Current and coming - exhibition at the Winterthur Museum

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

Collecting natural specimens and small-scale man-made objects was a preoccupation of the well-to-do and the learned in the seventeenth century, who displayed the objects in elaborately constructed cabinets. Some of the most lavish and ornate of these were made by craftsmen in Augsburg who were adept at using rare or exotic materials such as tortoiseshell, ebony, ivory, coral, marble, and semiprecious stones to embellish these functional cabinets, so that they became works of art in their own right.

Scientists in the seventeenth century were fascinated by the workings of the human eye, which fostered the invention of optical devices such as the camera obscura and a device known as the eye, or artificial eye. These were thought of as new ways of seeing or as extensions of our own eyes.

The show treats the following intriguing topics: collections of natural wonders and artificial curiosities; lenses for scientific study and entertainment; metamorphosis and anamorphosis (images that are unintelligible except when they are seen from a particular vantage point or reflected in a mirror); automatons; dissolving special effects; panoramas and other views; and devices made to entertain.

The catalogue of the exhibition is written by the cocurators of the show, Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, and is available by telephoning 800-223-3431.

Ceramics and glass in New York

The New York Ceramics Fair, held at the National Academy of Design in New York City, and now in its third year, has become a highlight in the calendar of every ceramics and glass collector: This year the fair takes place between January 17 and 20, with the preview on the evening of January 16. Fifty international dealers are displaying their finest offerings and the fair organizer, Caskey Lees, has invited fifteen English and American scholars to lecture on topics as diverse as seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Japanese ceramics and the American studio ceramics movement The fair includes a loan exhibition devoted to two collections at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The first features glass from the collection assembled by Gretchen Keuffel Keller over a period of nearly fifty years starting in the 1920s. Mrs. Keller donated the collection of some five hundred objects to her alma mater, Bradford College in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1964. The Peabody Essex Museum purchased the collection w hen the college dosed in 2000. It ranges from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century English and European glass to nineteenth-century vessels produced in the United States. Objects made in Sandwich, Massachusetts, the home of a thriving glass industry in the nineteenth century, are particularly well represented.

The second collection at the Peabody Essex Museum represented at the Ceramics Fair is a selection from the Asian export wares for which the museum is renowned.