I just spied the review of the MAD's Gord Peteran exhibition in the Times. This show was at Winterthur... oh, two years ago? Gord himself came for a lecture, and then my roommate and I ended up chatting with him and curator Glen Adamson into the wee hours in one of the scholar's residences on the estate. Funny stuff. Anyway, I'd like to see what the show looks like at MAD - I love seeing multiple installations of exhibitions. I like the pieces that have pretty obvious references to history... like "chest on chest" and "ark." You should go see them!
The grounds: Winterthur is beautiful. Saturday, especially, it was warm and sunny. See Jess's post for the cutsie lodgings, she did it better than I could. My version would be post-rain, but you'll get the idea.
Bonus points: I met someone who gave me a 17th-century nail which is still in the pocket of my dress. Sweet potato fries with mood-lighting at Buckley's. Dinner at Pauline's. Driving. In 5th gear. Saw all four grandparents!
Furniture Forum is this coming week, and coincides with Brock Jobe's exhibition, Harbor and Home. Kem Widmer is going to do the big reveal on Nathaniel Gould; I'm also looking forward to seeing the always adorable Derin Bray speak. I'll get to see my family in the area, as well as drink wine with my former classmate and Mount Vernon diva, Sam! We are both staying on the property, and the grounds should be lovely. Weather dot com tells me low 60s, sans rain. I'm optimisticly bringing sandals.
Newport will be a little different: it's not my home, like Winterthur, and the people will be either totally new to me or... well, you know, not already established as my soulmates. Which is fine. Always more to be found, right? The topics relate to the Gilded Age and the multitude of inspirations therein, with plenty of time for the mansions. The theme is "Great Escapes," and it should be one for me too. I'm doing little excited dances when I think about this. You know the ones. It's at the end of the month.
Last week there were two tea tables (well, more than two, but two major ones) up for sale at Christie's and Sotheby's (the one with Mr. Keno). The Christie's table had a low estimate, and brought over $4 million, while the Sotheby's table was estimated to bring $2-6 million, and only took in $1.6 million. The Christie's table was sold first, on Friday, and the other table sold on Saturday. Perhaps this had an effect on the prices. Some people felt that the Sotheby's table's surface ended up hurting it (refinished too recently). I was not completely shocked at the outcome (I just liked the Christie's one better anyway), but there was so much hype about the Sotheby's table, it even had its very own catalogue, so I feel a little bad for it. Yes, I just said I feel bad for a table... I hope it goes to a loving home.
Long ago, I mentioned the compass boxes I'm studying. A little more than a week ago I gave a workshop at the museum on these for a group of collectors, scholars, and dealers. I feel great about how it went, and I think we had almost 20 boxes and 30-40 people in the room that day. Though I spent all fall working on the project, I've really only begun. I've located over 60 objects now, and have made a lot of observations, but I still don't have real conclusions yet. I hesitate to make these at this point, because of the sensitive nature of the topic, which is affected by both market prices and existing ideas about the boxes. 
As an exercise for my connoisseurship project, I made my own compass box. The good thing is, my work could never be mistaken for the original (and I painted an old cigar box...). I bought a compass with two points (no pencil) and then scribed the lines. Then I painted it blue, and then applied the red and white over the lines, and did a little of the freehand stuff too. I used the box in the Katcher Collection (see the Expressions of Eloquence catalogue) as a model. The cool thing is, I think the boxes really were this bright when they were first made. I also realized that it really doesn't take much work to create these: I purposefully didn't try super hard to make it perfect, and it's not so bad! The compass marks don't even need measuring, I just eyeballed those.
This semester I'm working on a specific type of painted box: like the one shown here, which sold at Pook & Pook in April, 2007. The group of boxes and blanket chests with these motifs are loosely attributed to the "compass artist." They are usually blue (now faded to green) or red, with this painted floral decoration which was mapped out with a compass or divider. Only two of them have the small drawers like this. So far I have tracked down 27 objects: 3 slide-lid boxes, 5 blanket chests, and 19 domed boxes. My job is to examine as many as I can to figure out how they were really made, who was making the boxes, who was decorating them (and was it the same person?), etc. I'm still on the lookout for more, but will begin detailed examination of the ones at my museum.
For fun today I flipped through my good ol' copy of Regency Furniture by Frances Collard. Though the author claims her work is out of date (as is much work done over 20 years ago; it just happens!), I worship this text. If anything, it's a great gathering of primary material, both objects and period images. I first came across the book when I was studying a sewing/music box in the form of a tiny regency piano. Inside, the text has tons of images: furniture, Ackermann's prints, sketches and watercolors of interiors. Collard, a curator at the V&A, was one of many great contacts I made while working on this little piano.
