Displaying items by tag: pottery

In Ohio’s early years, clay deposits were discovered along a number of riverbanks and small-scale stoneware potteries sprang up to meet the utilitarian demands of a growing population. These potteries later took advantage of the state’s excellent location and the various transport routes...

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Nearly a hundred examples of iconic Tiffany Studios works are forming the centerpiece of Sotheby’s sale of Tiffany and Prewar Design: The Warshawsky Collection in New York on May 19.

Led by the "Elaborate Peony" Lamp, circa 1910 (est. $600,000-$900,000), the variety of colorful glass works in mostly floral motifs is emblematic of the collection of noted Chicago businessman Roy Warshawsky and his wife Sarita, who assembled the works from the 1960s through the 1990s. There are also leaded glass lighting and windows, favrile glass, enamels, pottery, and bronze pieces produced by the firm founded by Louis Comfort Tiffany.

The collection of Edith and C.C. Johnson Spink has given the St. Louis Art Museum 225 works valued at no less than $50 million, including two paintings by Norman Rockwell, two each by Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, and more than 200 works of Asian art.

The Rockwells and Wyeths are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But it is the Asian pottery, ceramics, bronzes, glass and jade, some thousands of years old, that will make the largest impact on the museum’s collection, officials said Tuesday.

The 2014 New Orleans Antiques Forum, “Southern Expression,” will explore the many facets of regional style with acclaimed experts in the field of decorative arts. This year’s topics include furniture, pottery, mourning jewelry and art, southern landscape paintings, clocks, quilts, and more.

The Historic New Orleans Collection established the New Orleans Antiques Forum (NOAF) in 2008 in an effort to boost cultural tourism in New Orleans and south Louisiana following Hurricane Katrina. Centered on a series of educational and entertaining talks, the three-day forum encourages the appreciation of decorative arts created in and imported through the Gulf Coast. Sessions are accessible to experienced collectors as well as beginning antiques enthusiasts.

The Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art in Biloxi has big plans to celebrate the opening of its first pod, one of four designed by architect Frank Gehry to house the museum's permanent collection of George Ohr pottery.

On Saturday, opening ceremonies will be held at 4 p.m. for the Beau Rivage Resort & Casino Gallery Pod on the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Pavilion. The exhibit for the pod, entitled "George E. Ohr: Prized, Honored & Cherished," will feature many pieces of Ohr pottery that have never been on display.

Winslow Homers in the shadow of a defunct Beech-Nut baby food plant. A Rembrandt, Picasso, Rubens and Renoir up the hill from a paper mill. The founder of the Hudson River School vying for attention amid baseball memorabilia and old farm machinery.

There are plenty of treasures to be found among the collections of lesser-known, off-the-beaten-path art museums dotting upstate New York. But they're well worth the trek for anyone looking for great art in unexpected places, whether it's the rolling, bucolic countryside typical of many areas or the industrial grittiness of riverside mill towns.

Piers Wedgwood, who devoted his working life to the ceramic and decorative arts of the Wedgwood Brand as its international ambassador and keeper of the legacy of his fifth great-grandfather, Josiah Wedgwood, died yesterday of cardiac failure at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. He was 59 and a long time resident of the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, PA.

In a career spanning four decades, Lord Wedgwood helped navigate the fortunes of a 255 year old luxury goods company in its struggles to remain viable amidst the changing life styles of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. A veteran of two major reorganizations of the firm, Lord Wedgwood remained positive and excited as it grew in the modern age, with Wedgwood now opening major new markets in India, China and Russia as well as new product lines such as Wedgwood Tea.

Piers Anthony Weymouth Wedgwood, Fourth Baron Wedgwood was born September 20, 1954 in Nakuru, Kenya outside Nairobi on his family’s farm. He assumed the Wedgwood peerage at age 16 upon the death of his father in 1970. Educated in England at Marlborough and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Lord Wedgwood was commissioned in the Royal Scots Regiment in 1973 seeing action in Cypress and retiring as a captain in 1980.

Lord Wedgwood did not view his peerage as an honorific, instead acting as a working member of the House of Lords with more than 25 years service on the Defense and Heritage Parliamentary Groups.

An active sportsman, Lord Wedgwood was a member of the Royal Automobile Club of England, the London Racquet Club and the Philadelphia Club.

Above all however, the Wedgwood Brand was Lord Wedgwood’s passion, beginning in the business in his teens cleaning the pottery kilns and learning production methods. It was soon clear, however, that his charm, speaking ability and uncanny resemblance to his ancestor Josiah made him the ideal and nearly irreplaceable spokesman for Wedgwood. For many years, Lord Wedgwood was closely identified with Wedgwood museums in England and Birmingham, Alabama, which includes the Buten Collection, formerly of Philadelphia.

In a reprise of another Philadelphia fairy tale, Lord Wedgwood met his wife, the former Mary Regina Quinn of the Fairmount section of Philadelphia, when he was presenting Wedgwood at the Marshall Field Company in Chicago where she ran the store’s public relations. The ‘old English lord’ she expected turned out to be both a dashing 26 year old and the start of a 34 year love affair. Lady Wedgwood, and a daughter, The Hon. Alexandra Mary Kavanaugh Wedgwood and two sisters survive.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete.

On January 25, Sotheby’s held the auction ‘Visual Grace: Important American Folk Art from the collection of Ralph O. Esmerian’ in New York. The sale, which included over 208 lots ranging from watercolors, portraits, pottery, furniture and weathervanes to carvings, needlework, sculpture and scrimshaw, fetched $12,955,943, significantly exceeding its pre-sale estimate of $9.5 million. The sale set a new record total for any auction of American folk art. 

The top lot of the auction was a carved figure of Santa Claus by wood carver Samuel Robb, which sold for $875,000, far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $250,000. Other important sales included Ruth Whittier Shute and Samuel Addison Shute’s portrait of Jeremiah H. Emerson, which brought $665,000; a rare carved pine pheasant hen weathervane from the late 19th century, which sold for $449,000; and ‘The Carver Limner,’ a painting depicting three members of Freeport’s Carver family, which fetched $521,000.

Esmerian, the former chairman emeritus of New York’s American Folk Art Museum, is currently serving a six-year sentence for fraud. The sale at Sotheby’s was ordered by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court and generated $10.5 million for Esmerian’s creditors including Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Approximately 100 artifacts, some dating back to the time of the pharaohs, are missing from the Aswan Museum on Elephantine Island in southern Egypt. On Wednesday, January 1, the Ministry of Antiquities announced that 96 works, mostly small figurines and beads, were missing from the museum’s store and that a lock on the inner door had been broken. The disappearance is a first for the museum.

The Aswan Museum opened to the public in 1912 and features Nubian artifacts including utensils, weapons, pottery and mummies.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art has received a $1.8 million gift from Oman; it is the largest donation in the institution’s history. The bequest will fund a series of programs called “Connecting the Gems of the Indian Ocean: From Oman to East Africa,” which will focus on Omani art and the connections between cultures in East and North Africa and the Middle East.

The National Museum of African Art, which was founded in 1964, holds about 9,000 works, making it the largest publicly held collection of African Art in the United States. The museum’s holdings include musical instruments, sculpture, jewelry, textiles, photographs, and pottery.