Only nine times in his seventy-eight years did Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot paint on anything other than canvas, paper, and panel. On one occasion, offended by the crude wooden lunchbox carried by his friend Alfred Robaut, Corot had a new one constructed, which he decorated with a plein air painting, "Fraîcheurs matinales" ("Morning Freshness"). It’s a mini-masterpiece made all the more charming by its humble setting, a breezy landscape of trees and hills awash with sunlight and enlivened by one of Corot’s favorite motifs: a flash of red, the hat of a small figure coming over a rise. Host Ben Miller gets the story from the dealer who sold it, Jill Newhouse, and the collector who bought it, Ray Vickers.

Curious Objects

Corot’s Impressionist Lunchbox

More popular than the Bible: that’s what the richly illustrated volumes known as books of hours—which helped worshipers keep track of each day’s seven canonical prayer periods—were during the Middle Ages. A trove of these objects from the Elaine and Alexandre Rosenberg collection is up for sale on April 23 at Christie’s, and in this special episode of the podcast Ben and Christie’s specialist Eugenio Donadoni zoom in on a particularly opulent example illuminated by the mysterious Master of the Paris Bartholomeus Anglicus.

The Book of Hours: A Medieval Best-Seller

The Association of Art Museum Directors killed something of a sacred cow last year when it ruled that museums will be permitted to use funds from deaccessioned artworks—previously strictly controlled—to pay for a wider array of institutional costs. On the occasion of this year’s virtual Philadelphia Show, Ben Miller speaks with the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s director and CEO Timothy Rub about the AAMD’s ruling and ripple effects it might have throughout the museum world. In a wide-ranging conversation, which gets into the nitty gritty of collecting and deaccesioning habits and procedures, as well as fundraising niceties, Rub makes a strong case for continuing to keep the departments of museums—and their fundraising efforts—firmly separated.

Museums and the Lure of the Sell-Off, with the PMA’s director and CEO Timothy Rub

During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration funded an interracial labor program in Wisconsin that employed over five thousand women to craft handmade goods: the Milwaukee Handicraft Project. Especially noteworthy among the rugs, quilts, costumes, and books that the women produced is a run of exquisitely crafted and clothed toddler-sized dolls. Host Benjamin Miller learns from scholar Allison Robinson about how these dolls—made to represent different ethnic groups both foreign and domestic—provide insight into New Deal–era debates over women’s labor, race, and cultural nationalism . . . and into the origins of Barbie and American Girl.

The WPA Origins of the American Doll, with Allison Robinson

Time was, many top interior designers sought to conjure a perfectly seamless décor—whether it be all Louis XV furniture, all early American, or all modern. The results could be beautiful—but also somewhat boring, and certainly impersonal. Interior decorator Thomas Jayne suggests another way to put together the spaces we live in: by using creative combinations of striking art and objects from across time to derive a style that’s endlessly evocative, livable, and fresh. In this episode, Ben Miller gets the goods from Jayne on the history of interiors (from the Greeks to the present day); what to budget first; and the spirit of “democratic decoration,” that, historically, has animated American interiors.

Curious Objects: Thomas Jayne

How to Make a Modern Home (with Antiques), featuring Thomas Jayne

Ben speaks with Ellery Foutch, assistant professor in American studies at Middlebury College, about a “relic Windsor chair” assembled by Henry Sheldon (founder of the Middlebury museum named in his honor) in 1884. This unusual piece of furniture was built with woods salvaged from structures with local or national significance—such as the warship Old Ironsides, the William Penn House in Philadelphia, and a colonial whipping post.

Curious Objects: Ellery Foutch

This Chair Is Made of America

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And in the antiques world the sincerest form of imitation is reproduction: the humble and studious attempt to conserve the lessons of the past because of their timeless value. One firm that’s well-versed in this particular form of historical homage is James Robinson, Inc., whose hundred-year partnership with a legacy silver workshop in Sheffield, England, has resulted in what Curious Objects host Ben Miller calls “the best historical-style silver flatware being made today anywhere in the world.” James Boening, director of James Robinson, Inc., and Craig Kent, workshop manager in Sheffield, come on the pod to dish about the vital importance of age-old processes like annealing, and the irony that homeowners would run themselves ragged trying to decide which rug to buy, but will settle for cold, unbalanced steel tableware without even blinking.

