The Antique Victorian Furniture Blog

On Saturday, October 24, Stair Galleries of New York will host an auction of the Hunt Slonem collection contained in Edgewood Terrace, also known as Cordts Mansion, “an imposing Second Empire-style brick mansion that stands at the top of a hill overlooking the city of Kingston in New York’s sprawling Hudson Valley.” Previews run from October 9 to October 24.

I’ve attached the press release and photos here for you, so there’s not much need for me to elaborate. Suffice it to say that this is going to be one magnificent auction. Here’s some more from the press release to entice you:

“After restoring his country retreat to its original Victorian grandeur, Mr. Slonem filled the rooms with an eclectic combination of 19th-century furniture and decorations, modern art and his own exotic, vibrantly colored, neo-expressionist paintings… The sale will feature an extensive selection of 19th-century furniture, decorative arts and fine arts as well as a number of 20th-century paintings, prints and photographs.

According to Mr. Slonem, ‘The collection represents nine years of gathering.’ The impressive array of 19th-century furnishings, spanning the years from 1830 to 1900 and encompassing all the major styles of the Victorian era, is heavily focused on the Gothic Revival. Throughout the house are chairs, center tables, dressing bureaux, secretaries, gilt-bronze mantel clocks, glass vases, porcelain teawares and ironstone toilet sets embellished with tracery, pointed arches, steep gables, pinnacles and cusping. Balancing the medieval-inspired pieces are furniture and decorations in other revival styles including Rococo, Renaissance, Louis XVI and Neo-Grec. Modern works of art, hung on brightly painted walls inspired by the colors in Mr. Slonem’s paintings, serve as a foil to the Victorian furnishings.”

Wow.

Click here to read the full press release.

Click here for the catalogue. You have to see this.

For information, contact Walter G. Ritchie, Jr. of Stair Galleries at 518-751-100 or walter.ritchie@stairgalleries.com. Visit Stair Galleries’ website at http://www.stairgalleries.com/.

Technorati Tags: 19th Century, Antiques, Chairs, clocks, decorative arts, Furniture, gothic revival, Hunt Slonem, louis xvi, modern art, neo-grec, paintings, Renaissance, Rococo, second empire, secretaries, Stair Galleries, tables, Victorian

I don’t know what to say about this video, except that it is Beatles set to antiques. And I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Antique, Antiques, Chair, Chairs, Chippendale, Furniture, Table

Here is a wonderful article from the American Collector Archives at Collectors Weekly. The article was first published in the March 1943 issue of American Collector, a magazine that ran from 1933-1948. The author of the article is a man named Richmond Huntley. Collectors Weekly titles it “Flashback: Victorian Furniture.” I can’t tell if that reflects the original title, but no matter.

Huntley’s prose is engaging and educated, a style largely lost in the journalism of today. Huntley’s perspective on Victorian furniture is decidedly negative and gives interesting insight into current tastes for the furniture.

Huntley lets us know that it was only recently (remember, recently as of 1943) that anything made after 1830 was considered antique. And only “recently” has Victorian furniture “been taken seriously at all.” By that we mean seriously enough to invest in, refurbish, and protect under Aviva home insurance! What a change in attitude!

He gives an abbreviated but informative history of Victorian furniture, mentioning Greek, Roman and Egyptian sources and styles like Louis XV and Gothic. He himself favors the furniture made before the Civil War and says little of what came after, perhaps out of contempt.

He makes no bones about his feelings for the “whatnots and overstuffed armchairs of the 1880’s.” If you have to keep one of those horrible chairs around because it belonged to a great-grandfater, you can always hide “its worst features” with a a slip cover. As far as the whatnots go, “family sentiment can be carried too far.”

Very funny. But there is a gloom these days resulting from a shift in taste away from the excess of antique Victorian furniture. As this article shows, though, it was hardly popular in the first half of the 20th century either.

