Maine Antique Digest, April 2017

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12-A Maine Antique Digest, April 2017
Philadelphia in April
by Lita Solis-Cohen
Put Philadelphia on your April calendar. A lot will be
going on there.
The Philadelphia Antiques & Art Show, a benefit for
Penn Medicine, will be held April 21-23 with a preview
party on April 20. As it was last year, the show will be in
a purpose-built tent at the Marine Parade Grounds of the
Navy Yard, at South Broad Street and Intrepid Avenue.
The promoters, Diana Bittel and Karen DiSaia, have
rounded up 59 dealers; seven of them were not there last
year. Some of those seven, such as Joe Kindig, known
for 18th-century American furniture, Kentucky rifles,
and period needlework and paintings, and James and
Nancy Glazer, who have sold some of the rarest Wind-
sor chairs, Pennsylvania German redware, and fraktur,
need no introduction—they have exhibited at the Phila-
delphia show in recent years. James Robinson, venerable
New York City specialists in antique jewelry and English
Georgian silver and a fixture at the Winter Antiques
Show in New York City, has not exhibited at the Phila-
delphia show since its first three years in the 1960s.
Joan Boening is the third generation to be president of
the gallery, founded by James Robinson, her great-uncle.
Her son James Boening is the fourth generation to be in
the business. James Robinson is taking the place of pop-
ular antique jewelry specialist Arthur Guy Kaplan, who
has retired.
Four dealers are new to the show. W.T. Thistlethwaite,
a young dealer from Glasgow, Kentucky, established
Thistlethwaite Americana in 2013 after completing an
apprenticeship with Alexandria, Virginia, dealer Sumpter
Priddy III. He offers 18th- and 19th-century American
furniture, paintings, and accessories. Christopher H.
Jones of Alexandria, Virginia, will bring some southern
furniture, along with maps, silver, and paintings. South-
ern furniture and silver are hot corners of the Americana
market. BiBi Mohamed of Imperial Fine Books has been
selling rare books and fine bindings since 1989 from her
shop on Madison Avenue in New York City but has not
exhibited at this show before. Nor has Jayne Thompson
of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, a dealer in English antiques.
Like Imperial Fine Books, Thompson is known to those
who frequent the Newport Antiques Show in Rhode
Island in July, also run by Diana Bittel.
Space for new faces was made possible by the retire-
ment of Arthur Guy Kaplan and the Herrs of Lancaster.
The Pricketts of Yardley, Pennsylvania, seem to have
dropped all shows. Others who were there last year but
will be missing this time are Mark and Marjorie Allen of
New Hampshire, James Kochan of Maine, and art dealer
Howard Godel of New York City.
Last year the show changed its name from the Phila-
delphia Antiques Show to the Philadelphia Antiques &
Art Show. Seven of the exhibitors have art galleries, and
many of the dealers in furniture also sell paintings. The
Philadelphia show is known as the best in the country for
Americana—American furniture, silver, folk art, toys,
needlework, flags—but it also offers a wide range of
paintings, drawings, and sculpture, as well as English fur-
niture and silver, ceramics, Tiffany glass, lamps, Native
American pottery, needlework, Oriental rugs, Chinese
porcelain, garden ornaments, portrait miniatures, and all
the best the dealers can muster.
Dealers generally do not like to publicize what they
will bring—surprise is a tool for selling—and this show
is a sale. The loan exhibition this year, What So Proudly
We Hail, explores American flags and patriotic textiles
from the 1790s to 1912.
General admission tickets to the show are $20 at the
door; $15 early-bird tickets can be ordered online (www.
) before March 15.
Seniors, students, and Penn Medicine employee tickets
are $18, and all tickets are good for the entire weekend.
