New Light: Blyth Spirits
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts.
In 2005 the Maine auction house F. O. Bailey Antiquarians offered a late eighteenth-century oil portrait of Nancy Bezoil Lane and her daughter Betsy as a painting “in the manner of Joseph Badger.” Marvin Sadik by then an art dealer, but formerly the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC bought it with a winning bid of $32,480. He had recognized the portrait as the work of the Salem, Massachusetts, artist Benjamin Blyth, an attribution based on the painting’s subject, its composition, its characteristic handling of anatomical elements, and its palette. Sadik’s coup ranks as one of the most notable discoveries of a Blyth oil portrait.
Fig. 1.
The Whistling Boy by Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), 1872. Initialed and
dated “FD [in monogram]. Munich. 1872” in monogram at lower left. Oil on canvas, 27 7/8 by 21 1/8 inches.
Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio, gift of the artist; all photographs courtesy of the Cincinnati Art Museum.
Although it would be foolish to suggest that the influential and wildly productive Jean-Léon Gérôme is lost to history, it is safe to say that the great academician is perhaps less widely known today than his students Thomas Eakins and Mary Cassatt. And while it would be equally foolish to suggest that Frank Duveneck is but a footnote to his more recognizable students, such as John Henry Twachtman, the Kentucky-born artist is not the name he was in his day. Reviewing a 1972 show at Manhattan’s Chapellier Galleries, critic John Canaday described Duveneck as “a painter who promised to establish a major position in American art but stopped halfway through his career and settled for a mi
Double take: A closer look at American bronze sculpture Editorial Staff
The Magazine ANTIQUES November 2006.
Bronze sculpture made in the United States between 1845 and 1945 was little studied and largely undervalued until it began to attract interest in the early 1980s. It now continues to gain attention from scholars, museum curators, and collectors. Broadening scholarship has brought recognition to the variety, quality, and importance of this field of American art, just as the market value of sculpture continues to rise. What is lagging behind this expanding appreciation by the public and in the marketplace is connoisseurship. This article is intended as a primer on how to look critically at bronze casts in order to judge them for quality and authenticity.
Gone but never forgotten in a quilt
Ode to George Floyd, a quilt by Peggie Hartwell. Members of the national Women of Color Quilters Network draw on personal experiences of injustice, turning their needlework into symbols of liberation, resistance and empowerment. Peggie Hartwell via The New York Times.
by Patricia Leigh Brown
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
.- Peggie Hartwell, a fourth-generation quilter from South Carolina, has found it hard to return to her needlework since she completed Ode to George Floyd, in which she renders Floyds face in subtle brown batiks, and an image of his mother barely visible behind a grove of trees. I had to talk to him, get to know him, the 81-year-old quilter said of the process. I pick up a piece of fabric and see his face.