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Articles
German government-appointed experts on Friday gave the green light to the restitution of one of the most valuable artworks in the trove of late collector Cornelius Gurlitt to its American owners. Art experts mandated by Berlin to comb Mr. Gurlitt's…
I prefer white walls so I can move art without a concern for colors clashing with one another,” says this collector, whose practical design sense is well honed from years of experience acquiring period furniture, accessories, and folk art. After…
Viewers of the hit PBS series Antiques Roadshow are familiar with the dealers and auctioneers who appraise the voluminous amount of material brought to each show venue, but what do these experts collect when they are on the hunt? In…
When he collected maps, Winterthur Museum founder Henry Francis du Pont brought to them the same discerning eye for color, form, and verity he applied throughout the collection. His correspondence with dealers was always polite though brief; understandable, given the…
Opportunity. That was what brought James Thompson to New York in 1748 at age twenty. He came from the linen-manufacturing town of Newry in Northern Ireland.1 Some of the best seed for growing flax, from which linen was made, came…
The use of both factory woven and homemade hearth rugs coincides with the increasing use of carpeting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as people sought to protect their investments in woven floor coverings and participate in a…
More walls and floor space—the recurring dream of collectors and museums alike. And a dream that came true for the recently renamed Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 2012, when the museum was increased to…
Silver served several functions in early American life. It was seen as a sound financial investment and as a testament to social status and family continuity. William Fitzhugh (1651–1701), one of Virginia’s first settlers, esteemed it “as well politic as…
Furniture tells us much about the past—about social customs and human interaction, about the relationship between Americans and the world, about the changing nature of technology and the evolution of aesthetics. The Cabinetmaker and the Carver: Boston Furniture from Private…
Daniel Chester French’s (1850–1931) best known works are rooted in American culture and history. He sculpted the country’s heroes, philosophers, and patriots (Fig. 1). The Minute Man (1871–1875) in Concord, Massachusetts, launched his career, and the seated Abraham Lincoln (1911–1922)…
One aspect of my research for the New-York Historical Society’s exhibit (see The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution, pp. 150–159) was to identify and locate as many as possible of the over 1400 objects included in the…
For the past hundred years the International Exhibition of Modern Art has been considered a signal event in the history of American art. Now known as the Armory Show, it was mounted by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors…
Since the mid-1950s, Massachusetts has seen a growth in the production of studio furniture. Many influential makers who trained and worked in the Bay State, like Tom Loeser, Alphonse Mattia, and Rich Tannen (Fig. 1), have carried forward the tradition…
Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is one of North America’s finest, most diverse, and unconventional museums of art, design, and Americana. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in a remarkable setting of thirty-eight exhibition buildings, twenty-five of which are historic and…
Printed textiles can be characterized by the technology used to print them (block, copperplate, or roller) or by the “style,” which in this case does not mean the characteristics of the design but rather the chemistry that is needed to…
The new Anne P. and Thomas A. Gray Library and MESDA Research Center at Old Salem Museums and Gardens in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, houses an impressive array of resources, including more than 20,000 catalogued volumes focused on southern history, material…
The first American art colonies appeared during the 1880s, when young artists, fresh from their experiences in France and Germany, began to return to America. These young Americans were a generation that returned to America carrying the most advanced ideas…
At the same time that Waylande Gregory (1905–1971), one of America’s most important ceramists of the 1930s, was creating his monumental ceramic sculptures (Fig. 1)—some weighing over one ton—he was also producing some of the finest American porcelains of their…
Very few artists attending art school in California in the 1920s were interested in the lush, romantic landscape painting that had dominated California art for the previous thirty years. Instead, they looked to the work by California artists dating back…
A passerby might notice this early house and attached barn and comment on how nicely it has been restored and how appropriate the landscaping is to its setting. Small “Capes” like the one in our story are all over New…
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