a quarter of a century later and
belonging to the Louvre. The Clark version is
the more successful, with its richer palette and
evocative suppression of detail in depicting the
architectural context. It is also decidedly more
gruesome. On the left side of the canvas the executioner raises up the severed head of Brutus’s
son, a detail that has been decorously suppressed
Fig. 6. Portrait of Guillaume
Guillon-Lethière by JeanAuguste-Dominique
Ingres (1780–1867), 1815.
Inscribed “M. de Ingres/ a
Mad.lle Lescot” at lower
right. Pencil on wove
paper, 11 by 8 ¾ inches.
Morgan Library and
Museum, New York,
bequest of Therese Kuhn
Straus in memory of her
husband, Herbert
N. Straus; photograph
by Maltaper on Wikimedia
Commons.
F
MAY/JUNE 2024
85
in the Louvre version, in which, instead, we see
the corpse being borne away.
Lethière’s ambitions, in a word, were those of
a successful French master in the decade or so on
either side of 1800. Like so many of his generation of fellow artists, he passed through the fires of
revolution and emerged at the other side relatively
unchanged by the ordeal. His themes both before
and after that cataclysm are almost reassuringly
conventional: like so many artists before him,
he illustrated the Italian poet Torquato Tasso in
Erminia and the Shephards (Fig. 4), and a similarly
literary orientation is revealed in Homer Singing
His Iliad at the Gates of Athens (Fig. 5).
ndeed, the Battle of Waterloo would come
and go, taking the Bonapartes with it, and
still Lethière is at his easel, unflappably
turning out his classical mythologies as though
nothing worthy of note had happened. With
a few adjustments, one of his more successful
works, Venus and Adonis from the Musée des
Beaux Arts in Rouen (Fig. 9), could have been
painted by Lagrenée fifty years earlier, or by
Domenichino over a century before that.
The height of Lethière’s success, in terms of his
career, if not his art, was surely his proximity to
the Bonapartes. He depicted Napoleon himself
on several occasions, especially in his Preliminaries
of Peace Signed at Leoben, April 17, 1797 (1805).
He also portrayed two of Napoleon’s brothers,
I
Fig. 7. Portrait of Adèle Papin Playing the Harp, c. 1799. Oil
on canvas, 70 ½ by 57 ⅞ inches. Carnegie Museum of Art,
Pittsburgh, Heinz Family Fund; photograph by Studio Sebert
for Tajan, Paris.
Fig. 8. Joséphine, Empress of the French, c. 1807. Oil on canvas,
88 ⅝ by 58 ¾ inches. Musée des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, France; photograph RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Fig. 9. Venus and Adonis, before 1817. Oil on canvas, 23 ⅛
by 27 inches. Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, France; photograph
by Y. Deslandes/Réunion des Musées Métropolitains
Rouen Normandie.
Fig. 10. Woman Leaning on a Portfolio, c. 1799. Oil on canvas,
25 by 22 ¼ inches. Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; photograph courtesy of the Worcester Art Museum / Bridgeman Images.
86
ANTIQUES
Joseph and Lucien, as well as the Empress Josephine,
seated somewhat awkwardly on her throne (Fig. 8).
Far more successful as paintings and portraits are
two works from about 1799, Portrait of Adèle Papin
Playing the Harp (Fig. 7) and Woman Leaning on a
Portfolio (Fig. 10). Especially the latter work reveals
the artist at his best, discharging his formidable
technique in the service of a compelling formal and
chromatic idea.
Lethière is not always that good. Although he is
a product of his age, he does not transcend it, as
David, Ingres, and Boilly so often did. But if he is
bound by the conventions of his training, he is also
empowered by them, in terms of color, conception,
and sheer execution, qualities that, in the older
sense, were largely passing out of the competence
of Western painting in its transition to romanticism
and beyond. This is the saving grace of the Old
Masters in general and of Lethière in specific, that
they can provide aesthetic satisfaction even in their
most conventional and routine moments.
MAY/JUNE 2024
87
BY ROBERTA J. M. OLSON
I
n the extensive publications about John James
Audubon (Fig. 1), the artist-naturalist who was
America’s first great watercolorist, his art has not
received the same attention as his dramatic life and his
contributions to natural history, especially in The Birds of
America. My new book, Audubon as Artist: A New Look
at The Birds of America, seeks to balance and illuminate a
largely ignored topic: Audubon’s relationship with other
artists, his debt to them and his struggles to identify his
vocation. Unlike most great artists who reach their stride
in their twenties, Audubon did not find his until he was
over forty years old. Nevertheless, one might look at him
as a nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci,
who married art and science in his works. Like his Renaissance predecessor, Audubon was a brilliant artist and innovator, albeit a charismatic but difficult personality, and
a creative “rock star” entrepreneur whose personal drive
Long revered for his
contributions to the
field of ornithology,
John James Audubon’s
artistic influences and
legacy receive proper
vetting in a new book
ARTS AND SCIENCES
and extraordinary gifts changed the way people
Dog (Fig. 2) are clearly forecasted by the painted
view the world and, specifically, birds.
tableaux of game by French animalier Jean-
In the past, scholars have concluded that Audu-
Baptiste Oudry. Oudry’s action-filled scenes, like
bon rarely based his compositions on paintings
that in Hawk Attacking Ducks (Fig. 3), known in
by fellow artists, a notion contradicted by a close
many versions and prints, throb with a drama aris-
examination of the art-historical record. For in-
ing from the artist’s empathy with wild creatures
stance, aspects of The Birds of America and Audu-
and his studies of wildlife. Because Oudry placed
bon’s oil painting English Pheasants Surprised by a
species in naturalistic settings and enlivened their
Fig. 1. John James Audubon
[1785–1851] by John Syme
(1795–1861), 1826. Oil on
canvas, 35 by 27 inches. White
House Historical Association,
Washington, DC, White House
Art Collection.
Fig. 2. English Pheasants
Surprised by a Dog (“Sauve qui
peut”) by Audubon, 1827. Oil on
canvas, 57 by 93 inches. Racquet
and Tennis Club, New York.
its back right foot beginning to coil up,
like a clock spring, as it strides forwards
over flattened vegetation. The elegant
bird regards the viewer warily with its
piercing right eye, and with its left, the
distant generic hunter (the greatest enemy of this species at the time, when it
was a delicacy for the table, and the only
human represented in all 435 plates).
he most frequently recognized
influence from another artist’s
work is Audubon’s Golden Eagle
(Fig. 6), which dates from 1833 and was
inspired in part by Jacques-Louis David’s
Napoleon Crossing the Alps (Fig. 7). Known
in five versions, the original canvas was
in Madrid until 1812, when it was taken
to the United States by Napoleon’s older
brother, Joseph Bonaparte, after his abdication as king of Spain, and was hung
at Joseph’s Point Breeze estate in Bordentown, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. The
image was also widely disseminated in
prints, as early as 1801–1809 (the SaintCloud version), and the Malmaison version was engraved by Raphael Morghen
in 1812–1813.
T
One might look at Audubon as a nineteenth-century American Leonardo da Vinci . . . a
brilliant artist and innovator, albeit a charismatic but difficult personality, and a creative “rock star”
entrepreneur whose personal drive and extraordinary gifts changed the way people view the world
Fig. 3. Hawk Attacking
Ducks by Jean-Baptiste
Oudry (1686–1755),
1740. Oil on canvas,
50 ¾ by 63 ¾ inches.
Staatliches Museum,
Schwerin, Germany.
Fig. 4. Egret (Grande
aigrette) by Oudry,
c. 1738–1753. Black
chalk and white pastel
on paper, 13 ½ by
11 ⅜ inches. Musée du
Louvre, Paris.
