The small gardens of Colonial Williamsburg

Editorial Staff Art

By THOMAS J. WERTENBAKER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, October 1954. The woods near Williamsburg are glorious in April and May with the crimson magenta flowers of the Judas tree, and the white and pink of the dogwood. The sweet smelling honeysuckle covers fences, embankments, and stumps. And everywhere in the town itself one can note along streets and lanes, or peeping from …

A desk associated with George Washington

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By JOAN SAYERS BROW; from The Magazine ANTIQUES May 1978. The  handsome slant-front desk illustrated here was originally owned by Colonel George William Fairfax (1724-1787), whose estate, Bevoir, was near Mount Vernon on the Potomac River in Virginia. In April 1773 Fairfax took his wife, sally Cary, to England, after asking his neighbor George Washington to watch over Belvoir while they were …

Skippets

Editorial Staff Art

By J. S. BROWN; From The Magazine ANTIQUES, July 1978. Skippets are small boxes made to hold and protect pendent wax seals attached to important documents. Silver, silver-gilt, and gold examples were used by the United States government between 1815 and 1871, primarily on treaties with other countries that had been ratified by Congress. The skippet was suspended from the treaty by …

American folk painting, The Wiltshire collection

Editorial Staff Art

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 …

Two hoof spoons

Editorial Staff Art

By ALBERT SCHER; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, September 1978.  When Helen Burr Smith wrote about silver spoons with hoof-shape terminals in ANTIQUES in 1944 there were only four of these interesting survivals from seventeenth-century Dutch New York households known in America. Now two more hoof spoons have come to light.   Fig. 1-Silver hoof spoon, probably New York, seventeenth century. Length 6 …

Loving the Gilded Age and learning how to look

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

from The Magazine ANTIQUES, January/February 2013 | John R. Tschirch is accustomed to being recognized. As Director of Museum Affairs for the Preservation Society of Newport County, he is in and out of the organization’s eleven historic houses so frequently that the volunteers and staff who usher nearly eight hundred thousand visitors through the mansions each year straighten when they see him …

Current & Coming, January-March

Editorial Staff Exhibitions

For sheer variety of form, color, period, and place of origin it is difficult to match the offerings at the annual New York Ceramics Fair, where thirty-three tightly packed booths represent virtually everything in the world of fired clay-from purely utilitarian objects to those meant solely for aesthetic contemplation. Most of the dealers are from the United States, though there …

Living with antiques, Beauregard House, a New Orleans “raised cottage”

Editorial Staff Living with Antiques

By FRANCES PARKINSON KEYES; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, August 1980. I had not the slightest idea when I started, rather desperately, to look for a small apartment in New Orleans where I could spend a few days every month for a year or two, that I would end up with a main house containing twelve rooms; slave quarters containing six …

New Orleans landscape painting of the nineteenth century

Editorial Staff Art

By W. JOSEPH FULTON; from The Magazine ANTIQUE, August 1980.               As in the rest of the United States, landscape painting as such seems to have received much slower acceptance in New Orleans than portrait painting; it was not really established here until the late 1860’s. We must speak with caution, however, since European artist-chroniclers accompanied expeditions to Louisiana …