The Case for Silver Tableware

Everybody’s got that object in their life: something that's been around for awhile, maybe since you were a kid, maybe you got it from your parents, maybe they got it from theirs, and somewhere along the line everyone kind of forgot where it came from in the first place.  Wouldn't it be nice to know? Don't you wish someone had kept a receipt? 

This is the story of that once-in-a-lifetime moment when an object whose origins disappeared suddenly got its history back. And since that object’s history concerns the grandees of early New York City, we all got our history back, too. 

Curious Objects’ fiftieth episode, feat. Debra Bach, curator of decorative arts and special exhibitions at the New-York Historical Society, Tim Martin, owner of S. J. Shrubsole, and Dan and Alice Ayers.

Curious Objects: Delancey Bowl

Once Upon a Bowl

As you await the upcoming season of Curious Objects, please enjoy this special bonus episode, in which Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Abraham Thomas, ceramist Roxanne Jackson, and painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins join host Benjamin Miller onstage at the 2022 edition of the Winter Show to grapple with the legacy of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” How have Benjamin’s contentions about “aura” fared in the ensuing eighty-odd years since its publication? And how might we apply his thoughts on art to works of craft being produced today?

Curious Objects: Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Bonus Episode: Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Sometime around the turn of the twentieth century, the Black child at the rear of this 1837 family portrait was painted out. Why?  Benjamin Miller sits down with the painting’s owner—and its primary advocate—Jeremy Simien, as well as scholars, collectors, and other experts in the field involved with the painting’s journey from museum castoff to much-fêted cipher for the Antebellum South, and attempts to nail down why its eponymous figure was forgotten for so long.

Part 1 of a 3-part series on the painting "Bélizaire and the Frey Children." Feat. Jeremy K. Simien, Ogden Museum of Art curator of the collection Bradley Sumrall, historian and genetic genealogist Ja’el Gordon, Washington and Lee University assistant professor of art history Wendy Castenell

Curious Objects: Bélizaire's Biography

The Story of Bélizaire, Pt. 1: Biography

In 1837 a family group that flew in the face of convention was committed to canvas, presumably by portraitist Jacques Guillame Lucien Amans. It showed four children. Three were white, dressed in their Sunday best and gazing placidly at the viewer. The fourth, standing behind them in a Brooks Brothers livery coat, was a Black teenager. This is Bélizaire, and at some point around the turn of the twentieth century—for reasons unknown—his portrait was covered up. 

Last week we took a close look at Bélizaire the person, and his tortured life-path through antebellum Louisiana society. This week we examine the painting that is the reason anyone knows Bélizaire’s name, and follow the twists and turns by which it traveled from the studio of Jacques Amans in 1837 to the collection of Jeremy Simien, where it is today.

This is Pt. 2 of our three-part series on the painting "Bélizaire and the Frey Children." Feat. Simien and Wendy Castenell, as well as Taylor Thistlethwaite of Thistlethwaite Americana. Hosted by Benjamin Miller.

Curious Objects: Belizaire

The Story of Bélizaire, Pt. 2: Provenance

For nearly two hundred years, from his death in 1823, New York potter Thomas Commeraw was out of sight. In 2010 it finally became possible to positively identify him: as a prosperous free Black craftsman with a manufactory in Corlears Hook employing seven people, an enterprise that provided stiff competition to the legacy affairs of Pot Baker’s Hill in lower Manhattan.

Thomas Commeraw, Free Black Potter in 1800s New York

A couple of months ago, Ben Miller turned up at the Salmagundi Club in New York’s West Village to assume an unfamiliar role: that of interviewee rather than interviewer, sharing his expertise on nineteenth century American silver with the audience of the Gilded Gentleman. It’s a conversation that we are proud to present to you now.

Silvery was in a state of flux during the nineteenth century. Discoveries of huge lodes such as the Nevadan mother given its name by Henry Comstock, new production methods like silver plating, and most importantly, the maturation of the domestic industry, were shifting American styles from the Englishisms of Paul Revere to the Yankee grandeur that was Gorham, and the glory that was Tiffany.

That’s the metanarrative. But Ben and GG host Carl Raymond don’t shy away from pesky niceties such as the difference between the silver of Louis Comfort Tiffany and his father, Charles, the importance (or unimportance) of hallmarks, and the most consequential question for listeners hoarding family silver in the attic: whether nineteenth-century services have value beyond their weight in . . . well, silver.

