Dealers’ Choice: The noteworthy art collection of gallerists Abbot and Marcia Vose of Boston goes on display

Editorial Staff Art

The term “old school” could almost have been invented to describe the Vose Galleries, that venerable Boston art institution now celebrating its 175th year in business. In honor of that almost unprecedented milestone for an art gallery, the two owners, Abbot “Bill” and Marcia Vose, who have been married for forty-four years, have decided to put on display a selection of their private collection of American impressionists, assembled over the past four decades, as part of an exhibition titled Crosscurrents: The Colonies, Clubs & Schools That Established Impressionism in America.

Audubon’s birds, Audubon’s words

Editorial Staff Art

Few books are more famous than John James Audubon’s Birds of America. From the moment his birds began to emerge from the printing press in the 1820s, people marveled at their liveliness, as if the images might literally fly off the page in a ruffle of feathers. That liveliness was the product of Audubon’s genius and his love for the …

Rediscovering an art star

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | In recent decades, few provinces of human creativity have fallen into swifter or more thorough disrepute than the society portrait. So steeply have its fortunes declined that the latest generation might be surprised to learn that this genre once held a position of signal honor among the varied forms of painting. Indeed, a …

Vose Galleries at 170

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By Tom Christopher   left to right: Elizabeth Vose Frey, Carey L. Vose, Abbot W. “Bill” Vose, Marcia L. Vose. Vose Galleries of Boston is that rarest of survivors: now completing its 170th year in business and still under the direction of the founding family, the firm itself predates many of the paintings that it buys and sells. Yet it …

Great Estates: Fenway Court, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Fenway Court, the former home of Isabella Stewart Gardner, gives added meaning to the notion of a house museum.  Built in the style of a fifteenth-century Venetian palace, it was conceived as both a residence and a museum.  With the help of many great advisers, Gardner amassed-and later, meticulously arranged-a superlative collection of fine and decorative arts, architecture, and rare …