Antiques week in New York city

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

At the fairs

Mid-January brings enthusiasts for all kinds of fine and decorative arts to New York City for antiques shows, auctions, museum and gallery exhibitions, and lectures. The lodestone for these events is the Winter Antiques Show, n benefit for the East Side House Settlement that is now in its forty-ninth year. Happily, after n hiatus of one year, the show returns to the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue and Sixty-seventh Street, where it may be visited between January 17 and 26. The charity benefit preview takes place on January 16. This year the loan exhibition, underwritten by the Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, is entitled American Dreams, American Visions: The Collections of Shelburne Museum. It comprises approximately forty objects selected from the museum's permanent collection of more than eighty thousand works. The museum, in Shelburne, Vermont, was the brainchild of Electra Havemeyer Webb (see pp. 184--191), and the loan exhibition reveals her wide-ranging appreciation for art as diverse as impr essionist paintings by Mary Cassatt, American folk portraits by anonymous artists, weather vanes, trade signs, textiles, and decoys. Starting on January 20 (daily at 2:30 P.M.) curators from Shelburne will lecture at the armory on n variety of subjects related to the museum. The catalogue of the show contains an essay on the collections at Shelburne. For information telephone 718-292-7392 or consult the show's Web site (www.winterantiquesshow.com).

A newer kid on the block is the New York Ceramics Fari, now in its fourth year. It is being held at the National Academy of Design in New York City between January 16 and 19. The loan exhibition, entitled Teapots, Tygs, and Toasts: Ceramics from the Historic Deerfield Collection, features thirty-five objects--from Chinese export porcelains to New England pottery. A popular aspect of this show is an expansive series of lectures on a wide range of topics that relate to the world of ceramics and glass, including Sandwich glass, North Carolina stoneware, and English ceramics in eighteenth-century America The catalogue of the show contains an essay by Amanda E. Lange, an associate curator at Historic Deerfield, in Massachusetts, on the formation of its ceramics collection, For information telephone 310-455-2886 or consult the Web site (www.caskeylees.com).

Younger still is the American Antiques Show, a benefit for the American Folk Art Museum that is in its second year and takes place from January 16 to 19 at the Metropolitan Pavilion at 125 West Eighteenth Street--a space that provides a wonderful setting for viewing the folk art offerings. The benefit preview party is on January 15. A selection of quilts drawn from the museum's collection is on view on the second floor of the pavilion during the antiques show. There are a number of related events such as seminars, lectures, and tours. For information telephone 212-977-7170.

In the museums

On January 14 an exhibition entitled Chinese Export Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art opens at the Metropolitan Museum, where it may be seen until July 13. It features some eighty works from the museum's permanent collection, and while the emphasis is on porcelain made in China for the European and American markets between the early sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, the exhibition also includes reverse paintings on glass, an ivory fan, and an intricately carved ivory pagoda.

Chinese porcelain was known on the Continent as early as about 1520, the approximate date of the earliest piece in the museum's collection: a ewer adorned with the arms (painted upside down; illustrated above) of the Portuguese royal family. For political reasons there was a hiatus in European trade with China until 1554, but not long thereafter the floodgates opened and a mania for Chinese porcelains took root in Europe, and later in America. Blue-and-white kraak wares were the first to enjoy favor and it was not until the mid-seventeenth century that taste shifted to porcelains with polychrome decoration. As the museum Bulletin that accompanies this exhibition relates, "Chinese export porcelain is an artistic hybrid, subsuming ever-shifting balances between East and West as well as interactions within each culture." It is known that drawings and actual models (some in silver) were frequently provided to Chinese potters and decorators in order to be certain their replicas were exact.

The Dutch were bringing Chinese porcelains to the American colonies as early as the 1620s, and later they arrived by way of agents in England. Not until 1784 did American ships sail for China, first from New York City and soon thereafter from the other large commercially active port cities on the East Coast. By 1810 the United States had become the second largest Western trader with China.

The winter edition of the museum's Bulletin is devoted to this aspect of the museum's permanent collections. It is written by Clare Le Corbeiller and Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen. Although it is merely sixty pages long, and lamentably lacks footnotes, it is nonetheless the best and most up-to-date capsule history of Chinese porcelains made for the European and American markets available. It may be obtained by telephoning 800-288-2129.