Folk-Art Gathering Basket
My grandmother lived in a small house under the shadow of the BEVO Mill, a reproduction windmill housing a famous brewery on Gravois in Saint Louis. I grew up there …
18th Century Interactive Visual Media
The concept of interactive media is familiar. We interact with our phones visually. The concept of a picture in three dimensions is ordinary, mundane, part of our visual vocabulary. However, …
Eight Immortals and a Chinese Chest
KG owns an early 20th century forty-one-inch long Chinese Qing Dynasty carved camphor chest of little value—$350-400. These are relatively common, but it bears priceless symbolism. Should KG keep this …
1970s Art Nouveau Reflected In A Lamp
Along the Art Nouveau lines of the 1970s, DD sent me a floor lamp with a 1979 Tiffany-style blown-glass shade in the Quezal tradition. The attached shade hangs on a …
South African Doll A Sacred Object
In the last three weeks I’ve received two calls for two major doll collections of hundreds of dolls each. Readers know I’m frightened of dolls. When I attend an appraisal …
Boehm Art Middle Class “Classy”
EG sent me a photo of a magnificent seventeen and a half inch porcelain Blue Jay perched on raspberry branches. Its brilliant plumage modeled in hard-paste porcelain and hand-painted with …
French Circus Poster A Memorial Of Time
This week FF sent me a French advertising poster with the narrative theme of enjoyment at the circus. Well-dressed 1930s crowds enjoy a carnival, (buy your tickets!) signed Émile Finot. …
Fashionable Singerie Monkeys
Singerie, you say? Yes. DD owns a delightful group of color lithographs ‘after’ Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin‘s celebrated Le Singe peintre and Le Singe antiquaire. One monkey is an artist, the other …
Kerosene Lamp Carries Rich Story Over 2,460 Miles
This little green kerosene lamp proves a point. Objects possess much the same uncanny property as the old theory of “six degrees of separation.” The principle suggests that any two …
Music Box Captures Memories of Romanticism and Ragtime
LB owns an 1898–1902 Symphonion crank-operated tabletop music box. It spins perforated seven-and-a-half-inch steel discs on a double-comb movement patented in Leipzig by Symphonion Musikwerke. The photograph shows a bound …