Displaying items by tag: furniture

The most sumptuous moment in America's Gilded Age is revealed through the work of some of its most noted design firms in Artistic Furniture of the Gilded Age at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The centerpiece of the three-part exhibition is the opulent Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from the New York City house commissioned by art collector and philanthropist Arabella Worsham (later Huntington; ca. 1850-1924).

If Henry and Mary Lily Flagler were to walk into their music room at Whitehall today, they would feel right at home.

That’s saying a lot, considering that Whitehall, finished in 1902, has withstood more than a century of weather and wear. To reverse the inescapable ravages of time, the Flaglers’ Beaux-Arts mansion has undergone an extensive 15-year conservation effort.

The Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Fla., is lining its domed music room with newly restored seating that had long been shedding bits of gilding and threads from its tapestry upholstery. Meanwhile, the once-prominent original supplier of the furniture, Pottier & Stymus, is re-emerging from obscurity.

The oil and railroad magnate Henry Flagler and his third wife, Mary Lily Flagler, bought roomfuls of Pottier & Stymus furnishings around 1902, as Mr. Flagler’s longtime favorite architecture firm, Carrère & Hastings, was completing construction of the couple’s showplace Beaux-Arts house.

When: Friday, November 13, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST to Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST

Where: Deerfield Community Center, 16 Memorial St., Deerfield, MA 01342

Join Historic Deerfield for an in-depth examination of the decorative arts of New England's inventors, merchants and peddlers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When President Adams moved into the new White House in 1800, innovation and adaptation already drove the creative designs of many New England-made objects. Even as elite tastes maintained traditional ties to European styles and materials, the consumer demands of an expanding middle class fueled inventive entrepreneurial approaches to making and selling cheaper American-made attractive goods. At times protected or even encouraged by embargo, war, and westward expansion, New Englanders made and sold a profusion of wares including patent clocks, popular prints, glassware, stoneware, tinware, pewter, cast iron stoves, and stenciled and painted furniture. First competing with and ultimately replacing European manufactures for many families, they infused their products with artistic energy and excitement that spurred a national impulse to "Buy American." Forum speakers and demonstrators will include Peter Benes, Deborah Child, David Jaffee, Amanda Lange, Ned Lazaro, William McMillen, Mary Cheek Mills, Sumpter Priddy, Andrew Raftery, Christine Ritok, and Philip Zea.

The 34th San Francisco Fall Antiques Show (FAS) will kick off on Wednesday, October 21, with an opening night Preview Gala at the Fort Mason Center’s Festival Pavilion in the city’s posh Marina District. The distinguished fair, which brings together an extraordinary range of fine and decorative arts, including American, English, Continental, and Asian furniture and decorative objects, fine art, jewelry, and much more, will be chaired by the leading interior designer Suzanne Tucker.

Says Tucker, “Many of the finest dealers from...

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is reassembling, restoring and scrutinizing parlor furniture that scandalized some Philadelphians when it was new.

The suite of gilded chairs, tables and couches was produced in 1808 for the Philadelphia drawing rooms of the merchant William Waln and his wife, Mary Wilcocks Waln, who made fortunes partly in the Chinese opium trade. On the neo-Classical pieces, designed by the British émigré architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, a fellow British immigrant, the artist George Bridport, painted petals and griffins.

Old Sturbridge Village has a remarkable collection of early American objects - the furniture, tools, clothing, toys, decorative arts and other artifacts of life in rural, inland New England during the period 1790 to 1840.

Old Sturbridge Village regularly hosts Collectors' Forums in order to focus on this collection, bringing together curators, experts, collectors and the public to examine a large sampling from the collection and learn about new scholarship and perspectives on the collection. This annual event is being held in conjunction with the opening of our new exhibit, Kindred Spirits: A.B. Wells, Malcolm Watkins and the Origins of Old Sturbridge Village.

Christie’s announced on Tuesday an auction of works from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of English furniture and decorative arts to benefit the Met’s acquisition fund in that department. The sale, which includes more than 200 lots, will take place October 27, in New York. The works up for auction are being deaccessioned as the museum prepares a renovation of its British galleries.

In a statement, Luke Syson, the Met’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Chairman of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, had the following to say: “This has been just the right moment thoroughly to reassess our British collections for the first time in half a century.

The inimitable Baltimore Summer Antiques Show will celebrate its 35th anniversary from August 20 to August 23, 2015, at the Baltimore Convention Center. Located in the flourishing Inner Harbor area of downtown Baltimore, the fair is the largest indoor antiques show in the country.

Produced by the Palm Beach Show Group, the 2015 Baltimore Summer Antiques Show will feature nearly 400 international exhibitors offering everything from furniture, silver, Americana, porcelain, glass, and textiles to major works of fine art, antique and estate jewelry, and Asian antiquities. According to Scott Diament, CEO of the Palm Beach Show Group...

Opening this summer at the New Orleans Museum of Art, A Louisiana Parlor: Antebellum Taste & Context is an exhibition featuring the Butler-Greenwood Plantation parlor furnishings acquired by the museum from descendants of the family in St. Francisville, Louisiana. The 1850s/60s parlor suite has survived with original textiles and rich documentation, making it one of the South’s best preserved examples of a pre-Civil War Louisiana interior.

The exhibition explores the relationship between this refined interior and its layered historical context through family portraits on loan from The Historic New Orleans Collection and through documents housed in the Mathews family archives of letters, receipts, and bills of sale held at LSU Library Special Collections.