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.
Aug
26
On August 1, the Stevens Auction Co. held an on-site auction at the prominent antebellum home Belle Oaks in Macon, Mississippi.
The prize lot was a 4-piece Victorian parlor suite by John Henry Belter, dating to around 1855. The suite consisted of a sofa, one armchair, and two armless chairs.
Mar
6
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.
Jan
16
What does James F. “Jimmy” Jones, Jr., president of Trinity College in Hartford, CT, have in the formal living room of his home? Antique Victorian furniture, of course.
The Hartford Courant has just run an engaging article on Mr. Jones’s life in a fishbowl on Trinity’s campus. Each morning he dashes outside, clad in his bathrobe, to get his newspaper. It’s usually early enough that none of the students or faculty sees him.
Mr. Jones and his wife Jan have lived in the president’s house since 2004. One of the challenges facing the Joneses when they first moved in was how to make their largely antique furnishings work in what was a modern, contemporary home. In the end it turned out to be a good fit.
The formal living room, home to the Victorian furniture which came from Jan’s great-grandmother, is where they often hold receptions. The one and only photo accompanying the article is fortunately of this room. The furniture (see if you can spot all the chairs) gives the space a remarkably comfortable and inviting aspect. The article calls it “warm and welcoming.”
It’s worth remembering what a social world the Victorians lived in. The furniture was meant to say “Welcome!” Furniture designed for function alone simply doesn’t speak to you in the same way.
Dec
5
Unable to resist articles about holiday events in Victorian homes (see my post on December 3), I came across this article in the Holland Sentinel about a Victorian Christmas Tea being offered at the Cappon House in Holland, Michigan. The event promises to be a step back in time for the attendees, with authentic Victorian delicacies being made according to period recipes. There will even be a pianist in period attire playing the popular tunes of 1900. But something else in the article caught my eye.
This house, built in 1873 for Dutch immigrant Isaac Cappon, a wealthy tannery owner as well as Holland’s first mayor, remained in the Cappon family all the way up to 1980. As a result, it is now “furnished with one of the country’s largest collections of early Grand Rapids furniture in its original setting.”
I took a look at the three photographs provided with the article. I was charmed by the sitting room and amazed by the massive mirror over the mantle. That was enough to set me off on the trail, and I found the site for the Holland Museum, run by the Holland Historical Trust, which owns the contents of the mansion somehow in coordination with the City of Holland.
On this page of the site you’ll see a photo of the exterior of the home. The house was designed by another Dutch immigrant, Jan R. Kleyn, in the Italianate style. It’s impressive, to say the least.
The first link provided from this page is Preserving the Past. Following the link we come to a page that gives the history of Isaac Cappon and his family. Mr. Cappon had eleven children by his first wife and five by his second (the housekeeper). Good thing he lived in a mansion!
Most of the furniture in the home came from Berkey & Gay and Nelson, Matter & Co., “two of the most significant early Grand Rapids furniture companies.” Both companies, along with a third Grand Rapids firm, won awards at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876.
Berkey & Gay supplied the mirror, parlor suite, center table, drapery and corner cornice for the parlor, the master bedroom suite, and the parlor suite and bookcase for the sitting room. There are a number of pictures provided on this page, one of which is a close-up of the arm of a Berkey & Gay chair. Photographs taken of the Berkey & Gay showroom back in 1870 show a mirror identical to the one over the mantle and chairs similar to the ones in the sitting room.
Another link to follow is Lessons from the Parlor. This page, along with providing two shots of the parlor, talks about how the furnishings of this particular room and of the home in general teach a lesson of immigration and assimilation during the Victorian era of 19th century America. This is a thoughtful little article, more insightful than much of what you get on museum promo pages.
I hope you enjoy all this. It falls right in line with my general endeavor to put antique Victorian furniture back into its own era. My compliments to the Holland Museum for their achievements in doing the same!
Nov
24
Here’s a passage from Wilkie Collins, the great Victorian author of detective fiction. This is from a short story called “A Traveler’s Story of A Terribly Strange Bed,” originally published in 1852. The room described here is in a gambling house in Paris, but that strange bed is very British. It has a sinister functionality, too, which you’ll discover if you read the story.