Gilded-Age Silver with the Gilded Gentleman

Curious Objects guest Kay Collier, who is the owner of Kathryn Hastings and Company, purveyor of fine antique and modern wax seals, has always been a letter writer. You can thank her grandmother for encouraging the habit. Every week when she was a child Collier would receive a card with a piece of bubblegum and a dollar bill, and would send mail back. When she was nineteen Collier took a trip to Europe with her sister. Visiting the Amatruda papery on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, one of the oldest paper manufactories in Europe, her heart lit upon a wax seal. “You just have an intuitive feel for an object, it calls to you and you think ‘I don’t know what this is but I have to know more, I have to touch this thing,’” she says.

One thing led to another and today she is the owner of some five hundred seals: wheel seals, case seals, rotating seals, fobs made to be worn with pocket watches by Victorian gents. Each boasts a beautiful matrice (the part of the seal that’s actually pressed into hot wax, to render a design) made from citrine, amethyst, bloodstone agate, and other semiprecious stones, with ormolu intaglios. Although wax seals date back to the Bronze Age, Collier is partial to seals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when designers began incorporating an array of romantics symbols. Bay leaves mean loyalty, forget-me-nots signify remembrance or true love, ships gesture to the highs and lows of the human experience. For years Collier has been on the trail of a witch riding a broom and holding aloft a hammer to symbolize the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a 1486 German treatise on demonology used to charge witches with heresy. The seal is cheekily inscribed “all have their hobbies.” She’s bought three, but all, unfortunately, have been fakes. “There is a witch out there and she’ll find me when she’s ready,” Collier says.

Collecting can be a lonesome pursuit, especially when your quarry is without mainstream appeal. Seeking to break out of her bubble, in 2019 Collier had the idea to make seals to sell. Today she manufactures both antique and modern seals, shifting the age-old practice into the future by using multiple colors and layers of wax, and through such innovations as submerging LEDs in the hot wax so that her seals glow from within. “We’re just a few years away from artists emerging who use seals and wax as a way to make art,” she says.

That her collecting grow out a passion for letter-writing, is Ben quips, “like being a chair collector because you love sitting down so much.” But for Collier her seals are about more than usefulness, and even about more than beauty. They’re a reminder of the fleetingness of life, measured out, perhaps, by the amount of time it takes to make and send a letter to someone you care about, and the time it takes to receive one in return. “Antiques outlive us, they’re much older when we acquire them and hopefully they’ll have lives long after us. We’re stewards, and that idea of using and sharing is really important.”

Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, with Kay Collier

The cope, a long, loose-fitting ceremonial cloak worn by a priests or bishops, is a curious object. “Imagine a circle cut in half—a cope is the shape of that half,” explains Thomas Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Henry VII commissioned thirty of these richly embroidered vestments for the English clergy, helping to lay the foundation for that special blend of religion, power, and material prestige that would mark the reign of his son, the notorious Henry VIII. One of these copes is our focus piece this week. But twenty-nine of its brothers and sisters shared the fate of so many Renaissance textiles: oblivion.

Textiles Don't Get No Respect

Host Benjamin Miller welcomes back his erstwhile co-host, Michael Diaz-Griffith, to discuss the latter's new book, "The New Antiquarians." A survey of the up-and-coming generation of antiques collectors, who are taking up the mantle of the wealthy, socially competitive collectors who preceded them, the book takes readers into the homes of “people who are independent of mind, who want to create an interior that’s expressive of who they are"—from fashion designer Emily Bode to artist Andrew LaMar Hopkins, and many in between.

Curious Objects: The New Antiquarians

The New Antiquarians

In 1963, archaeologists from the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York began excavations in an ancient Levantine town called Jalame, in today’s Israel. For eight years they uncovered objects—many of which were brought back to the Corning—related to the production of glass in the Late Roman Empire. Most of the pieces produced in the Jalame workshop were workaday, monochrome items, but a few were more luxurious, such as a conical beaker decorated with blue dots (from copper). Untreated glass is naturally green or blue, from the iron found in sand, so the glass for this beaker would have to have been de-colorized with manganese. “The Jalame excavation was transformative because it was really the first scientific investigation of a glass workshop from antiquity,” says Katherine Larson, the guest for this episode of Curious Objects and curator of the exhibition "Dig Deeper: Discovering an Ancient Glass Workshop in Corning."