90
interactions with a compelling visual narrative,
he ranks as the closest predecessor in the fine
arts to Audubon. His smaller drawings of live
birds from menageries (Fig. 4) also foreshadow
Audubon’s animated achievements, such as his
Snowy Egret (Fig. 5). Some of the similarities
may be due to species’ characteristics, but the
interest in representing an action taking place
or “becoming” before our very eyes, as in baroque art, is common to both artists and was
the takeaway for Audubon. While Oudry’s
egret is clearly striding forwards with its left
leg raised, its filmy breeding aigrettes (also the
French word for an egret), used for mating
displays, blown back from its head, Audubon’s
smaller snowy egret’s action is subtler and more
psychological. Audubon emphasizes the bird’s
deliberate stalking along the water’s edge, with
ANTIQUES
Fig. 5. Snowy Egret,
Study for Havell pl.
242 by Audubon,
1832. Watercolor,
gouache, and graphite
with scraping and selective glazing on paper, 29 ⅜ by 21 ⅜
inches. New-York Historical Society, purchased for the Society
by public subscription
from Mrs. John J.
Audubon.
MAY/JUNE 2024
91
D
avid had portrayed an idealized Napoleon heroically pointing the way over
the Alps through the Great St Bernard
Pass. For his Golden Eagle, the model for Havell
plate 181 (Fig. 8), Audubon may have consulted
an engraving after David’s work or, alternatively,
if he had visited Point Breeze, he remembered
David’s painting when composing the watercolor.
Audubon is not recorded as having visited the
estate, and his single documented meeting with
Joseph was in New York’s Battery Park in August
1824, although Joseph’s nephew, Charles-Lucien,
was Audubon’s friend. The artist may have visited Point Breeze because the young Bonaparte
kept his extensive collection of bird specimens
there and was sometimes in residence. Moreover,
Audubon sent letters to him at that address. Regardless, he knew both David’s masterpiece and
a lost painting based on it by Rembrandt Peale,
Napoleon on Horseback. Most revealing is that
Audubon identified Rembrandt Peale’s painting
as “Napoleon Crossing the Alps,” substantiating
his knowledge of David’s composition.
As in David’s composition, Audubon positioned his life-size golden eagle in the frontal
plane, where both protagonists engage the viewer.
Figs. 6, 6a. Golden Eagle, Study for Havell
pl. 181 by Audubon, 1833. Watercolor,
pastel, graphite, black ink and black chalk
with touches of gouache and selective
glazing on paper, 38 ⅛ by 25 ½ inches.
New-York Historical Society, purchased for
the Society by public subscription from
Mrs. John J. Audubon.
Fig. 7. Napoleon Crossing the Alps by
Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), 1801.
Oil on canvas, 8 feet 6 ⅜ inches by 87
inches. Musée national des Chateaux de
Malmaison et de Bois-Préau, RueilMalmaison, France.
92
ANTIQUES
MAY/JUNE 2024
93
in dramatic, even theatrical, postures frequently
based on geometry—characteristics that he would
mine in endless variations.
Deserving of the moniker of Old Master himself, Audubon did not simply derive his golden
eagle composition from David. For the concept of
the voracious raptor carrying away its prey, he had
digested Rembrandt’s arresting Abduction of Ganymede, not the oil painting but rather a print after
it (Fig. 9). Audubon’s admiration for the Dutch
master peppers his writings. For example, during
a visit to the Earl of Morton and his wife in 1826,
he noted that, among the works that impressed
him, there was a “beautiful head by Rembrandt,”
and in his essay “Method of Drawing Birds,” he
cites the Dutch master as a paragon of portraitists.
Like all great artists, Audubon influenced later
generations, just as he had learned from studying
the works by other artists. As explored in this
volume, he layered many of these lessons into
his watercolor models and plates for The Birds of
America, endowing his dazzling tableaux with a
profound resonance and gravitas which, after two
centuries, still proclaim the fierce beauty of the
natural world.
The article is excerpted and adapted from Audubon as Artist: A
New Look at The Birds of America, published by Reaktion Books
(London, 2024).
ROBERTA J. M. OLSON is curator of drawings emerita at the
New-York Historical Society.
Fig. 8. Golden Eagle by
Robert Havell Jr. (1793–
1878) after Audubon, plate
181 in The Birds of America
(1827–1838). Hand-colored
etching with aquatint and
engraving on paper, 39 ⅜
by 27 ⅛ inches. New-York
Historical Society, Patricia
D. Klingenstein Library.
Fig. 9. Abduction of
Ganymede by Antoine
Cardon (1772–1813)
after Rembrandt van
Rijn (1606–1669), 1795.
Engraving, 25 ⅜ by 17 ⅞
inches. Rijksmuseum,
Amsterdam.
94
Audubon did not obtain his specimen in the
manner depicted in the detail at the lower left of
the watercolor (Fig. 6a). Rather, he purchased a
live adult female that had been severely injured
in a trap (he misjudged the sex) in Boston from
Ethan Allen Greenwood, the proprietor of the
New England Museum.
y referring to David’s famous composition,
Audubon asserted his indebtedness to the
prestigious painter and his equality as an
artist. However, the lessons he learned from David
override any specific inspiration from one painting, justifying the self-trained artist’s references to
him as his “master.” From David he gleaned the
powerful principles of neoclassical art—simple,
isocephalic compositions with outlined figures
B
ANTIQUES
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NED
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PAST
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By Sa
At the Allan Breed School of Woodworking in New Hampshire,
a museum-trained master craftsman instructs the next generation
in the styles and standards of historic American furniture
M
any readers of this magazine will recall with admiration the interpretive
work of curator Morrison Heckscher
in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For almost fifty years he enabled
the meticulous reexamination of otherwise longaccepted conclusions about the origins of American
decorative traditions. Perhaps this is why, among
conservators and craftsmen specializing in early
American furniture, Heckscher’s word is gospel.
Indeed, in the New Hampshire workshop of
master cabinetmaker Allan (Al) Breed, the one
book that sits atop the worktable, like a Bible, is
Heckscher’s American Furniture in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Late Colonial Period: The Queen
Anne and Chippendale Styles. “If you only have one
book, this is it,” Breed advises others in the trade.
Breed, who has been crafting fine reproductions
of early American furniture since the late 1970s,
owes a debt to Heckscher and rare curators like
Figs. 1a–c. Details
of a reproduction
Philadelphia rococo
looking-glass frame
being made by Allan
(Al ) Breed (1954–).
An earlier reproduction of the same
frame is shown in
Fig. 5. Photographs
by Sarah Bilotta.
Fig. 2. Corner chair
by Breed, c. 2010, in
the style of c. 1775
chair by John Goddard (1724–1785)
of Newport, Rhode
Island. Mahogany;
height 29, width
29, depth 23 inches.
Photograph by
Bill Truslow.
Breed’s studio is not just a gallery
of historic cabinetry styles. It is
a working shop, floor strewn with wood shavings, that familiar smell wafting across the
space. And, it’s full of tools, each with a purpose
The years since have taken Breed all over the
country in pursuit of more challenging work.
He has made reproductions for museums and
private collectors, doing restoration work in
addition—everything from claw-and-ball
feet to clock cases to elaborate rococo mirrors.
“I love challenging work,” he says, pointing to
a Philadelphia rococo mirror he is currently
carving (Figs 1a–c.). “It humbles you.”
Breed’s work feels like a lost art. “All this stuff
can be made by machines,” he says. “But there
are people who still prefer something made by
a person.” With this philosophy in mind, he is
passing on his craft. He has spent much of his
Fig. 3. X-ray of a c. 1790
country Chippendale chair
from the North Shore of
Massachusetts, taken in
1977. Bilotta photograph.
Fig. 4. Photo-composite
plan for a Philadelphia
rococo-style looking glass.
