Henrietta Johnston’s portraits of Colonel John Moore and his wife, Frances Lambert Moore
Intelligent design
A look at the evolution of the decorative arts collections at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, as it provides the loan exhibition for the 2018 edition of the Winter Antiques Show.
Homer’s odyssey
An exhibition at the Worcester Art Museum examines Winslow Homer’s puzzling, productive mid-career sojourn in Britain.
Mourning Becomes Them: The death of children in nineteenth-century American art
“In the midst of life we are in death” These familiar words, which marched across sermons and samplers alike in the early decades of the American republic, surely resonated with sixteen-year-old Charlotte Sheldon in the summer of 1796. Sheldon was studying at Sarah Pierce’s Litchfield Female Academy when she heard the news: Polly Buel, another student, had died. Sheldon put down her studies …
Pictures within pictures: Photographs of American folk paintings, 1840-1880
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2013. Early photographs of American folk paintings constitute a unique archive of works by both recognized and unknown artists,1 frequently even preserving a visual record of otherwise unknown paintings. A large number of early daguerreotypists practiced this lucrative work at a time when photography afforded Americans their first opportunity to have accurate copies of works …
Collecting American samplers in Southern California
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, May/June 2013 | Best known for its expansive sandy beaches, stately palms, and glorious golden sunsets-as well as numerous superb collections of modern and contemporary art-Los Angeles is, perhaps unexpectedly, also home to a significant number of important and excitingly diverse American decorative arts collections. While some Southern California collectors have been amassing important holdings of …
American folk painting, The Wiltshire collection
By RICHARD WOODWARD; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978. Paintings by America’s first artists afford an informative and entertaining view of the nation’s early years. Many of these painters received academic instruction at home or abroad, while others were either wholly untutored or obtained their training from nonacademic sources. The work of this latter group, the “folk painters,” provides an insight into …
MESDA and the Study of Early Southern Decorative Arts
It has become almost a folk legend among decorative arts scholars: the story of Joseph Downs (1895 – 1954), then curator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, announcing at the 1949 Williamsburg Antiques Forum that “little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore.”1 The comment prompted an offended woman from Kentucky …
Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette
from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2012 | People don’t like hocus-pocus,” Richard Hampton Jenrette tells me. A fit eighty-two, the former lion of Wall Street seems a model of sanity in an insane world. Take his views on finance: “Wall Street has been high-jacked by speculators.” Or industry: “We are foolish to have outsourced our manufacturing.” Fig. 1. Edgewater, as …