Curious Object: New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson

New Perspectives on Ancient Glass, with Katherine Larson

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is the United States’ oldest continuously operating museum. Today it embraces nearly 1 million objects from around the globe. However, as with most museums, space and programming constraints mean that only a fraction of these can be on view at any one time. Enter PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, a massive new facility that gives curators, visiting scholars—and Ben Miller, host of Curious Objects—access to Jingdazhen punch bowls, documents from the Salem Witch Trials, showy Persian shoes, and much, much more. 

Feat. Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.

Curious Objects: Peabody Essex Museum Collection Center

Around the World at the Peabody Essex Museum

Benjamin Miller continues his odyssey through the PEM’s James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Collection Center, which embraces a sizeable portion of the museum’s nearly 2 million objects sourced from around the globe. Christian Louboutins and a $2.1 million copy of the Declaration of Independence are on the menu, as Ben speaks with Angela Segalla, director of the Collection Center, curators Karina Corrigan and Paula Richter, and Dan Lipcan, director of PEM’s Phillips Library.

Curious Object: A Journey Back In Time At the Peabody Essex Museum

A Journey Back In Time At the Peabody Essex Museum

This week host Benjamin Miller welcomes back an old friend: Glenn Adamson, ANTIQUES contributor and now editor of Material Intelligence, an online quarterly published by the Chipstone Foundation. The upcoming issue of the journal concerns leather, one of the oldest as well as the commonest human-worked materials. From its sartorial to industrial applications (machine belts—sorry American bison), and its prevalence in sadomasochistic paraphernalia, Ben and Glenn cover the gamut.

Curious Objects: Leather, with Glenn Adamson

Leather, with Glenn Adamson

Clarissa von Spee, curator and Chair of Asian Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, comes on the pod to discuss a pair of ornately carved Qing Dynasty jade vessels, made by masters in Suzhou, China. Probably luxury objects and perhaps gifts, they’re just a couple of the more than two hundred objects on view as part of the exhibition "China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta," the first exhibition in the West that focuses on the artistic production and cultural impact of a region located in the coastal area south of the Yangzi River.

White jade cup with Daoist figures (仿古款白玉雙仙人耳杯), China, Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), Qianlong period (1736–1795). Palace Museum, Beijing, ©故宫博物院.

Curious Objects: Jade, the Imperial Gem, with Clarissa von Spee

Jade, the Imperial Gem, with Clarissa von Spee

Benjamin Miller is joined by Nathan Raab, principal at the Raab Collection, a purveyor of historic documents, manuscripts, and autographs that range from medieval codices to notes, signatures, and letters by the likes of Napoleon and Amelia Earhart. The firm’s inventory includes several items of especially national significance, such as the never-before-seen missive by George Washington—written just before the Continental Army’s encampment at Valley Forge for the winter of 1777–1778—that is the subject of this episode.

Curious Objects: A Newly Unearthed George Washington Letter, with Nathan Raab

A Newly Unearthed George Washington Letter, with Nathan Raab

Nick Dawes knows as much about antiques as probably anyone alive. With more than one hundred appearances on “Antiques Roadshow” since its US edition debuted in 1996, Dawes has sifted through thousands, perhaps millions, of family heirlooms in the thirty to sixty seconds allotted for each supplicant by the busy TV production schedule. Talking antiques, Dawes reminisces about “the ones that got away,” and the time he discovered a ceramic vase painted by Picasso that sold for $400,000. Word to the wise: if you ever hear the phrase “this is a very interesting object . . .” brace yourself—your curio is probably worthless.

Curious Objects: Antiques Roadshow Appraiser Nick Dawes

"Antiques Roadshow" Appraiser Nick Dawes

Like host Benjamin Miller, Oliver Newton specializes in silver—specifically, that from England, and especially silver from the nineteenth century and before. He has in hand a 1713 Anthony Nelme shaving bowl, one of those otherwise workaday objects made exceptional by fine craftsmanship, distinguished provenance, and, of course, the luster and value of its material. From the bowl’s history to the ins and outs of slinging hollowware, Oliver and Ben cover the antiquing gamut in the collegial manner what befits two young swells of the trade.

Curious Objects: Benjamin Miller Interviews Oliver Newton

Why You Should Spend $10000 on a Shaving Bowl

Stuart Feld discusses effects the internet has had on the world of antiques and collecting.

