Children’s toys: The New-York Historical Society, 200 years

Editorial Staff Art

By Amy a. Weinstein; originally published in January 2005. Appealing to the imagination of children of all ages, the toy collection of the New-York Historical Society offers a miniature window into nineteenth-century American family life. The approximately three thousand objects that constitute the collection are made of wood, metal, paper, ceramic, and cloth and trace the social, economic, political, and …

Japanese screens

Editorial Staff Art, Exhibitions

 By Ruth Davidson; Originally published in January 1971 For the enchantment of visitors to Asia House Gallery this month and next there will be on view byōbu, or Japanese painted screens, from twelve museums and private collections in New York. Arranged so as to suggest their appearance in a Japanese house, the twenty six screens will be shown in two …

Ezra Wood, profile cutter

Editorial Staff Art

By Olive Crittenden Robinson; originally published in August 1942. Among records of the many profile cutters of silhouettists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries flourishing in Massachusetts, no mention appears of Ezra Wood who plied his art along with his trade in Buckland, Franklin County, Massachusetts. Indeed while eastern Massachusetts seems well represented in ‘black portraiture,” my search …

From the archives: “New Mexican tinwork, 1840-1915”

Editorial Staff Art

By Lane Coulter; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 1991 The art of the tinsmith flourished in New Mexico from about 1840 to 1915. During this period Hispanic tinsmiths primarily made devotional objects that reflected the Roman Catholicism of the Spanish Southwest, but they also made a limited number of more secular objects. They used shapes derived from architecture as well as immensely …

Chinese botanical paintings for the export market

Editorial Staff Art

By Karina H. Corrigan; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, June 2004. A single stem of chrysanthemum explodes off the page shown in Plate I. This exquisite Chinese export painting was executed abut 1823, two years after this variety of chrysanthemum, the so-called quilled orange, had been introduced into English gardens.1 Chinese plants were first brought to Europe in the late seventeenth century, but …

Patronage and the publication of botanical illustration

Editorial Staff Art

 By Bernadette G. Callery; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, August 1989. Modern collections of botanical illustrations are treaty indebted to the patrons of the past, whose leisured curiosity and horticultural acquisitiveness enabled them to accumulate various “vegetable rarities,” and then to have those plants recorded in drawings or paintings from which published illustrations were prepared. Many of the surviving florilegia, or collections of …

Beatrix Potter, scientific illustrator

Editorial Staff Art

By Robert McCracken Peck Originally published in June 1996 At a time when many house museums have difficulty keeping their doors open, a small cottage in the English Lake District can barely manage to close its doors at all.  Hill top (Pl. VII), the two-hundred-acre farm where Beatrix Potter lived for the last thirty-eight years of her life, is so …

Stephen and Maxfield Parrish in New Hamsphire

Editorial Staff Magazine

Originally publsihed in June 1979 By Virginia Reed Colby Stephen Parrish, a well-known painter and etcher, and his son Maxfield,1 one of the most popular artists of the early twentieth century, both moved to New Hampshire in the 1890s. Stephen came to Cornish in 1893, following the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens and other artists, writers, and musicians who made up what …

Valentine’s Day by the numbers

Editorial Staff Magazine

We have published 92 February covers since 1922, and at least fourteen of them contain allusions to Valentine’s Day.   Some figures 8:  Love birds (four pairs) 1934, 1954, 1956, 1960 7:  Courting couples  1930, 1937, 1953, 1961, 1968, 1994, 2002 6:  The number of times Valentine’s Day graced the cover between 1951 and 1961. (The 1930s had four such …

Parisian jewelry and American patrons, real and fictional

Editorial Staff Art

By SHIRLEY BURY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1992. The formidable skill of Parisian jewelers in interpreting the work of innovative designers was the prime cause of their international popularity. Although craftsmen elsewhere practiced the late eighteenth-century technique of open-backed, or à jour, setting, which allowed light to refract and reflect through the stones, greatly enhancing their brilliance, the contrast …