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Tag: Living with Antiques

Living with antiques: A Labor of Love

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Restoring the Daniel Hiester house, an eighteenth-century Pennsylvania gem Built of brick with glazed Flemish-bond headers on all four sides, the Daniel Hiester house is one of the earliest brick houses in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. It was built for Daniel Hiester Sr. (1713–1795), a prosperous tanner and brickmaker, and his wife, Catharina Schuler (1716–1789), in 1757. The rear half of the side gable wall has no windows due to a large fireplace on the first floor and built-in closet on the second floor. Behind the house is a summer kitchen with a clay tile roof. A stone mile marker stands alongside the driveway, which was originally the Sumneytown Pike. Photograph by Gavin Ashworth and Michael E. Myers. On a cold spring day in early 2012, I made my first visit to the Daniel Hiester house, located near Sumneytown in Upper Salford Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. I grew up just a few miles away and had long been curious about this house, which was reputed to be one of the finest examples of Pennsylvania German architecture. Yet no one I knew had ever been inside; the owners were said to be reclusive and there were even rumors that a trespasser had been shot and killed. But now, a local land trust was trying to preserve the house and invited me to tour the property. As I drove across the old stone arch bridge over Ridge Valley Creek and up the long driveway, I could hardly contain my excitement. Sunlight glinted off the glazed header bricks as I approached the house, built in 1757 by German immigrant Daniel Hiester Sr. and his wife, Catharina Schuler. The dwelling of the Hiester family (the name is pronounced Heester) is an extraordinary survival with incredible original details, including elaborate ironwork and woodwork. At a minimum,

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Digital doings: From Shakers to Conquistadors

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Teuraheimata a Potoru by Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), 1891. Photograph courtesy of Jill Newhouse Gallery, New York. Those who have been watching this space, as the saying goes, will know that a new Curious Objects season has been in the works for some time. Happily, by the time you’re reading this, that season will be available for your delectation. It is the first to make full use of the format that we test-drove last January in the “Once Upon a Bowl” episode—multiple guests, musical interludes, and emphasis on the storytelling chops of host Benjamin Miller. Three auditory investigations are on tap, each broken into multiple parts. One is a deep dive into the curious case of the painting that graced ANTIQUES’ September/ October cover: Bélizaire and the Frey Children. Miller sits down with the painting’s owner—and its primary advocate— Jeremy Simien, as well as scholars, collectors, and other experts in the field involved with the painting’s journey from museum castoff to much-fêted cipher for the antebellum South, and attempts to nail down why its eponymous figure was forgotten for so long. Also on tap are Jill Newhouse, who’s bringing a new Tahiti picture by Gauguin to market, and an exploration of what we might call the Shakers’ three Fs: “Feminism” (applied broadly), Furniture, and a Future that was seemingly snuffed out by celibacy and the changing social and economic pressures of the nineteenth century. Bélizaire and the Frey Children, attributed to Jacques Amans (1801–1888), c. 1837. Collection of Jeremy K. Simien; photograph by Selina McKane. We’re very proud of what we’ve come up with, and hope you’ll check it out. As always, tune in to Curious Objects on Spotify, iTunes, or wherever you listen to podcasts, or navigate to ANTIQUES’ website and select the “Podcast” tab. Marching triumphantly into

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Editor’s letter: July/August 2022

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Editor-in-Chief Gregory Cerio. Journalism isn’t supposed to be fun. But it was a genuine pleasure working on our “Living with Antiques” cover story thanks to its subjects, Marc Brown and Laurene Krasny Brown, two remarkable people. They are warm, wise, generous, whip smart, intellectually curious, engaging, boundlessly patient—thank heaven—and they radiate creativity. Laurie is an artist whose primary medium is paper, while Marc is the creator of the Arthur children’s book and television series. (He also conceived the tableau of Shaker boxes for our cover.) You can see some of the Browns’ work on this page, and learn much more about them and their folk and self-taught art collection in Stacy C. Hollander’s excellent article, which is illustrated with superlative photos taken by Ellen McDermott with the help of Bridget Sciales. Patrick Bell, the proprietor, with Edwin Hild, of the esteemed folk art gallery Olde Hope Antiques, was instrumental to making this cover story possible, and my cup runneth over with gratitude. Thanks, Pat! Arthur Turns Green by Marc Brown. Word came in late May that a venerable member of our media tribe had passed away: Roger Angell, a longtime fiction editor for the New Yorker, who died at age 101. Though he blue-penciled the likes of Nabokov and Updike, most readers knew Angell chiefly for his sideline as the magazine’s baseball writer. At that job, he was the best—as most every other baseball writer will cheerfully tell you. Angell covered the game with extraordinary eloquence, insight, reportorial acumen, and—perhaps most importantly— with a fan’s passion. I am put in mind of a marvelous passage in one of Angell’s finest articles, “Agincourt and After,” an account of the epic 1975 World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox. It is a rumination on fandom: What I do

