Chrysler Museum reopens

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Visitors approaching the grand front entrance of Norfolk, Virginia’s Chrysler Museum of Art on its reopening on May 10 could be forgiven for not realizing that a major transformation has taken place. So seamlessly have the flanking wings been enlarged and the gardens in front of them so surreptitious­ly moved forward that it is on­ly when inside that the impact …

Chinese botanical paintings for the export market

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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

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 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 …

Talking antiques at the Philadelphia Antiques Show

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We asked exhibitors at the Philadelphia Antiques Show to highlight one exceptional object in their booths and describe it as they might to an interested collector. Here are the things they chose, along with some of their comments.   Arthur Guy Kaplan Nothing evokes spring and the promise of summer like butterflies flitting around the garden. From ancient times to the …

The Hudson River School at Questroyal Fine Art

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One of the noblest buildings on Manhattan’s Upper East Side is 903 ParkAvenue, which commands the northeast corner of the avenue at 79th Street. As it happens, this building makes two compelling claims upon your attention. First of all, it was completed exactly one century ago by Warren and Wetmore, who gave the world Grand Central Terminal a year earlier. …

Palaces for the People: Guastavino and the Art of Structural Tile

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The pan roast is back. The herring is coming. The famous Oyster Bar restaurant in New York’s Grand Central Terminal reopened last Thursday after a four-month renovation of its 101-year-old interior, particularly a thorough cleaning of its ceiling of interlocking vaults covered with terracotta tiles by the Guastavino firm.  Seeing the tiles fully cleaned and all the edging light bulbs …

Lost imperial Easter Egg found

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In a story that is the stuff of fairy tales, one of the missing imperial Fabergé Easter Eggs made for the Russian royal family has been found and will be on public view at Court Jewellers Wartski in Mayfair, London, in the run up to Easter. The magnificent Third Imperial Easter Egg had turned up in the hands of an …

Surprises at the Armory Show

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King by Alice Neel (1900-1988), c. 1954. India ink on paper, 13.33 by 11 inches. The Estate of Alice Neel, Courtesy Aurel Scheibler, Berlin. The modern section of the Armory Show on Pier 92 (March 6-9) opened with a significant surprise: an installation curated by Susan Harris, Venus Drawn Out: 20th Century Works by Great Woman Artists. Pier 92 had …

A major exhibition offers a fresh look at William Glackens

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“Armenian Girl” by Glackens, 1916. Oil on canvas, 32 by 26 inches. The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia and Merion, PA. The Soda Fountain by William James Glackens (American, 1870-1938), 1935. Oil on canvas, 48 by 36 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Joseph E. Temple and Henry D. Gilpin Funds 1955. Installation view at Nova Southeastern University’s Museum of Art, Fort Luaderdale. Photograph by Steven …

Late bloomers: The Purple Foliage Workshop

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The second quarter of the eighteenth cen­tury is thought of as the golden age of Chinese export porcelain, and with good reason. This is the period just following the intro­duction of the famille rose enamel, a period of innovation and experimentation when European porcelain manufacture was in its infancy and Eu­rope was crying out for the very best that the …