See Figs. 1a–c. Photograph
by Michael Turner.
him. “When he was curator of American
decorative arts at the Met,” Breed recalls,
“he took pieces right off the wall for
me to measure.” Breed’s work would be
impossible without access to reference
pieces, but with strict access regulations
at museums, this is not always possible. It
is curators like Heckscher who make it so.
reed’s career began with another
such museum professional when, in
1974, he appeared on the doorstep
of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, asking
for a job. He was a young man with an affinity for antiques markets and was hooked
on the idea of restoring furniture. “They
said no,” he recalls cheekily. “But, ‘you can
volunteer.’ So I did.” Breed apprenticed for
several months with the MFA’s restorer,
Italian-trained cabinetmaker Vincent Cerbone. “It was from Vinnie that I learned the
rudiments of hide glue, carving theory, and
furniture construction while we took apart
and reassembled pieces from the museum’s
collection.” When Cerbone passed away,
Breed purchased many of his tools, especially a sophisticated collection of woodcarving tools. Two years later, he and a group
of fellow students from the North Bennet
Street trade school in Boston opened their
own shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
B
98
ANTIQUES
detective work, back in 1977. It’s the first chair he
ever reproduced for a customer. “I was curious what
the joint looked like,” Breed says. So, he handed the
country Chippendale chair of about 1790 over to a
radiologist friend who took it to work and X-rayed
it. “It’s pretty poorly made,” he chuckles. “Look at
the gap in the mortise-and-tenon joint.”
To do this work, Breed notes, you also have to
be good at drawing. In practice, you outline shapes
and motifs in pencil directly on the wood, but then
you cut them off. So, if you need to go back to the
original template, you have to be able to draw it
again. Breed and his son, who worked with him
until five years ago, have also used photography in
career teaching others, whether at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, or in his studio. He typically hosts around
six classes per year, for a week or even just a weekend,
teaching skills like carving and veneering, giving
students the opportunity that the MFA gave him.
Don’t be fooled. It’s complicated work that takes
years to master. “When you’re looking at a piece,
you have to kind of figure out what process was
used and what [the maker] did first.” It requires
cunning investigation and a strong understanding
of historical methods of furniture construction.
Tacked onto a bulletin board in a corner of his
studio is a curious X-ray of a chair back (Fig. 3).
It was part of Breed’s early furniture restoration
Fig. 5. Looking-glass
frame by Breed, 2013,
based on a c. 1769–
1775 Philadelphia
example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Painted white pine;
height 48, width
26 inches. Truslow
photograph.
Fig. 6. Template by
Breed for a cartouche
to decorate the mantelpiece of a house in New
Hampshire, c. 2013.
White pine, height 48,
width 26 inches.
Bilotta photograph.
Fig. 7. Breed working
on a claw-and-ball foot,
c. 2005. Photograph
courtesy of Al Breed.
MAY/JUNE 2024
99
the studio, to make full-size composites that are then
used to make a pattern. On a table in the center of
the studio is the composite for the rococo mirror
he is currently carving (Fig. 4). He is making two
of them for a client. They are based on a white pine
Philadelphia looking glass of about 1775. This is the
second time in his career he’s undertaken a reproduction of this exact piece. Previously, in 2013, he
completed a reproduction that, to the specifications
of his client, was painted in gleaming white (Fig. 5).
A photograph of the finished product hangs on a
clothesline over his workbench.
n a table beside the workbench is a display
piece that catches my eye. It is an elaborate
carved shell motif, made as a template for
a mantelpiece in a home in New Hampshire (Fig. 6).
Breed worked in collaboration with an architect
to design the piece, which was then sent to Italy
in 2013 to be reproduced in marble. Set beside
the shell cartouche is a section of a gilded frame, a
copy of an eighteenth-century John Welch frame
made for a John Singleton Copley portrait in the
MFA, Boston. Breed produced another copy for an
art collector in 2015. Across the expansive studio
stands another workbench, where I spot some of
the most elegant veneering I’ve ever seen—made
for a Federal-style chest of drawers (Figs. 8, 8a).
The original is from about 1800 and was made in
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, by the prosperous
cabinetmaker Langley Boardman.
I am in awe to be this close to so many precise
reproductions of early American furniture. It is as
close as I might get any time soon to the real thing.
But, Breed’s studio is not just a gallery of historic
cabinetry styles. It is a working shop, floor strewn
with wood shavings, that familiar smell wafting
across the space. And, it’s full of tools, each with
a purpose. Breed maintains an entire wall of hand
planes of different sizes and a cabinet of carving
tools in different shapes and dimensions (Fig. 11).
They remind me that everything in his studio was
made without machinery.
O
Figs. 8, 8a. Chest of drawers by Breed, c. 2010, in
the style of a c. 1800 example by Langley Boardman
(1774–1833) of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Pine with satinwood and other veneers; height 38,
width 40, depth 20 inches. Truslow photographs.
Fig. 9. Interior of Breed’s workshop.
Bilotta photograph.
100
ANTIQUES
The studio is set high up above the Salmon
Falls River, in early nineteenth-century mill
buildings in Rollinsford, New Hampshire,
that have been converted into artist studios
(Fig. 10). Periodically, a train rolls by mere
feet from the window. Breed has been in this
space since 2003. He is surrounded by other
craftspeople, young and old, who work from
their spacious studios. However, he is most
certainly the only one in the entire complex
who is actively producing “eighteenth-century” furniture. It brings to mind the question
of whether this work, this style of furniture
in general, is going out of fashion.
“I think the trade and the antique furniture
market will have a generation before they
come back,” Breed says. “My kids don’t want
a house full of brown furniture.” But, it wasn’t
long ago that Scandinavian-inspired blocky
modern furniture was in the same position.
These things come and go. In the meantime,
Breed is as busy as ever, perhaps an indication
that the brown furniture market is not as dead
as it is perceived to be. Breed anticipates that
it will only get busier, which is why he continues to pass on his skills to eager students.
His career demonstrates how museums and
craftspeople can, and do, collaborate to tell
the history of American furniture design. It is
a humbling reminder of how crucial both are
to sustaining collections of historic American
furniture for the future.
Fig. 10. The Mills at Salmon Falls, Rollinsford,
New Hampshire, where Breed and other craftsmen
and artists have their workshops and studios.
Photograph by Taylore Dawn Kelly, courtesy of
Cutter Family Properties.
Fig. 11. Hand planes in Breed’s studio.
Turner photograph.
MAY/JUNE 2024
101
Masterpieces on the
Mersey
By
Barrymore
Laurence
Scherer
Thanks to the aesthetic
discernment and
farsighted provisions
of an English viscount,
Port Sunlight’s Lady
Lever Art Gallery
today preserves one
of the most comprehensive collections of
fine and decorative
arts in the UK
D
ante Gabriel Rossetti’s Blessed
Damozel (Fig. 10) and Edward
Burne-Jones’s Beguiling of Merlin
(Figs. 3, 8); landscapes by Thomas Gainsborough,
John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, sensual
marbles by French sculptor Maurice Ferrary and
classicist John Flaxman’s relief designs for Wedgwood. These are just a few of the treasures in the
Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, a town
across the River Mersey from Liverpool, England,
founded as a model village for the workers of the
nearby Lever Brothers soap factory. The gallery
is home to an outstanding collection of paintings, sculpture, European furniture, tapestries,
Chinese porcelain, and other fine and decorative
works of art.
It was opened in 1922 by William Hesketh Lever,
1st Viscount Leverhulme (Fig. 15). Lever made a
vast fortune in soap, an enterprise that resulted in
the founding of Lever Brothers and its corporate
descendant Unilever. The wealth he earned enabled
Fig. 1. The Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England, founded by William
Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–
1925), in 1922.
Fig. 2. A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford
by John Everett Millais (1829–1896), 1857. Oil on
canvas, 49 ⅜ by 67 ½ inches. Except as noted,
objects illustrated are in the Lady Lever Art Gallery.
Fig. 3. The Beguiling of Merlin by Edward Coley
Burne-Jones (1833–1898), 1872–1877. Oil on
canvas, 73 ¼ by 43 ¾ inches.
him to become an art collector on a scale approaching that of industrialists Henry Tate in England and,
in America, J. P. Morgan and Henry Clay Frick.