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Prairie Pearl

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Living with Antiques: Habitat for Humanity

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Fig. 1. The living room on the parlor floor draws the visitor in with its serene palette, and an eclectic mix of furniture invites intimate conversation. Laurie Brown’s wish to initiate a dialogue with the streetscape is fulfilled through the placement of two tall planters set before the windows. On a tree-lined street in New York City’s Greenwich Village, a street of small brick houses, stoops, and ornamental wrought-iron balustrades, lives a couple and their cat. Two oversize topiaries flanking the top of the stairs draw one’s eyes to a dark painted door, and you almost expect to find a small paper label with the words “Drink Me” hanging from the knob. Upon entering you suspect that you have walked through the looking glass into an “otherwhere,” greeted by the slightly wild and wide-eyed stare of little Miss Fanny, an “Electric Pencil” drawing by James Edward Deeds Jr. “Come in,” she seems to say. “Curious things await.” And so, as you step farther into the house, the outside world quietly recedes and you succumb to the embracing warmth of creative lives closely entwined with art, objects, and wonder. Fig. 2. Above the living room fireplace— one of seven in the town house—hangs an 1840–1845 portrait of a child by Sturtevant J. Hamblin (1817–1884), one of the namesakes of the Prior- Hamblin school. Note how the point of the child’s hairdo exactly echoes the drape of the curtains above his head. At left, one of two plinths salvaged from a Vermont church perches atop a country table. The plinth’s faux marble finish inspired the imaginative checkerboard pattern painted on the floor. Marc Brown has a shock of white hair. He is the compact, dapper, and bespectacled author and illustrator of the beloved Arthur book and television series, a world

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Living Large

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Fig. 1. A collector of houses and the art that accompanied them, Richard H. Jenrette (1929–2018)—whose exquisite Hudson River villa, Edgewater, pictured here and in Fig. 10, ANTIQUES published in June 1982 and again in January/February 2012— brought interest in American classical design to its height with his founding of the Classical American Homes Preservation Trust. Photograph by Gavin Ashworth. In a defiant opening salvo, in its debut issue of January 1922, The Magazine ANTIQUES declared itself to be, on general principle, opposed to modernity. “These are the days when the mahogany of time-worn experience is being split into kindling wood, or jammed ruthlessly up attic, or sold, with other heirlooms, to the junkman,” bemoaned the magazine’s jocular founding editor, Homer Eaton Keyes (1875–1938), only half in jest. Fig. 2. ANTIQUES signaled its approval for modernism with a July 2001 feature exploring the fertile collaboration of client Richard H. Mandel, architect Edward Durell Stone, and designer Donald Deskey on an international-style country house built in Bedford, New York, between 1933 and 1935. See also Fig. 17. Photograph by Paul Rocheleau. Rallying to his side all “defenders of the past,” Keyes sketched his plans for the new publication, one he hoped would be both authoritative and free of “twaddle.” Showing objects in interiors was a mission left to rivals. Keyes advocated a sober-minded and scholarly approach to antiques, like that advocated by dealer Israel Sack (1883–1959), who from his pulpit in Boston warned in an ad in the November issue, “Sentiment is a poor guide to the collector who wishes his possessions to constitute a really significant unit, rather than a heterogeneous aggregation.” Fig. 3. Alice Winchester (1907–1996) introduced the 1950 Milwaukee home and collection of Stanley (1896–1987) and Polly Mariner Stone (1898–1995) in May 1956, and ANTIQUES revisited it

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