Editor's letter

Magazine Antiques, June, 2008

We may be living with the past here at The Magazine ANTIQUES but that doesn't mean we're entombed in it. I was reminded of the difference this spring during three days at the Philadelphia Antiques Show. Held for the first time at the city's Navy Yard, a cluster of muscular nineteenth-century brick buildings set like a village at the confluence of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers, the show seemed every bit as vigorous as its new location. More than once I found myself talking to second or third generation dealers like the glamorous Jenifer Kindig, who moves swiftly on mile-high Prada heels between our digital world and the fine furniture of eighteenth-century Maryland.

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Philadelphia has always lived easily with history too. Except for the Liberty Bell Center, a drab theme park for which the federal government can probably be blamed, the city's juxtapositions of past and present are full of lively accidents--some happy, some a little messy: eighteenth-century town houses and glass and steel condominiums, small museums devoted to Edgar Allan Poe or Betsy Ross near dive bars and diners, the gracious Fairmount Park hard by the old Eastern State Penitentiary. Better these collisions any day than the mummification of a city by the New Urbanists with their bossy sentimentality.

To my mind the antiques show more than held its own next to the other big ticket events across from the Navy Yard that weekend. The Phillies, 76ers, and Flyers were all playing a little more than a center fielder's throw from Peale family portraits, a burl veneer Queen Anne high chest of drawers, English creamware, and Chinese porcelain. I loved the mix. It seemed just right for a city memorialized in a movie about a boxer who trains on the steps of its art museum.

In this issue about England we include several nimble ways of treating the past as something very much alive. Martin Filler writes about the consummate collector Paul Walter whose rooms are celebrated for their seamless joining of modern paintings, antique silver, and Indian art. Walter has recently moved to a new place in the country and discovered that his nineteenth-century W.A.S. Benson chandelier looks better in its rustic log dining room than it did in the period room where he'd originally installed it. Shax Riegler introduces us to Ivan Day, a collector of antique cookery books and tools, who enlivens our understanding of the past by actually using those recipes and tools to make the gilded sugar work centerpieces, savory pies, and cakes that open a door to another culture and an earlier time. Patricia Ferguson goes to Tatton Park, home to the Egerton family since the sixteenth century and now a National Trust property, and describes the family's fondness for early ceramics to which ormolu and other gilt-metal mounts were later added. It amused me to think that the Egertons enjoyed the past, and when it suited them, were happy to have it improved upon too.

In his article on twentieth-century British designers, Gregory Ccrio proposes a number of reasons for their neglect: I have one more: we are deeply invested in the England of National Trust houses and village churches, Wedgwood and William Morris. Those mid-century British designers with their jaunty furniture break the nostalgia frame. But a Gerald Summers chair can easily take its place in a room with a curly maple desk many centuries its senior. Great design like a great city is always welcoming.