Maine Antique Digest, December 2016

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28-B Maine Antique Digest, December 2016
- SHOW -
28-B
It was a perfect place for
decorators to shop.
Radnor, Pennsylvania
The 2016 Main Line Antiques Show
by Lita Solis-Cohen
The Main Line Antiques Show is a benefit for Surrey
Services for Seniors. Surrey supports independent living by
providing companions, nurses, short-term care, live-in 24/7
care, house cleaning, money management, and help with insurance
claims for those in need. Last year Surrey provided 79,000 hours
of home services, 28,000 home-delivered meals, 27,000 nutritious
meals at special sites, 17,000 rides, and 60,000 hours of volunteer
services on Philadelphia’s Main Line. The antiques show preview
party is a major fund-raiser. Anne Hamilton, who masterminded
the rebirth of the Philadelphia Antiques Show (which benefits
Penn Medicine), along with Maureen Brennan-Miller made this
show and its well-attended preview happen.
Show manager Nicholas Vandekar, a local real estate agent,
has been the show’s volunteer manager for the last five years. He
rounded up an impressive roster of 33 dealers for the September
30-October 2 show, fewer than in years past, but a diverse group
that brought enough furniture, paintings, prints, needlework,
ceramics, and smalls to furnish a country or formal house and
decorate gardens. It was a perfect place for decorators to shop.
When one dealer took ill, Nicholas Vandekar convinced his
brother Paul Vandekar of Maryknoll, New York, to come with a
full truck. He put together an impressive stand of Piero Fornasetti
plates, framed prints, watercolors, woollies, and English pottery.
He sold a collection of eight Chinese watercolors of insects on
opening night.
There was an impressive selection of English porcelain and
pottery at the show. MalcolmMagruder of Millwood, Virginia, and
A.J. Warren of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, shared a big booth, and
Marcia Moylan and Jacqueline Smelkinson of The Spare Room,
Baltimore, Maryland, offered a selection of English Regency
porcelain and pottery, for which they are well known, along with
Victorian and Georgian jewelry and snuffboxes.
Gary Sargeant of Woodbury, Connecticut, offered an impressive
selection of Georgian furniture, and Zane Moss of Sharon,
Connecticut, brought comfortable English Regency furnishings.
John Hutchinson of Rose Valley Restorations, West Chester,
Pennsylvania, offered a Philadelphia mahogany sideboard with
a bottle drawer and griffin inlays that he had restored. Taylor
Thistlethwaite of Glasgow, Kentucky, showing here for the first
time, had a diminutive Philadelphia mahogany four-drawer chest
of drawers in remarkably fine condition that had descended in an
Annapolis family; it was fresh to market and hitherto unknown.
Dealers H.L. “Skip” Chalfant of West Chester, Pennsylvania,
and James Kilvington of Greenville, Delaware, have been loyal
supporters of this show and generally find something to buy and
sell here, but many of the local dealers who have showed here
before opted out this year, which made it a smaller show. The
show did have some new faces. The spacious
venue of the Dixon Center at Cabrini University
in Radnor is right in the middle of the Main Line
and is a comfortable facility with easy access
and parking.
A weekend of dreary weather was perfect for
antiquing, and a steady crowd of shoppers came.
The three jewelry dealers seemed busy, and print
dealers made multiple sales. A few paintings
found new homes, but most antiques dealers
said selling was not buoyant.
Few fall shows have reported good sales for
the majority of exhibitors. Dealers continue to
blame the slow business on the uncertainty of an election year. Let’s
hope there will be new energy after November 8. The Main Line
Antiques Show is one of the few small charity shows to survive.
For more information, go to ).
MarciaMoylan and Jackie Smelkinson
of The Spare Room, Baltimore,
Maryland, brought the usual collection
of 18th- and 19th-century English
porcelain pottery and Georgian and
Victorian jewelry and this tray full
of quizzing glasses, the precursor of
the lorgnette for magnification. The
most expensive is the gold one with
turquoise stones (bottom, second to
the right); it was $11,600. The Berlin
iron one to its right was $2565; the
silver one, top center, $365; and the
gold one with garnets, top right, circa
1830, $1200.
The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Alix Aymé (1894-
1989), lacquer and gold leaf on wooden panel, signed
lower left and lower right, 20" x 13¼" (sight size), in a
handcrafted French frame, was $28,000 from Fletcher/
Copenhaver Fine Art, Fredericksburg, Virginia. A
French painter, Aymé lived and worked in China,
Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and before World War
II worked with Symbolist and Nabi painter Maurice
Denis in Paris. She returned to Paris in 1945, painted
murals, and continued her lacquer work. Her first
American museum exhibition was at the Evergreen
Museum at Johns Hopkins University in 2012.
Schorr and Dobinsky Fine Art, Bridgehampton, New
York, asked $1295 for the cast stone dog in the center;
the pair of spaniels sold. The faux bois birdcage,
Belgian, early 20th century, was $1995. The lot of
cast-iron garden edging, French, was $695 for the lot.
Flowers, attributed to Mary Elizabeth Price (1877-
1965), circa 1940, watercolor and gouache on paper,
was $4500 from Hollie Powers Holt of Fine Antique
Prints, Wayne, Pennsylvania. Mary Elizabeth Price
was a member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of
women artists who exhibited together from 1917
to 1945. She often painted flowers on gold or silver
backgrounds. She studied at the Pennsylvania
Museum and School of Industrial Arts and the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and exhibited
at the National Academy of Design in New York. Her
brother R. Moore Price made her frames and those
of other New Hope painters, including the one on this
painting.
Stripey , a bronze cat, early 1960s, by Gerd Utescher
(1912-1983) was $9500 from Dixon-Hall Fine Arts,
Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Born in Berlin, the
artist came to Philadelphia in 1959 and taught at the
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and at the
Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was part of a group
of artists who founded Gallery 10 in Philadelphia that
included Peter Paone, Adolph Dehn, William Smith,
and others. Among his large sculpture commissions
is the Emancipation Proclamation fountain near City
Hall in Philadelphia. He traveled to Italy to oversee
the casting of his work and settled there with his third
wife. He died there in 1983.
This Black Forest Swiss
carving of a bear with a tray
with a fruit border was $2500
from Leatherwood Antiques,
Sandwich, Massachusetts.