If you like it, buy it. Why worry what everyone else thinks? Eventually tastes will come around to it. If you’re a dealer with an inventory of Victorian furniture, well, tastes may come around sooner than you fear. A bad economy may actually help that along. Have a look at this post.

On the positive side, as far as Huntley is concerned, are Belter, Marcotte, J&J Meeks, and Seibrecht. The article contains a single photo – a bed by Belter. Surprise. Huntley knew the good stuff. An investment-minded person might have taken note. Check out this post to see how far the appreciation for beds by Belter has come. And imagine if your grandparents had bought up Belter in 1943 and left it to you!

Click here to read this delightful article. While you’re there, take a look around the antique Victorian section of Collectors Weekly. It’s well worth the visit.

Technorati Tags: american collector, armchairs, Bed, belter, civil war, collectors weekly, dealer, Economy, egyptian, Furniture, Gothic, greek, louis xv, marcotte, meeks, roman, seibrecht, Victorian

Take a look at this article from Auction Central News, written by Terry Kovel. Did you know that the Victorian era saw desks that turned into beds, chairs that turned into bathtubs, or highchairs that turned into strollers? Victorian furniture is an endless source of fascination for those of us with a historical perspective.

Now, if you have your eye on that highchair for you own baby, just read far enough to learn that it wouldn’t pass modern safety standards. Inventiveness and safety aren’t always compatible, are they?

Read the article here.

Technorati Tags: auction central news, bathtubs, Beds, Chairs, desks, Furniture, highchairs, inventiveness, strollers, Victorian

Take a look at the photos of this Victorian chair at the Tigerlilly Patch blog. Nice job of reupholstery. I’m always impressed by this kind of work.

Reupholstered Victorian chair

Technorati Tags: Antique, Chair, Ebony, Furniture, Reupholstery, Victorian

I just came across a blog called Slip Into Something Victorian. Its most recent post is about Lizzie Borden. Mystery and the Victorian era sure do go hand in hand.

Denise Eagan, the author of the post, recently visited Lizzie’s Victorian home, which is located in Fall River, Massachusetts. It was in this house back in 1892 that Lizzie’s father and stepmother were found murdered in exceptionally brutal fashion. Lizzie was brought to trial but acquitted.

To this day the crime is unsolved, although Lizzie remains the primary suspect in the minds of many. The post gives a very nice summary of the circumstances of the mystery, with some interesting details about such things as possible sexual abuse and the miserly nature of Lizzie’s father.

And here’s something you probably didn’t know. The home today is a bed and breakfast. You can actually sleep in Lizzie’s room, in a nice antique Victorian bed, I might add! I don’t think I would shut my eyes for a second, and not just because I was admiring all the furniture in the room.

Slip Into Something Victorian contains a gallery of pictures, among which are an excellent selection taken at the Borden house. There’s a lot of antique Victorian furniture in there. You’ll see beds, chairs, mirrors, dressers, a dining room table, a striking medallion back sofa, and more – all within the confines of one of the world’s eeriest Victorian homes.

And maybe you’ll be inspired to visit the home and spend the night. I understand you’ll be treated to the breakfast the Bordens had that morning. The contents of Abby Borden’s stomach actually provided an important clue as to the time of her subsequent murder. Food for thought.

You can read the post here. If you have trouble finding the picture gallery, click here.

And here are some earlier posts of mine involving mystery of one kind or another: Nov. 24, Nov. 20, Nov. 17, Nov. 16, Nov. 13.

Technorati Tags: Antique, Bed, Beds, Chairs, Dresser, Furniture, Home, House, lizzie borden, Mirror, Mystery, Sofa, Table, Victorian

Back on October 23, I posted about an article written by antique collector Ben Mijuskovic. In that article, which appeared in the Maine Antique Digest, Ben gave a short history of antique Victorian furniture in America and then told the story of a particular Victorian chair that he and his wife had found. If you haven’t read that one, you can find it here.

