Latest Articles
'In The Company of Women' A Selction of Paintings from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
One of the highlights at The International Fine Art Fair in New York is the presentation of a loan exhibition showing distinguished works of art not normally on public view. This year’s exhibition, called In the Company of Women focuses on a group of six Old Master, 19th- and 20th- century paintings from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston...
03 January, 2005
Creation : The Hudson River School Oil Sketch as Work of Art
In the Annals of Art Collecting the Constable oil sketch has been the subject of almost religious veneration, and in certain collecting circles the acquisition of one of John Constable's freely brushed nature studies - oftentimes just clouds - has represented an ultimate achievement. Similarly, among a rarified but
growing band of collectors - and even a few museums, which generally go for the finished, or "major,"work of art - oil studies and sketches by French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other English artists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have attracted increased attention....
03 January, 2005
'Solid and Permanent Grandeur': The Design Roots of American Classical Furniture
In 1817 The Great French Emigre Cabinetmaker, Charles Honore Lannuier, produced a set of outstanding armchairs in his New York workshop for the wealthy Baltimore merchant James Bosley. Although the chairs had immediate antecedents in designs by the French architects Charles Percier and P.-F.-L. Fontaine, the London antiquarian Thomas Hope, and the English furniture designer George Smith, the original source for their design is found on the marble frieze of the Parthenon in Athens. How did the design for Bosley's fine armchairs find its way nearly six thousand miles, from the Acropolis to America...
03 January, 2005
Master Drawings
Drawings! What a fascinating and wide ranging subject, and where does one begin or end? This survey will confine itself to what are traditionally old master drawings, which comprise drawings from 1500 - 1800, and early 19th century drawings. The developments in the 20th century must be written about by someone else at another time...
03 January, 2005
The Tiara - Elegance Abandoned
The origins of the Tiara are very remote indeed. In antiquity the brows of the victorious and the newly wed were bound with flowers and leaves, and when circumstances allowed, these garlands and wreaths were of the finest beaten gold. Those that have survived were almost always the crowning glories of the dead and were buried with them in anticipation of a majestic afterlife...
03 January, 2005