“I raised myself on my elbow, and looked about the room–which was brightened by a lovely moonlight pouring straight through the window–to see if it contained any pictures or ornaments that I could at all clearly distinguish. While my eyes wandered from wall to wall, a remembrance of Le Maistre’s delightful little book, “Voyage autour de ma Chambre,” occurred to me. I resolved to imitate the French author, and find occupation and amusement enough to relieve the tedium of my wakefulness, by making a mental inventory of every article of furniture I could see, and by following up to their sources the multitude of associations which even a chair, a table, or a wash-hand stand may be made to call forth.
In the nervous unsettled state of my mind at that moment, I found it much easier to make my inventory than to make my reflections, and thereupon soon gave up all hope of thinking in Le Maistre’s fanciful track–or, indeed, of thinking at all. I looked about the room at the different articles of furniture, and did nothing more.
There was, first, the bed I was lying in; a four-post bed, of all things in the world to meet with in Paris–yes, a thorough clumsy British four-poster, with the regular top lined with chintz–the regular fringed valance all round–the regular stifling, unwholesome curtains, which I remembered having mechanically drawn back against the posts without particularly noticing the bed when I first got into the room. Then there was the marble-topped wash-hand stand, from which the water I had spilled, in my hurry to pour it out, was still dripping, slowly and more slowly, on to the brick floor. Then two small chairs, with my coat, waistcoat, and trousers flung on them. Then a large elbow-chair covered with dirty-white dimity, with my cravat and shirt collar thrown over the back. Then a chest of drawers with two of the brass handles off, and a tawdry, broken china inkstand placed on it by way of ornament for the top. Then the dressing-table, adorned by a very small looking-glass, and a very large pincushion. Then the window–an unusually large window. Then a dark old picture, which the feeble candle dimly showed me. It was a picture of a fellow in a high Spanish hat, crowned with a plume of towering feathers. A swarthy, sinister ruffian, looking upward, shading his eyes with his hand, and looking intently upward–it might be at some tall gallows at which he was going to be hanged. At any rate, he had the appearance of thoroughly deserving it.”
I absolutely love the remark about the “multitude of associations.” Do you notice how the ornate beauty of the sentences written by Victorian authors closely resembles the beauty of antique Victorian furniture?
Nov
20
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!
Nov
5
I came across this nice little post on the Blossoms&Lace blog, authored by a woman named Jill. Jill is extremely excited about the Victorian sofa, love seat and chair she just acquired.
Interestingly, she found her antique Victorian furniture on Craigslist. It had been posted for five days, and the only reason it hadn’t sold was because it didn’t have any accompanying photos. That’s something to look out for. Given how excited Jill is, I suspect she got a pretty good deal on it.
Take a look at the photo she provides. You can click on it to enlarge it and see the detail of the carving. Very elegant suite.
Nov
4
I mentioned in a post yesterday that I was going to start looking for passages in Victorian literature that had descriptions of furniture, and I mentioned Charlotte Bronte in that context. Well, look what I found. A passage from Charlotte Bronte’s great Victorian romance, Jane Eyre, that describes a room in a mansion, full of furniture: a Victorian bed, Victorian tables, and Victorian chairs. Lots of mahogany and lots of red. Hence the room’s name:
“The red-room was a square chamber, very seldom slept in, I might say never, indeed, unless when a chance influx of visitors at Gateshead Hall rendered it necessary to turn to account all the accommodation it contained: yet it was one of the largest and stateliest chambers in the mansion. A bed supported on massive pillars of mahogany, hung with curtains of deep red damask, stood out like a tabernacle in the centre; the two large windows, with their blinds always drawn down, were half shrouded in festoons and falls of similar drapery; the carpet was red; the table at the foot of the bed was covered with a crimson cloth; the walls were a soft fawn colour with a blush of pink in it; the wardrobe, the toilet-table, the chairs were of darkly polished old mahogany. Out of these deep surrounding shades rose high, and glared white, the piled-up mattresses and pillows of the bed, spread with a snowy Marseilles counterpane. Scarcely less prominent was an ample cushioned easy-chair near the head of the bed, also white, with a footstool before it; and looking, as I thought, like a pale throne.”
Charlotte Bronte lived from 1816 to 1855, and Jane Eyre was published in 1849. This “red-room” certainly predates the Eastlake era, doesn’t it? Pretty dark and ominous. Do you think it’s an accurate reflection of the times?
Nov
2
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!