Moreover, Lever’s Congregationalist upbringing,
together with his innate kindness, contributed to
his strong belief in altruism and self-improvement.
Lever became a canny businessman as well as a
pioneering labor reformer and an exceptionally generous philanthropist. This bore its finest fruit in his
founding of the beautiful village of Port Sunlight to
house his factory labor force.
Today the beaux arts–style Lady Lever Art Gallery
forms the village’s noble centerpiece. At the head of a
gracious tree-lined avenue of flowerbeds, it fairly overflows with the choicest works amassed by one of the
great collectors at the turn of the twentieth century.
ever was born in Bolton, Lancashire, the
seventh child and first son of a Lancashire
grocer. His mother had hoped he would
study medicine while William himself had set his
cap at an architect’s career. But when he was sixteen
his father determined that he would join the family
grocery business. Beginning as a packing clerk at a
shilling a week, the industrious young man quickly
progressed from the warehouse to the front office.
At twenty-one his business acumen earned him
a partnership. Confident that he could properly
support a family on his handsome annual salary of
£800, he married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Hulme (Fig. 14), in 1874. Lever continued
to expand the family firm, enlarging and improving the premises and opening a branch in nearby
Wigan, always seeking new and more efficient ways
to conduct business.
L
Lever, with his
ZEWXÁRERGMEP
resources, was
able to retain
in Britain vast
swathes of its artistic and
cultural heritage at a
moment when British
ancestral collections
were being harvested by
deep-pocketed Americans
104
ANTIQUES
Fig. 4. Salammbo by Maurice Ferrary (1852–1904),
1899, installed in the gallery’s south rotunda. Marble, red granite, bronze;
height 107, width 35,
depth 39 ½ inches.
Fig. 5. The noble classicism
of the gallery’s main hall
provides an elegant setting
for paintings by Frederic
Leighton, John Everett Millais, and other artists, hung
above important furniture,
decorative arts, and sculpture from the collection assembled by Lever.
Fig. 6. Showcase of
Wedgwood jasperwares
designed by John Flaxman
(1755–1826), including the
famous jasper version of
the ancient Roman glass
Portland Vase (center), as
well as original wax models
made for Wedgwood by
Flaxman. At upper right is
the case of Flaxman’s own
modeling tools bought by
Lever in 1914.
Having created a successful new brand (Sunlight
Soap; Fig. 11), Lever decided to go independent in
1886. With his younger brother, James, William
founded Lever Brothers that year.
Lever soon needed to expand his premises and
his workforce. He began to consider establishing
a manufacturing center where he could not only
produce Sunlight Soap, but at a time when most
factory workers lived in dreary slums, Lever also
wanted to house his employees comfortably in
(as he phrased it) “houses with gardens back and
front, in which they will be able to know more
about the science of life than they can in a back
slum, and in which they will learn that there
is more enjoyment in life than the mere going
to and returning from work.”1 In 1887 he purchased more than fifty acres in Wirral, Cheshire,
conveniently on the River Mersey. In a March
1888 ceremony, Elizabeth Lever broke ground;
construction commenced soon thereafter.
MAY/JUNE 2024
105
Always keenly interested in architecture and
design, Lever envisioned Port Sunlight as a garden
village in an urban setting. Beyond workers’ housing
there would be schools, a library, sporting facilities,
parks, a church, and even an art gallery. He engaged
a number of architects to design buildings in a variety
of picturesque styles inspired by traditional vernacular ones, especially Tudoresque half-timbering.
y this point in his career, Lever had begun
collecting art, a pursuit he traced back to his
acquisition of a pair of eighteenth-century
Derby biscuit figures of a shepherd and shepherdess, which he displayed on the mantelpiece of his
house in Wigan during the 1870s. Deciding during
initial construction of Port Sunlight to reside closer
to his new headquarters, Lever rented the much
larger Thornton Manor, a mid-Victorian Gothicrevival house. After ultimately purchasing it, he
began to enlarge it into a neo-Tudor manse whose
spacious new rooms fairly begged to display art.
English and Chinese porcelain became abiding
interests. Motivated during the 1890s by the collec-
B
106
ANTIQUES
tor and watercolorist James Orrock (1829–1913)
913)
to establish collections spotlighting British historical taste, Lever was particularly drawn too the
famille-verte wares that had been a staple off the
nese
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese
export market. Similarly, he collected the blued by
and-white ceramics that had been championed
such painters as Whistler and Rossetti duringg the
rise of the aesthetic movement in the 1860s and
ublic
1870s, and often identified by the greater public
ersity
with Oscar Wilde, who, as an Oxford University
undergraduate, had famously quipped aboutt his
difficulty “living up to” the blue-and-white wares
decorating his rooms at Magdalen College.2
Lever’s decorative arts collections gradually emurnibraced important English and Continental furniture, tapestries, and, later in his life, ancient Greek
jects
and Roman works, as well as ethnographical objects
ughcollected during his many business trips throughout the world.
Determined to preserve a representation off the
corahighest taste in eighteenth-century English decorative arts, Lever also built one of the world’s most
ntury
comprehensive collections of eighteenth-century
re of
Wedgwood jasperware. He established the core
ay of
this collection in 1905 by purchasing the array
Wedgwood items in the care of Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks, 1st Lord Tweedmouth (1820–1894). The
oday
Scottish statesman and businessman, honored today
Fig. 7. Cephalus and Aurora by
Flaxman, 1790. Marble; height 57 ½,
width 40, depth 26 inches. Gift of
William Hulme Lever.
Fig. 8. A corner of the main hall is
hung, at left, with three major paintings
by Edward Burne-Jones. Left to right:
The Tree of Forgiveness, 1881–1882;
The Annunciation, 1876–1879; The
Beguiling of Merlin.
Fig. 9. Snowdrift by Edward Onslow
Ford (1852–1901), 1901. Marble, green
onyx, lapis lazuli, with silver mounts,
black marble; height 12 ½, width 35 ½,
depth 14 inches. Possibly personifying
the spirit of winter asleep or dying as
the spring thaw melts the snow, the
sculpture was purchased by Lever from
Ford’s executors in 1911.
Fig. 10. The Blessed Damozel by Dante
Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), 1875–
1879. Signed “D G Rossetti” at lower
right of the predella. Likely gilt gesso
over wood (frame) and oil on canvas;
height (overall) 87 ¼, width 54 ¾,
depth 8 ½ inches. This work illustrates
Rossetti’s own sorrowful poem about a
woman who dies young and pines in
Heaven for her lover, depicted pining
on earth in the predella. Lever bought it
in 1922.
MAY/JUNE 2024
107
Fig. 11. An original color
lithograph advertisement
for Sunlight Soap, Lever
Brothers, c. 1900. Wellcome Collection, London.
of Thomas Hope (1769–1831), the Regency period
furniture designer, collector, and influential advocate of ancient Greek taste.
Lever continued to collect sculpture, acquiring
works by such important members of late-nineteenth-century England’s New Sculpture movement as William Goscombe John (1860–1952),
whose gilt bronze A Maid so Young (Childhood)
(1896–1897) appears in the gallery’s main hall.
Apart from commissioning marble portrait busts
of himself and his wife from John, Lever commissioned him to sculpt the magnificent Defence
of the Realm, Port Sunlight’s bronze-and-granite
memorial dedicated in 1921 to the Lever Brothers
employees who died in World War I. Another leading representative of the New Sculpture movement
was Edward Onslow Ford, whose tender Snowdrift
(Fig. 9) Lever purchased from the artist’s executors
in 1911. The emaciated nude girl depicted lying
Fig. 12. The Decameron
by John William Waterhouse (1849–1917),
1915–1916. Signed and
dated “J.W.Waterhouse./
1916.” at lower right.
Oil on canvas, 39 ¾ by
62 ¾ inches.
