Bringing an Old house back to life

Editorial Staff Furniture & Decorative Arts

By MARGARET NOWELL; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, February 1945. There are few more worth-while experiences than bringing back to life an old house. This is what Mr. and Mrs. John Howard Joynt have done with the handsome brick house at 601 Duke Street in Alexandria, Virginia. Fig. 1-The house, with its gray brick wall, encloses two sides of the property, and overlooks …

Painters of the Hudson River school

Editorial Staff Art

By FREDERICK A. SWEET; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, March 1945. Toward the end of the nineteenth century America’s art collectors were captivated by French taste and filled their gilt drawing rooms with salon figure pieces and bucolic scenes by members of the Barbizon school. Our own painters such as George Inness and Homer Martin, had to follow French trends, in order to …

Eighteenth-Century Jewelry

Editorial Staff Art

By JOHN HAYWARD; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1955. Most aspects of eighteenth-century arts and crafts have been the subject of detailed and exhaustive research in the course of the past fifty years. The jewelry of the period, however, has been somewhat neglected in favor of Renaissance jewelry (so called, though much of it dates from the first half of the seventeenth …

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

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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 …

A Demonstration in Pewter Making

Editorial Staff Art

By L. M. A. ROY [Originally published September 1949 ; posted in conjunction with Barrymore Laurence Scherer’s “American Pewter,” March/April 2013.] Mr. Roy’s model for this pictorial demonstration was John G. Herrock, “whose family,” he says,” were tinkering with tools from the time they came to Maine in 1799.”  Besides pewter, he makes violins, reproductions of colonial furniture, wrought iron, jewelry, and …