Curious Objects and the stories behind them: Stuart Feld

Curious Objects and the stories behind them: Effects of the Internet

Stuart Feld: Effects of the Internet on the world of collecting and dealing

Stuart Feld talks about his many areas of expertise and the linen press that has followed him throughout his career at the fine and decorative arts gallery Hirschl & Adler.

Curious Objects & the stories behind them: Stuart Feld

Dealer Stuart Feld: An 'Expert in Everything’ and an early American linen press

Independent collector Wade Lege discusses common mistakes he sees collectors or restorers make.

Curious Objects & the stories behind them

Wade Lege on Mistakes Collectors or Restorers Make

Benjamin Miller talks with Paul Becker, the fifth-generation owner and director of Chicago-based Carl Becker and Son, a 150-year-old luthier business.

Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them

Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them: Paul Becker

Making Music: A Conversation with Luthier Paul Becker

Antiques Dealers' Association executive director Judy Loto goes into detail about an antique powder horn that's the apple of her eye. She also has some tips for new collectors.

Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them: Judy Loto

Rare Book Dealer Judy Loto on a Mysterious Engraved Powder Horn

The founder of Geographicus Rare Antique Maps goes into detail about a big, blue, Qing-era map of the empire's tribute system: a network of cities, tribes, and nations that extended as far as Europe.

Curious Objects & The Stories Behind Them: Kevin Brown

Kevin Brown and His Qing-era Map of China

A virtual tour of the suite of Gilded Age mansions built for the Vanderbilts, Oelrichs, Astors, and Berwinds in Newport, Rhode Island, by the likes of Richard Morris Hunt and Stanford White.

Curious Objects & the stories behind them: Preservation Society of Newport County

The House that Vanderbilt: Gilded Age Mansions of Newport, RI

If you find an Old Master artwork in your attic, how can you be sure it isn’t fake? This month Ben and Michael consider the case of "Judith and Holofernes," a painting attributed to Caravaggio and estimated at $100–$150 million that sold to a private buyer on June 25.

Curious Objects: Is It Real? Caravaggio at Auction

Is it Real? A Caravaggio Rediscovered

Philip Hewat-Jaboor is chairman of Masterpiece London and owner of a fine alabaster and rosso antico marble vase. The vase has a fascinating transnational backstory, but, maybe more importantly, it's beautiful, a factor Philip says is “coming back into the equation” with regard to works of art.

Curious Objects: Philip Hewat-Jaboor

The Color of Beauty: Philip Hewat-Jaboor’s Neoclassical Vase

This month, Ben and Michael speak with Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of prints and drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum. The focus is an odd bronze bust of a crying child—once believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo—but the trio’s conversation quickly branches out, touching on subjects as diverse as the collector/connoisseur divide in the 19th century; the role of “creative restorers” in the history of antique fakery; and the intercontinental flow of fine and dec arts treasures from Europe to the collections of tycoons like Morgan, and from there into the public domain.

Curious Objects: Jennifer Tonkovich

The Mystery of the Michelangelo Bust

It's kinetic sculpture, it's haute couture, it’s . . . armor! This month, Ben speaks with Chassica Kirchhoff, an assistant curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, about a suite of metal suits from the 1500s that were worn and jousted in by the dukes of Saxony. Emblematic of the feisty Protestant state’s chivalric past and supreme examples of Saxon metalworking prowess, by the 1700s the suits of armor had come to represent “a fulcrum between the early modern past and the Enlightenment present,” Kirchoff says. Shortly thereafter they went on display at the famous Green Vault in Dresden, a precursor of modern museums.

Thirty-five Saxon Suits of Armor, with Chassica Kirchhoff

This month, Ben speaks with Tiffany Momon, visiting assistant professor at Sewanee University in Tennessee, and founder of the Black Craftspeople Digital Archive, a scholarly resource that explores the contributions that African Americans have made to the material culture of the United States. Tiffany and Ben focus their attention on a chair made by enslaved craftsmen at Leonidas Polk’s Leighton Plantation in Louisiana, and Tiffany offers tips on what institutions and researchers can do to ensure they’re telling the full story of the decorative arts.

An Armchair's Astonishing Provenance, with Tiffany Momon

Through interviews with leading figures in the world of fine and decorative arts, Curious Objects—a podcast from The Magazine Antiques—explores the hidden histories, the little-known facts, the intricacies, and the idiosyncrasies that breathe life and energy into historical works of craft and art.

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