Fig. 13. Lever, by then
Lord Leverhulme, waits
for Queen Victoria’s
youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, to open the
Lady Lever Art Gallery
for the first time on December 16, 1922, in a
photograph published
by the Liverpool Echo,
March 21, 2014.
as the founder of the golden retriever breed, was not
only one of the earliest British Wedgwood collectors
but had acquired numerous significant pieces from
Josiah Wedgwood’s grandson Charles Darwin.
Now in the front rank of British Wedgwood collectors, Lever with his vast financial resources was
able to retain in Britain vast swathes of its artistic
and cultural heritage at a moment when British
ancestral collections were being harvested by deeppocketed Americans. Lever regularly added to his
Wedgwood collection, most notably purchasing in
1920 an exceptional marble mantelpiece set with
Wedgwood relief tablets created around 1786. The
central tablet is The Apotheosis of Virgil, designed
and modeled by the famed English sculptor John
Flaxman, who, early in his career, had worked for
Wedgwood modeling classically inspired figures
and groups to be rendered in jasperware (Fig. 6).
By 1790 Flaxman’s reputation as a sculptor in
marble allowed him to devote himself to this calling. His graceful Cephalus and Aurora (Fig. 7), one
of his first major sculptural groups, was inspired
by the popular tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of
the passion of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, for
Cephalus, a beautiful but initially reluctant youth.
Lever purchased it along with many Greco-Roman
sculptures at the famous 1917 sale of the heirlooms
108
ANTIQUES
in the snow provides a female counterpart to the
drowned nude youth of Ford’s 1892 memorial
to Percy Bysshe Shelley (now in its own gallery at
University College, Oxford).
ever also evinced a hearty taste for sensual female imagery in such contemporary
French sculpture as Maurice Ferrary’s
Salammbo (Fig. 4). Depicting the nude marble
figure of Flaubert’s heroine entwining herself with
an enormous bronze serpent, symbolic of her
Carthaginian religion, it was purchased by Lever
from Ferrary in 1900, following its display at the
Paris Exposition Universelle.
Decorative arts and sculpture aside, painting was
Lever’s central interest as a collector. Starting in the
late 1880s he had begun to attend the important
summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy with the
idea of buying pictures he could use to advertise
Sunlight Soap. But during the mid-1890s, influ-
L
enced again by James Orrock, Lever
became a truly serious art collector.
Although he built a significant collection of eighteenth-century portraits and
landscapes, including representative
canvases by Gainsborough, Reynolds,
Romney, Vigée Le Brun, and Turner,
Lever was especially drawn to paintings
by leading masters of the Victorian age,
building an important collection by the
Pre-Raphaelites Ford Madox Brown,
Burne-Jones, William Holman Hunt,
John Everett Millais (Fig. 2), and Rossetti. He also acquired major compositions by such classicists as Frederic, Lord
Leighton, the revered president of the
Royal Academy whose exquisite scenes
inspired by Greek history and mythology earned him the sobriquet “Jupiter
Olympus,” and the Dutch-born Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a popular painter
of superbly detailed genre scenes of
ancient Rome.
It’s worth noting that while Lever
did acquire various paintings after they
were initially shown at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions or the Paris
Salons, and such a work as The Decameron (Fig. 12) directly from its creator,
John William Waterhouse, he bought
many artworks when the collections of
their first and even second owners went
up for sale on the secondary market.
MAY/JUNE 2024
109
Fig. 14. Mrs. William
Hesketh Lever, later
1st Lady Lever by
Samuel Luke Fildes
(1843–1927), 1896.
Initialed “F S” at
lower right. Oil on
canvas, 47 by 33
inches. Gift of 3rd
Viscount Leverhulme.
Leverhulme when, upon being raised to the peerage
as a baron in 1917, Lever memorialized her by adding her maiden name to his. Lord Leverhulme was
elevated further by being created a viscount in 1922.
In March 1914, George V and Queen Mary honored Lord Leverhulme with a visit to Port Sunlight.
After proudly conducting the royal pair through
the factory, he arranged for the king to press an
electric button on a scale model of the village and
thereby lay the cornerstone of the new Lady Lever
Art Gallery. In his address at the gallery’s opening in
1922, in the presence of Queen Victoria’s daughter,
Princess Beatrice (Fig. 13), Lord Leverhulme noted:
“Art has always been to me a stimulating influence.
It has always taught me without upbraiding me;
elevated me without humbling me . . . . Art can be
to everyone an inspiration. It is within the reach
of all of us.”3
Today, the gallery’s twelve thousand works of fine
and decorative art not only represent the cream of
Lord Leverhulme’s vast collections, they make it
one of the richest and most rewarding representations of Great Britain’s artistic patrimony.
Fig. 15. William
Hesketh Lever, Baron
Leverhulme of Boltonle-Moors, as Junior
Grand Warden of
England by George
Hall Neale (1863–
1940), 1918. Signed
“C.HALL.NEALE” at
lower right. Oil on
canvas, 84 by 47 ¼
inches. Lever was a
dedicated Freemason,
and collector of
Masonic relics.
Fig. 16. The Daphnephoria by Frederic
Leighton (1830–
1896), 1874–1876.
Oil on canvas, 91
inches by 17 feet 2 ½
inches.
Fig. 17. On His
Holidays, Norway by
John Singer Sargent
(1856–1925), 1901–
1902. Signed “John S.
Sargent” at lower
right. Oil on canvas,
54 by 96 inches.
110
A
case in point is Leighton’s immense Daphnephoria (Fig. 16)—at 91 inches by more
than 17 feet, the Lady Lever Gallery’s largest
canvas. Inspired by the ancient Greek festal procession held every nine years by the Boeotians in Thebes
to honor Apollo, it was commissioned around 1874
by Leighton’s friend James Stuart Hodgson, a partner
in Barings Bank. When the bank’s failure in 1890
obliged Hodgson to sell the painting in 1893, it went
to another British collector, George McCulloch, but
was on the market again in 1913, at which time Lever
bought it with the intention that it dominate the
main hall of the new gallery he was planning—and
which he decided to name after Lady Lever, following her sudden death in July.
Interestingly, Sargent’s On His Holidays, Norway
(Fig. 17), which Lever bought in 1923, is essentially
a landscape-cum-portrait of McCulloch’s son, Alexander, then a student at Winchester College, who
would win silver in single sculls at the 1908 Summer Olympics at Henley-on-Thames.
Just as Lever assembled one of the great private art
collections relatively late in his multifarious life, so
he gathered his public honors similarly late. In 1911
he was created a baronet, whereupon his beloved
wife became Elizabeth, Lady Lever. However, her
death prevented her from assuming the title Lady
ANTIQUES
1 Quoted in W. P. Jolly, Lord Leverhulme: A Biography (London:
Constable, 1976), p. 27. 2 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde
(New York: Knopf, 1988), p. 45. 3 Quoted in Oliver Rowe, “Art for
All,” Financial Management, published online June 1, 2019, quoted
in Lady Lever Art Gallery Guide (Liverpool: National Museums
Liverpool, 2013; rev. 2017), p. 5.
MAY/JUNE 2024
111
EVENTS | exhibitions symposiums lectures
ALABAMA
COLORADO
ILLINOIS
Huntsville Huntsville Museum of Art: “American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from
the DeMell Jacobsen Collection”; to June
16.*
Colorado Springs Colorado Springs Fine
Arts Center: “Clarence Shivers: Experimenting with Form”; to July 6.
Chicago Art Institute of Chicago: “Foreign
Exchange: Photography between Chicago,
Japan, and Germany, 1920–1960”; to September 9. • “Georgia O’Keeffe: ‘My New
Yorks’”; June 2 to September 22.*
Montgomery Montgomery Museum of Fine
Arts: “Art | Invention: Resonance”; to July 7.
ARIZONA
Phoenix Phoenix Art Museum: “William
Herbert ‘Buck’ Dunton: A Mainer Goes
West”; to June 30.*
Scottsdale Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art: “Dorothy Fratt: Color Mirage”; July 21.*
Denver Denver Art Museum: “The Skeletal
World of José Guadalupe Posada”; to May 12.
