Philadelphia collects: City folk

Editorial Staff Art

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 |  Twenty-five years ago in these pages, Beatrice B. Garvan wrote about an anonymous collection of Pennsylvania folk art that was already more than a quarter-century in the making. Garvan was struck by the coherence of the assemblage that was ever in flux, by the sense of motion generated by the collectors’ unyielding search …

Philadelphia collects: The torch bearer

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March/April 2013 | This issue celebrates the long history of Philadelphia as the city of great artist-artisans. That history would be even more impressive had there been a Helen Drutt on the scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to make sure that absolutely nothing of value was lost to posterity. What Drutt has done for …

Hudson River Classics: Edgewater and Richard Hampton Jenrette

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

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 …

Living with antiques: No velvet ropes–a collection in New Jersey

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts, Living with Antiques

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September/October 2011 | Called the last of the Georgians by the architect Robert A. M. Stern, Mott B. Schmidt dared to be unfashionable, stub­bornly designing traditional houses for town and country long after they were in favor.* Schmidt’s houses in the American Georgian manner usually relied on a restrained com­bination of red brick, dark shutters, and …