A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States—chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing—to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR NPR • Time Magazine • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Boston Globe A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians—a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin's youngest sister, Jane, whose obscurity and poverty were matched only by her brother’s fame and wealth but who, like him, was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator. Making use of an astonishing cache of little-studied material, including documents, objects, and portraits only just discovered, Jill Lepore brings Jane Franklin to life in a way that illuminates not only this one extraordinary woman but an entire world.
This book is for art market researchers at all levels. A brief overview of the global art market and its major stakeholders precedes an analysis of the various sales venues (auction, commercial gallery, etc.). Library research skills are reviewed, and advanced methods are explored in a chapter devoted to basic market research. Because the monetary value of artwork cannot be established without reference to the aesthetic qualities and art historical significance of our subject works, two substantial chapters detail the processes involved in researching and documenting the fine and decorative arts, respectively, and provide annotated bibliographies. Methods for assigning values for art objects are explored, and sources of price data, both in print and online, are identified and described in detail. In recent years, art historical scholarship increasingly has addressed issues related to the history of art and its markets: a chapter on resources for the historian of the art market offers a wide range of sources. Finally, provenance and art law are discussed, with particular reference to their relevance to dealers, collectors, artists and other art market stakeholders.
A definitive guide to the 18th- and 19th-century painted furniture that has dominated recent antiques shows. The authors consider the elegant painted furniture from major East Coast style centers. An impressive array of works by prominent craftsmen are highlighted. 350 full-color photos. Major reviews.
The “fascinating, forgotten story” of a daughter of a renowned American family—a suffragette and spiritualist who shocked New England society (Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher). Older sister Harriet Beecher Stowe was the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Brother Henry Ward Beecher was one of the nation’s most influential ministers. Their sibling Catharine Beecher wrote pivotal works on women’s rights and educational reform. And then there was Isabella Beecher Hooker— “a curiously modern nineteenth-century figure.” Tempest-Tossed is the first full biography of the passionate, fascinating youngest daughter of the “Fabulous Beechers” —one of America’s most high-powered families of the time. She was a leader in the suffrage movement, and a mover and shaker in Hartford, Connecticut’s storied Nook Farm neighborhood and salon. But there is more to the story—to Isabella’s character—than that. An ardent spiritualist, Isabella could be off-putting, perplexing, tenacious, or charming in daily life. Many found her daunting to get to know and stay on comfortable terms with. Her “wild streak” was especially unfavorable in the eyes of Hartford society at the time, which valued restraint and duty. In this book, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Susan Campbell brings her own unique blend of empathy and unbridled humor to the story of Harriet’s younger half-sister and her evolution from orthodox Calvinist daughter, wife, and mother to one of the most influential players in the suffrage movement, where this unforgettable woman finally gets her proper due.
This book presents new information on the export trade, patronage, artistic collaboration, and the small-scale shop traditions that defined early Rhode Island craftsmanship. This stunning volume features more than 200 illustrations of beautifully constructed and carved objects—including chairs, high chests, bureau tables, and clocks—that demonstrate the superb workmanship and artistic skill of the state’s furniture makers.
The function of the painted wooden object ranges from the practical to the profound. These objects may perform utilitarian tasks, convey artistic whimsy, connote noble aspirations, and embody the highest spiritual expressions. This volume, illustrated in color throughout, presents the proceedings of a conference organized by the Wooden Artifacts Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) and held in November 1994 at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in Williamsburg, Virginia. The book includes 40 articles that explore the history and conservation of a wide range of painted wooden objects, from polychrome sculpture and altarpieces to carousel horses, tobacconist figures, Native American totems, Victorian garden furniture, French cabinets, architectural elements, and horse-drawn carriages. Contributors include Ian C. Bristow, an architect and historic-building consultant in London; Myriam Serck-Dewaide, head of the Sculpture Workshop, Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique, Brussels; and Frances Gruber Safford, associate curator of American decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A broad range of professionals—including art historians, curators, scientists, and conservators—will be interested in this volume and in the multidisciplinary nature of its articles.
Between 1790 and 1840, millions of middle-class Americans throughout the nation encountered "Fancy": they rode in a Fancy sleigh, dressed up in Fancy clothes, blew their noses in Fancy handkerchiefs, bought goods at Fancy shops, ate at Fancy tables on Fancy dishes, and slept under Fancy coverlets. Not just fancy but Fancy: an early nineteenth-century cultural phenomenon born out of new and enlightened ways of seeing, understanding, and responding to the surrounding world. Fancy expressed itself in just about everything that pleased the senses; generally colorful and boldly patterned, it elicited delight, awe, surprise, whim, and caprice. Whether experienced in the form of painted surfaces, kaleidoscopic quilts, or imaginary landscapes, Fancy engaged the emotions and expanded the imagination, expressing the core of human fancy. "American Fancy" offers an appropriately fantastic experience of this uniquely American sensibility. Author Sumpter Priddy has assembled and produced an original oeuvre in the field of decorative arts, going beyond the traditional modes of furniture analysis, which concentrate on style, history, and construction, to consider the perceptual and emotional responses through which the original users and viewers would have interacted with these material things. To this end he employs the interpretive methods used in the fields of literature, fine arts, philosophy and even psychology. Rich, fully illustrated, wondrously researched, and bound in a cover that imitates a typical Fancy pattern, "American Fancy" does its marvelous subject true.