Kirkland Museum of Fine and Decorative
Art: “Vanity and Vice: American Art Deco”;
May 22 to January 12, 2025.
CONNECTICUT
New Haven Yale University Art Gallery:
“Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression”; to June 23.*
DELAWARE
Wilmington Delaware Art Museum: “There
Is a Woman in Every Color: Black Women in
Art”; to May 26.*
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
National Gallery of Art: “The Anxious Eye:
German Expressionism and Its Legacy”; to
May 27.
National Museum of Asian Art: “Staging
the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater
in Japanese Prints”; to October 6.*
National Portrait Gallery: “Brilliant Exiles:
American Women in Paris, 1900–1939”; to
February 23, 2025.*
FLORIDA
Porcelain vase, Korean, 1700s. Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, gift of Drs. Chester and Cameron C. Chang; photograph
© Museum Associates/Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles Getty Center: “Blood: Medieval/Modern”; to May 19.* • “Hippolyte Bayard: A Persistent Pioneer”; to July 7. *
Getty Villa: “Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya,
and Moche Pottery”; to July 29.*
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Imagined Fronts: The Great War and Global Media”; to July 7.* • “Korean Treasures from
the Chester and Cameron Chang Collection”; to June 30.
Pasadena Norton Simon Museum: “I Saw
It: Francisco de Goya, Printmaker”; to August 5.
San Diego San Diego Museum of Art:
“Agents of Power: Body Adornment in African Art”; to July 7.
San Francisco de Young: “American Beauty: The Osher Collection of American Art”;
May 18 to October 20.* Accompanying lecture: “Book Launch and Curator Talk on the
Osher Collection of American Art” by Lauren Palmor; May 25, 1 pm.
112
Lakeland Polk Museum of Art at Florida
Southern College: “Rockwell / Wyeth: Icons
of Americana”; to May 26.
Naples Baker Museum, Artis—Naples:
“George Gershwin and Modern Art: A Rhapsody in Blue”; to June 16.*
Sarasota John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: “Mountains of the Mind: Scholars’
Rocks from China and Beyond”; to June 23.
GEORGIA
Athens Georgia Museum of Art, University
of Georgia: “Power and Piety in 17th-Century Spanish Art”; to July 28.
Atlanta High Museum of Art: “Hear Me
Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield,
South Carolina”; to May 12.*
HAWAII
Driehaus Museum: “Chicago Collects: Jewelry in Perspective”; May 23 to September 22.
Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago: “Meiji Modern: Fifty Years of New Japan”; to June 9.*
Walters Art Museum: “New on the Bookshelf: The Creative Power of Women”; to
June 16.
MASSACHUSETTS
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Dress
Up”; to September 2.
Northampton Smith College Museum of
Art: “Painting the Persianate World: Portable Images on Paper, Cloth and Clay”;
to July 7.
Salem Peabody Essex Museum: “Ethiopia
at the Crossroads”; to July 7.*
INDIANA
Bloomington Sidney and Lois Eskenazi
Museum of Art, Indiana University: “Magic
Ledger: The Drawings of Saul Steinberg”;
to June 2.*
Williamstown Clark Art Institute: “Guillaume
Lethière”; June 15 to October 14.* • “Paper
Cities”; to June 23.
MICHIGAN
South Bend Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,
University of Notre Dame: “Equal Forces:
The Sculpture and Photography of Kenneth
Snelson”; to July 7.
Detroit Detroit Institute of Arts: “Japanese Friendship Dolls”; to June 5. • “Regeneration: Black Cinema 1898–1971”; to
June 23.*
IOWA
Flint Flint Institute of Arts: “From Earth to
Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas”; May 11
to August 25. • “Mexicanidad”; to September 8.
Davenport Figge Art Museum: “Revolutionary Artist: The Prison Fantasies of David Alfaro Siqueiros”; to June 9.
KANSAS
Wichita Wichita Art Museum: “Upside
Down, Topsy-Turvy, and In-Between: Images of the Carnival and Circus from the
Wichita Art Museum”; to August 11.
KENTUCKY
Louisville Speed Art Museum: “Capturing
the West: Timothy O’Sullivan, Pioneer Photographer”; to August 25. • “India: South
Asian Paintings from the San Diego Museum of Art”; to May 12.
LOUISIANA
New Orleans New Orleans Museum of Art:
“Double Space: Women Photographers and
Surrealism”; to August 4.
MAINE
Brunswick Bowdoin College Museum of
Art: “Empires of Liberty: Athena, America, and the Feminine Allegory of the State”;
to June 2.
Muskegon Muskegon Museum of Art: “John
Steuart Curry: Weathering the Storm”; May
23 to September 2.
MINNESOTA
Minneapolis Minneapolis Institute of Art:
“American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella
Watson”; to June 23.* • “Wandering With
Dutch Artists”; to June 2.
MISSOURI
Kansas City Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art:
“Glamorous Women: Gender and Fashion in
Chinese Art”; to May 19.
St. Louis Saint Louis Art Museum: “Concealed Layers: Uncovering Expressionist
Paintings”; to August 4.* • “Matisse and
the Sea”; to May 12.* • “Native American
Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection”; to July 14.
MONTANA
Billings Yellowstone Art Museum: “Will
James in Magazines”; to June 1.
Honolulu Honolulu Museum of Art: “Fashioning Aloha”; to September 1. • “Ke Kumu
Aupuni: The Foundation of Hawaiian Nationhood”; to August 4.*
Rockland Farnsworth Art Museum: “Magwin’-teg-wak: A Legacy of Penobscot Basketry”; May 25 to January 5, 2025. •
“Marsden Hartley and the Sea”; to October 7.
IDAHO
MARYLAND
NEVADA
Boise Boise Art Museum: “Silver Linings:
Celebrating the Spelman Art Collection”;
to July 21.
Baltimore Baltimore Museum of Art: “Art/
Work: Women Printmakers of the WPA”;
to June 30.
Reno Nevada Museum of Art: “Sagebrush
and Solitude: Maynard Dixon in Nevada”;
to July 28.*
ANTIQUES
NEBRASKA
Lincoln Sheldon Museum of Art, University
of Nebraska: “(In)credible: Exploring Trust
and Misperceptions”; to July 6.
By Sierra Holt
NEW HAMPSHIRE
Manchester Currier Museum of Art: “Stories of the Sea”; to October 18.
NEW JERSEY
Montclair Montclair Art Museum: “Century: 100 Years of Black Art at MAM”; to
July 7.*
New Brunswick Zimmerli Art Museum,
Rutgers University: “George Segal: Themes
and Variations”; to July 31.*
Trenton New Jersey State Museum: “Discovering Grant Castner: The Lost Archive
of a New Jersey Photographer”; to September 15.
NEW MEXICO
Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art:
“Staff Picks: Favorites from the Collection”;
to August 18.*
New Mexico Museum of Art: “Out West: Gay
and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900–
1969”; to September 2.
NEW YORK STATE
Albany Shaker Heritage Society: “A Gathering to Commemorate the 250th Anniversary of the Shakers Coming to America”;
May 3–5.
Court Painting”; to June 9.* • “New York
Art Worlds, 1870–1890”; to July 21.* •
“Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion”; to September 2.
Morgan Library and Museum: “Beatrix Potter: Drawn to Nature”; to June 9.*
New-York Historical Society: “Women Who
Preserved New York City”; to June 9. •
“Women’s Work”; to August 25.
Asheville Asheville Art Museum: “Honoring
Nature: Early Southern Appalachian Landscape Painting”; to October 21.
Winston-Salem Old Salem Museums and
Garden: Symposium: “Memory and Meaning in Southern Silver”; September 20–21.