Ben has since called my attention to another of his articles, which came out in Antiques and Fine Art. Like the previous article, this one is about a Victorian chair, the “loveliest Victorian chair” as the title tells us. Also like the previous one, this article is on a higher intellectual plane than your average writing on antiques.

What I didn’t know about Ben when I wrote that first post is that he’s a professor of philosophy as well as a collector of Victorian antiques. His expertise in philosophy stretches from the ancient to the modern. He does research into ethics, existentialism, and the philosophy of religion and could tell us a thing or two about Hume, Hegel, and Husserl.

We’re just fortunate enough that Ben is also captivated by antique Victorian furniture and enjoys sharing his experiences with it. The depth of Ben’s insight is evident in every sentence he writes. In this article he relates how he and his wife found an antique Victorian chair at their favorite antique shop in San Francisco. In keeping with the theme of mystery that has lately crept into The Antique Victorian Furniture Blog, the chair defied identification. Ben and his wife promptly bought the chair and then set out to get some answers.

I don’t want to give away too much here. It’s Ben’s mystery, and he tells a charming story. I’ll just remark that there’s a puzzling four-point star theme to the chair and a “delicately painted” Grecian urn that give Ben the opportunity to discuss a famous episode from the Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid, the Greek priestesses known as sibyls, and the god Apollo.

That’s all I’ll say. Not a word about that sliver of wood that provided the final bit of evidence.

Thanks for this one, Ben!

Click here to treat yourself to this wonderful article.

Technorati Tags: Antique, Antiques, Chair, Furniture, Mystery, Shop, Victorian

I found this charming post in a blog called Happenstance House. It’s written by a woman who lives in a Victorian home in Michigan and furnishes it with antiques. At one point in her life she and her husband ran an antique shop, although she admits that her lack of success in the venture came from a greater desire to take things home than to sell them.

She treats us to a photographic tour of her home, providing commentary on the different objects in the photos. At the time of the post, she was on the verge of having a sale in her house, although I sense from her tone that she doesn’t really like to part with things.

Her taste, as she tells us, runs toward a mixture of Oriental and Victorian antiques. See what she has to say about the Victorian chair that’s next to the piano. There’s romance in antique Victorian furniture!

You’ll find this extremely pleasant post here. The music she provides is almost too good to be true!

Technorati Tags: Antiques, Chair, Furniture, House, Photography, Victorian

I ran across this post in a blog aptly named Chair. The blog’s author, Roxanne, takes us a through a step-by-step series of photos as she quite expertly reupholsters a beautiful Victorian chair. We get a lot of good looks at the chair, springs and all. And the finished product certainly looks like a chair that Dresser would have said a user could sit in confidently!

Take a look.

Technorati Tags: Antique, Antiques, Chair, Dresser, Reupholstery, Victorian

Have a look at this article from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, about a Victorian chair designed by Christopher Dresser.

The article explains that the chair represents a good example of the changes that took place in the latter half of the 19th century. Interestingly, advocates of the “modern” design considered previous designs, with their excessive, deeply carved decoration not only hard to clean but downright immoral! You can see in the photo of this chair the simple, shallow incisings that characterized much of the furniture of the later Victorian era.

Another intriguing aspect of this short article is its discussion of the friction between Dresser and his famous contemporary Charles Eastlake. Perhaps you didn’t know this, but Dresser called Eastlake “the apostle of ugliness” even though the two of them agreed on many principles. They both disdained heavily carved ornamentation and both stressed functionality.

Evidently though, Dresser was even more interested in functionality than Eastlake, or at least perceived himself that way. He declared that a well-designed chair permitted its user to sit with confidence, unlike those of contemporary designers, including Eastlake himself.

Note the Egyptian and botanical influences in the design of this particular chair. Click here for the article.

Technorati Tags: Antique, Antiques, Chair, Christopher Dresser, Victorian