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Articles
Blue and white is a color combination that has been popular for centuries, particularly for ceramics and textiles. While the history and technology of blue and white ceramics are well understood, a group of European and American blue and white…
Sit Down! Chairs from Six Centuries (21 October, 2010–16 January, 2011) at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, celebrates one of the most useful objects found wherever people gather. Sit Down! considers broad stylistic trends in European and…
Founded by Hartford art patron Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) in 1842, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is America’s oldest public art museum. A luxury once reserved for the wealthy, Wadsworth set out to make art accessible to all social classes.…
Historic Charleston Foundation (HCF) was founded in 1947 to preserve and protect the historic landmarks structures and material culture that make Charleston a unique American city. The foundation is well known for its advocacy programs, including protective covenants and easements,…
During the last half of the eighteenth century, craftsmen of Continental and British descent brought a wide variety of Old World ceramic traditions to the North Carolina backcountry. The achievements of these craftsmen often surpassed those of their Middle Atlantic…
The Connecticut River Valley region stretches from northern New Hampshire to Long Island Sound. The area including Deerfield, Massachusetts, south to Old Saybrook, Connecticut, was an important center for needlework. Taught by skilled instructresses, young women in fashionable academies and…
Gertrude Townsend, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s, first curator of textiles, focused much of her energy during the late 1930s and early 1940s on building the country’s finest collection of early American embroidery, curating the exhibition New England Colonial…
The new Art of the Americas Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), opening November 20, 2010, marks the culmination of over a decade’s work to bring together in one place a more inclusive vision of American art.…
Louis Comfort Tiffany created Parakeets and Gold Fish Bowl to showcase his firm’s design and glass manufacturing skills at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In a promotional brochure for the fair, Tiffany stated that it “illustrate[s] most…
Few realize today the extraordinary level of enthusiasm with which Americans pursued ownership of sculpture during the last half of the nineteenth century. The reasons for the popularity of parlor sculpture were many and varied, but essentially sprang from the…
When Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) retired from the presidency in 1809 and returned to Monticello to live year-round for the first time since 1796, his domestic world was expansive and complex. His wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (1748–1782), had been dead…
American antiques have been a passion for Norman and Mary Gronning since their introduction to them in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. As newlyweds just beginning their careers as teachers, the couple sought a way to supplement their income…
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a collector as someone who “collects or gathers together…specimens, works of art, curiosities…[and] items of interest because of [their] excellence, rarity, etc.” It would be much more efficient to simply refer the reader to Peter…
Broadway’s “discovery” by William Morris (1834–1896), a principal figure in the English Arts and Crafts movement, spearheaded interest in the quiet village in the English Cotswolds (Fig. 1) and brought about its incarnation as an arts colony populated by a…
When Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820) arrived in cosmopolitan Philadelphia in 1798, the city had been the capital of the “new Republic” of the United States for eight years. By introducing Philadelphians to Grecian-influenced architecture with his Bank of Pennsylvania, completed…
Among the key elements for turning a passion for antiques into a business is the ability to be a good teacher; one who knows how to engage and encourage others. Such is the case with Mark and Marjorie Allen, specialists…
The whimsical crayon drawings of the artist whose signature has been interpreted as “P. S. Downes” has elicited interest from folk art collectors and scholars since the 1970s.1 The images portrayed frequently relate stories—supposedly autobiographical—about an aged sailor who saw…
Walk into almost any American antiques show and you will find for sale several examples of a unique portrait style produced in the northeastern United States from approximately 1820 to 1850. These portraits measure only about 3 by 2¾ to…
A layered cutwork Tree of Life, discovered at a Connecticut antiques show in the booth of the late Frank Ganci, presented an intriguing puzzle when it first came to light in 1980 (Figs. 1, 1a). Upon its removal from a…
American art connoisseurs John and Susan Horseman have assembled a collection of American paintings that are being traveled by the Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, Tennessee. The exhibition, Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, brings…
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