OHIO
Cincinnati Cincinnati Art Museum: “From
Shanghai to Ohio: Woo Chong Yung (1898–
1989)”; to August 18.*
Cleveland Cleveland Museum of Art: “Fairy
Tales and Fables: Illustration and Storytelling in Art”; to September 8. • “Six Dynasties of Chinese Painting”; to September 1.
Columbus Columbus Museum of Art: “Marie Laurencin: Sapphic Paris”; to August 18.*
OKLAHOMA
Cooperstown Fenimore Art Museum: “As
They Saw It: Women Artists Then and Now”;
to September 2.
OREGON
NEW YORK CITY
American Folk Art Museum: “Francesc
Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the
Birth of Art Brut”; to August 18.*
Bard Graduate Center: “Sonia Delaunay:
Living Art”; to July 7.*
Brooklyn Museum: “Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo (feat. Takashi Murakami)”; to August 4. • “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm”; to
August 18.
Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Collecting
Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany and
Co.”; June 9 to October 20.* • “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery”;
to June 4.* • “The Harlem Renaissance
and Transatlantic Modernism”; to July 28.*
• “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the
Renaissance”; to July 7.* • “Indian Skies:
The Howard Hodgkin Collection of Indian
Providence RISD Museum: “Fantasy,
Myth, Legend: Imagining the Past in Works
on Paper since 1750”; to June 2.* • “Nancy
Elizabeth Prophet: I Will Not Bend An Inch”;
to August 4.*
SOUTH CAROLINA
Columbia Columbia Museum of Art: “Interior Lives: Modern American Spaces,
1890–1945”; to May 12.
NORTH CAROLINA
Catskill Thomas Cole National Historic Site:
“Native Prospects: Indigeneity and Landscape”; to October 27.*
Poughkeepsie Frances Lehman Loeb Art
Center, Vassar College: “Making a Life in
Photography: Rollie McKenna”; to June 2.*
RHODE ISLAND
Tulsa Philbrook Museum of Art: “Wyeths:
Textures of Nature”; to August 18.
Eugene Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art,
University of Oregon: “‘Woman Was the
Sun’ | Art of Japanese Women”; to August 4.
Portland Portland Museum of Art: “Peggy Bacon: Biting, Never Bitter”; June 14 to
February 2, 2025.
TENNESSEE
Nashville Frist Art Museum: “Monuments
and Myths: The America of Sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester
French”; to May 27.*
Philadelphia Museum of Art: “Diana Scultori: An Engraver in Renaissance Rome”; to
July 7. • “Mary Cassatt at Work”; May 18
to September 8.* • “Of God and Country:
American Art from the Jill and Sheldon Bonovitz Collection”; to July 7.
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts:
“Layers of Liberty: Philadelphia and the
Appalachian Environment”; June 27 to November 7.
Pittsburgh Frick Pittsburgh Museums and
Gardens: “Vermeer, Monet, Rembrandt:
Forging the Frick Collections in Pittsburgh
and New York”; to July 14.
Williamsburg Muscarelle Museum of Art,
College of William and Mary: “America in
Black and White: Depression-Era Photographs from the Farm Security Administration”; to May 31.
WASHINGTON
Seattle Seattle Art Museum: “Calder: In
Motion, the Shirley Family Collection”; to
August 4.*
TEXAS
Austin Blanton Museum of Art, University
of Texas at Austin: “Anni Albers: In Thread
and On Paper”; to June 30.
Fort Worth Kimbell Art Museum: “Art and
War in the Renaissance: The Battle of Pavia Tapestries”; June 16 to September 15.*
Houston Menil Collection: “Janet Sobel: AllOver”; to August 11. • “Ruth Asawa Through
Line”; to July 21.*
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: “Vertigo of
Color: Matisse, Derain, and the Origins of
Fauvism”; to May 27.*
San Antonio McNay Art Museum: “A Particular Beauty: 19th-Century French Art at
the McNay”; to June 16.
UTAH
Provo Brigham Young University Museum of
Art: “Reconciliation: Biblical Imagination in
German Expressionist Prints”; to October 19.
Salt Lake City Utah Museum of Fine Arts:
“Pictures of Belonging: Miki Hayakawa, Hisako Hibi, and Miné Okubo”; to June 30.*
PENNSYLVANIA
Philadelphia Barnes Foundation: “Alexey
Brodovitch: Astonish Me”; to May 19.*
Mueller”; to August 4.* Accompanying
lecture: “Lethal Beauty: Design Elements
in Samurai Suits of Armor” by Andreas
Marks; June 13, 6:30 pm.
VIRGINIA
Charlottesville Fralin Museum of Art at
the University of Virginia: “Voices of Connection: Garamut Slit Drums of New Guinea”; to June 2.
Mount Vernon George Washington’s Mount
Vernon: The 2024 Mount Vernon Symposium; May 31–June 2.
Norfolk Chrysler Museum of Art: “Fantastic Creatures of the Venetian Lagoon: Glass
1875–1915”; to August 18.
Richmond Virginia Museum of Fine Arts:
“Producing the Picturesque: Watercolors and Collaborative Prints by Kawase
Hasui”; to May 27. • “Samurai Armor from
the Collection of Ann and Gabriel Barbier-
Samurai armor of the yokohagido- to-sei gusoku type,
Japanese, 1600s–1700s. © The Ann and Gabriel BarbierMueller Museum, Dallas, Texas, on view at the Virginia
Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; photograph by Brad Flowers.
WISCONSIN
Milwaukee Milwaukee Art Museum: “Life
Captured in Line: 17th-Century Dutch and
Flemish Prints”; to August 18. Accompanying lecture: “Life Captured in Line: 17thCentury Dutch and Flemish Prints” by Nikki
Otten; May 30, 12 pm.
CANADA
Montreal Montreal Museum of Fine Arts:
“Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore: Giants
of Modern Art”; to June 2.*
Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario: “Making Her
Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe,
1400–1800”; to July 1.*
An * indicates that a catalogue, brochure,
and/or checklist is available for this exhibition. Information and photographs should
be received three months before the opening
month of an exhibition and four months before symposiums and antiques shows that
include loan exhibitions or lectures.
MAY/JUNE 2024
113
JULY/AUGUST 2023
COVERING
ANTIQUES &
FINE ARTS
Since 1922
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022
End notes
By Eleanor H. Gustafson
I
started working with Greg when he wrote
for ANTIQUES, where I was the editorial manager, and then helped him launch
MODERN in 2009. There were a lot of late
nights and some tears, but it was also one of
the best experiences I’ve ever had. He was an
excellent writer and a great editor, giving me
the confidence to continue in this field. The
decorative arts and design world has lost a
great advocate, scholar, mentor, and friend.
Danielle Devine, editor of Maine Home
and Design, former editorial manager
of The Magazine ANTIQUES and deputy
editor of MODERN Magazine.
In Memoriam:
Gregory Cerio
I have been lucky enough
to work with four of the
six editors-in-chief of
ANTIQUES in its 102-year history.
Beyond their obvious devotion to the
decorative arts, they all shared one
important quality: a sense of humor—
crucial to dealing with scholars, curators, writers, antiques dealers . . .
Greg’s was tinged with a sharp wit and
an occasional snarky sarcasm that,
combined with his wealth of knowledge, could be intimidating—until
you came to understand that behind
it was a soft heart, a desire for excellence, and a wish to bring out the best
in his team, particularly to nurture
young people, as is attested to in several of the remembrances below.
After years of not-always-benevolent corporate management, Greg
(with publisher Don Sparacin) shepherded the magazine into productive private ownership, through the
Covid-19 pandemic, and securely
into the digital age by promoting
our Curious Objects podcast. His eye
for design was always evident in
the covers he chose; his pleasure in
the written word, in his own writing
as well as in sharpening that of others, is clear in every story published
under his direction. The staff is now
spread from Maine to Mexico. We all
knew he had some health issues, but
his consistently positive attitude led
us to believe he would be fine in the
end. His unexpected death has left
us in shock and sorrow, but as one in
honoring his memory.
