Bringing back Olana

Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

The fiftieth anniversary of the rescue of Church’s exotic masterpiece  finds it and its spectacular landscape more popular than ever with lovers of art, architecture, and ecology.   View looking south to the Hudson River from the bell tower of the main house at Olana. Andy Wainwright 2004.  Just south of Hudson, New York, a signpost on Route 9G marks the …

The Victoria and Albert’s new look at “Europe 1600–1815”

Editorial Staff Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

By Joan DeJean   Neptune and Triton  by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, c. 1622– 1623, as installed in the newly reopened Europe 1600–1815 galleries at the V&A. Except as noted, all images © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.       In December 2015 the Victoria and Albert Museum’s European galleries were opened to the public for the first time in nearly …

The Schwarz Gallery

Gregory Cerio Art, Furniture & Decorative Arts

by Gregory Cerio The Private Office of George William Childs at the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Philadelphia by George Bacon Wood Jr. (1832–1910), 1877. Oil on canvas, 27 by 38 inches. Private collection; all photographs courtesy of the Schwarz Gallery, Philadelphia.     Specializing in American and European paintings of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries and best known for its expertise in …

The Fabric Workshop and Museum

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

At the moment, Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop and Museum has a national reputation though it is less well known around town. In one respect it is a little like its founder, the late Marion “Kippy” Boulton Stroud, who was both bold (and bossy) but surprisingly self-effacing. Unlike the Rosenbach or the Barnes, to name two of the city’s other idiosyncratic museums, …

Mount Vernon Comes to Freeman’s

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

Despite its dainty name the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association is not an outfit to be trifled with. Nor is it one to do anything by half measures. Founded in 1858, it is comprised of twenty-seven members, each representing a state in the union at that time, who approached and still approach the project of preserving George Washington’s estate with an almost …

Getting the blues: Transfer ware translated by three contemporary artists

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

You can only imagine what the china connoisseur in Edward Lamson Henry’s 1889 A Lover of Old China might think upon encountering a plate made by one of the three contemporary artists shown here. A Lover of Old China by Edward Lamson Henry (1841-1919), 1889.  Oil on academy board, 14 by 12 inches. Shelburne Museum, Vermont. We, on the other …

The Seductions of Budapest

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

It is easy to succumb to the beauty of Budapest, Hungary’s capital city, which straddles the legendary Danube River flowing down from Germany out to the Black Sea. High on a hill on the Buda side stands the Buda Castle, erected on the ruins of former royal palaces going back to the thirteenth century. It is answered across the river …

Speaking Through Wood

Sammy Dalati Furniture & Decorative Arts

The Civil War has left its mark on two important pieces of vernacular furniture acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Fig. 1. Secretary-bookcase attributed to members of Connecticut’s 16th Infantry, made to honor brothers Wells (1845–1904) and John Bingham (1844 –1862), 1876. Walnut, oak, ebony, poplar, pine, maple, metal, glass, muslin, silk, bone, horn, abalone, and Seth Thomas movement; height 95 1⁄2, …