G
reg took a chance on me, a museum
professional and design history graduate student, and a relative newcomer to the
editorial world. I always felt he recognized my
deep love for design and shared it himself. He
was the most constructive critic I had while
working on my master’s degree at Oxford.
I watched my writing style evolve as he
edited—an irreplaceable gift.
The first time I met Greg in person was
in the crowded lobby of the Winter Show
(rescheduled that year, and taking place in
spring) opening night party in 2022. I was a
girl from Maine on my first editorial assignment in Manhattan, in a crowd of honed
media professionals and art collectors. Greg
immediately greeted me and introduced
me to many art dealers who would become
friends and mentors. He was deeply invested
in my growth as an art writer, but also as a
young person in the art world, in general. He
lambasted my resistance to using the subJANUARY/FEBRUARY 2022
way, but he also welcomed me into his New
York circle, introducing me to his favorite
restaurants and museums.
My favorite memories are of touring art
and antiques fairs with Greg as guide. He
showed my boyfriend and me around the
Winter Show, spending ample time highlighting the objects we were interested in. At
one show, he found out that my mom was
interested in pewter and made her a list of
antiques dealers specializing in it. He was as
snarky as he was kind, and I loved that he
had those two sides to him. He never let it go
that I carried an Oxford University tote bag:
“Just flash that if anyone criticizes your factchecking.” His art-world savvy and unmistakable editorial tone made ANTIQUES what it
is today. It will not be the same without him.
Sarah Bilotta, digital manager
and editorial research associate
G
reg was a kind, funny, and brilliant
man, and an outstanding editor and
writer. He was open-minded, always making careful editorial decisions. He loved fine
and decorative arts, and he really loved The
Magazine ANTIQUES. Nothing displayed his
dedication more than when, during the
production of what would be his final issue,
he managed to write, edit, and in general
run the show, all while being confined to
a hospital bed. I will miss Greg for a lot of
reasons, but especially for his humor. I’m
grateful I was able to know him and work
with him for so many years.
Martin Minerva, art director
Celebrating 100 Years
19222022
Gregory Cerio
(1960–2024).
The Magazine
Antiques: The
First One Hundred
Years by Andrew
Lamar Hopkins
(1977–), gatefold
cover of the
January/February
2022 issue.
Photograph by
Alister Alexander/
Camerarts, NY,
courtesy of
the artist.
End notes
D
In celebration
of its first century,
in 2022 ANTIQUES
hosted a booth at
the Winter Show
that featured a
wonderful range
of objects lent by
exhibitors against
a backdrop of
covers from over
the years.
One of Greg’s
favorite covers,
September/
October 2019,
a detail of Vera
Neumann’s 1963
design Cats and
Dogs. Photograph
by Steven Meckler,
courtesy of
Susan Seid.
uring my first Winter Show as ANTIQUES’
managing editor, Arthur Liverant was
selling a 100-plus-year-old piggy bank that
I kept coming back to. Thrilled to learn that
the pig would be my first antique purchase,
Greg made sure Arthur held it so that I
could run back to buy it. The pig ended up
being the subject of one of my first papers
at the Bard Graduate Center. When I applied
to BGC while working at ANTIQUES, I was
able to do so thanks not only to Greg’s rave
recommendation, but his full support as I
maneuvered the difficulties of attending
graduate school while holding down a fulltime job. He was a superlative editor and
writer, as well as a quiet cheerleader for his
small team. His dry wit, sarcasm, and continuous encouragement will be sorely missed.
Katherine Lanza LoPalo, Historic Artists’
Homes and Studios, former managing
editor, The Magazine ANTIQUES
I
will remember Greg, first of all, as a lover
of words, often of the unusual sort (especially French) but never at the expense of
the ordinary. It was clear that Greg looked at
writing like a craft, an attitude that put him
in sympathy with the many artisans profiled
in ANTIQUES while he was editor. Cutting
and rearranging, he rarely failed to improve
what crossed his desk—not always a great
way to make friends out of writers, but, as a
way of gaining their respect, unbeatable. His
own articles, written en masse and on-deadline (and usually not signed), were never
less than comme il faut. What’s more, it was
common to find in them passages where
reason, economy, rhythm, and word choice
combined to become more than the sum
of their parts—moments of mastery that
are the joy and privilege of the craftsman
whose tools warm to his touch. Happily, all
of Greg’s work remains visible, in our pages.
They make an enviable monument.
Sammy Dalati, senior editor
D
espite only knowing him for a little over
a year, I will always remember Greg. He
was a truly fascinating person with what
seemed like never-ending knowledge of art
and antiques. I will always admire his ability
to craft articles that were both informative
and infused with personality. Although
he was never formally an educator, his
guidance and editing were often learning
opportunities for me. There are questions,
such as “What would Greg change?” or “How
would he write this?” that I will always carry
when I’m writing. I am so grateful to have
worked with him; he will be missed.
Sierra Holt, digital media and
editorial associate
I
will keep this on the light side as I recount
the long journey through magazine land
that Greg and I shared. I’m sure he would
approve. Greg first came to my attention
around 1999 or thereabouts when he submitted an article on tall-case clocks to House
and Garden, where I was executive editor.
Although it was not the sort of subject a shelter magazine in pursuit of designer trends
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2019
and trendsetters warmed to, I found the
reporting and the delivery engaging and persuasive. We bought it, and Greg eventually
joined the staff, where he wrote a lively column on a potentially dull subject, auctions.
I’ll come back to House and Garden in a
moment, but first the rest of the journey.
When I became editor of ANTIQUES in
2008 I asked Greg to join Martin Filler in
covering mid-century modern design,
something he did so well that we eventually
created MODERN magazine in 2009, Greg
Cerio editor. Turbulent years those, but the
issues were solid. When I decided to leave
ANTIQUES in 2016, I had only one candidate
for my job . . . you know the rest.
I will finish with a favorite anecdote from
an editorial meeting at House and Garden.
One of the design editors had been to
England, where she’d fallen for a country
house whose decor had a subtle but persistent motif of owls, something she described
for us at numbing length until she finished
by remarking that we should publish said
owlish interior as there was nothing like it
this side of the Atlantic, to which my friend
observed, “Hey, we have Hooters!” I will miss
his brand of fun.
Elizabeth Pochoda, editor-at-large
and former editor-in-chief
The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2024, vol. CXCI, no. 3, published bimonthly and copyright Magazine Antiques Media, LLC, 1867 66th Street, #2 Brooklyn, NY 11204. Tel: 646-221-6063. Name registered in United
States Patent Office. ISSN 0161-9284. Publication No. 511-890. Periodicals postage paid at New York, NY, and at additional mailing offices. The cover and contents of The Magazine ANTIQUES are fully protected by
copyright and may not be reproduced in any manner without written consent. Unsolicited manuscripts or photographs should be accompanied by return postage. The Magazine ANTIQUES assumes no responsibility for
the loss or damage of such material. FOR CUSTOMER SERVICE, CHANGE OF ADDRESS or TO ORDER A NEW SUBSCRIPTION: Write to The Magazine ANTIQUES, P.O. Box 37612, Boone, IA 50037-2612,
or call (toll-free) 800-925-9271. Outside the US call 515-243-3273. SUBSCRIPTION RATES: US 6 issues $39.95, 12 issues $75, 18 issues $99; in US possessions, add $20 per year; in Canada, $79.95 per year (includes
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advertisements only from advertisers of recognized reputation in the trade but cannot guarantee the authenticity or quality of objects or services advertised in its pages.
Spencer Marks, Ltd.
Fine Antique & 20th Century Silver
www.spencermarks.com
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Spencer Gordon, III Õ Mark F. McHugh
P.O. Box 330, Southampton, Massachusetts 01073 (413) 527-7344
Member: The Art and Antiques Dealers League of America, CINOA & The Antique Dealers’ Association of America
The Hudson River School Three Centuries Immutable
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