Free daily lectures (with show admission) begin on Fri-
day at 11:30 a.m., when interior designer Meg Braff speaks
about “The Art of Reinterpreting What Is Old and Making
It New Again,” revealing how she mixes vintage pieces
with modern for fresh interiors. The talk will be followed
by a book signing. At 2 p.m. on Friday, special agent Jake
Archer of the FBI Art Crime Team, Philadelphia division,
will reveal the FBI’s role in combating theft of art and cul-
tural property. On Saturday at 2 p.m., R. Scott Stephen-
son, Ph.D., vice president of collections, exhibition, and
programming at the Museum of the American Revolution,
Philadelphia, which will open to the public on April 19,
will talk about “Banners of Liberty: Flags of the American
Revolution,” explaining the meaning and history of some
Revolutionary War-era flags. On Sunday at 2 p.m., dealer
Jeff Bridgman, who will be selling flags at the show, will
give a walking tour through the loan exhibition. The Bull
Dog Café, sponsored by Pook & Pook (the Pooks own
bulldogs), will serve gourmet sandwiches, salads, snacks,
drinks, wine, and beer.
There are also daily guided show tours by the Philadel-
phia Museum of Art Fairmount Park house guides from
10 to 11 a.m. each day before the show opens. Tickets for
the tour are $25, which includes the $20 show admission.
The preview on Thursday is a festive party as well as a
chance for the passionate collectors to get first dibs. Pre-
view tickets are $600 for a 5 p.m. entry and $300 for a 6
p.m. entry, and young collectors under 40 can buy a $150
ticket for 6 p.m. and stay until the show closes at 9 p.m.
Hours are 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday,
and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday. Valet parking is avail-
able for $10, and there is plenty of free self-parking.
At 8 p.m. on Friday, April 21, at the Antiques Dealers’
Association of America Award of Merit dinner, Patricia
E. Kane, the Friends of American Art Curator of Ameri-
can Decorative Arts at Yale University Art Gallery, will
receive the ADA’s flame finial, which acknowledges her
skills in sharing her breadth of knowledge in the field of
American decorative arts.
“Pat has done an extraordinary job of advancing the
knowledge of Americana over the last four decades and
has opened the eyes of many to the great arts of our col-
onies in t ether it is
in the field of silver or furniture, her many discoveries,
her understanding of the cultural influences on the aes-
thetics of the period, and her scholarship have been pro-
found, but it is her unassuming manner and her generous
teaching which we honor with our Award of Merit,” said
Arthur Liverant, chair of the ADA dinner committee.
Tickets are $95 each; send a check made out to ADA to
PO Box 218, Northwood, NH 03261. For more informa-
tion, contact Judith Livingston Loto at (603) 942-6498 or
go to the ADA website ).
There will be plenty to do and see in Philadelphia the
weekend of the antiques show. The Philadelphia Museum
of Art (PMA) has a glorious exhibition, American Water-
color in the Age of Homer and Sargent , with 170 works
painted in the years 1860 through 1925, including 27 by
Winslow Homer and a dozen by John Singer Sargent and
paintings by other artists whose works will be for sale
at the Philadelphia Antiques & Art Show. For example,
art dealer William Vareika of Newport, Rhode Island,
specializes in the works of Philadelphia-born William
Trost Richards, who has four works in the PMA exhi-
bition. Richards divided his time between Newport and
Chester County, Pennsylvania, and enjoyed painting on
excursions to Europe. Richard Rossello of Avery Galler-
ies, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, will offer oil paintings by
several of the artists included in the PMA show, includ-
ing a John Marin watercolor.
Alexandra Kirtley has reinstalled the Waln furniture
and moved and reinstalled the New England furniture
collection with the new tea table purchased at Sothe-
by’s in January, and the galleries in the American Wing
are worth another visit. The John Cadwalader furniture,
paintings, and silver will take you back to the apogee of
the rococo movement in Colonial Philadelphia.
The Museum of the American Revolution will open its
doors on April 19, but unless you have advance timed
tickets, it is unlikely you can see the new museum that
weekend. The museum is planning four days of pag-
eantry and patriotic fanfare for its opening. Tickets went
on sale on February 22.
You can, however, go to the Constitution Center, Inde-
pendence National Historical Park, the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, and the Barnes Foundation.
Freeman’s in Philadelphia and Pook & Pook in Down-
ingtown both have auction previews from 10 a.m. to 5
p.m. daily during the weekend.
Freeman’s will offer a collection of Native American
pottery, baskets, and textiles from the collection of the
Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament and National Shrine
of Saint Katharine Drexel in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.
Determined to use her inheritance to better the educa-
tional opportunities of minorities, Katharine Drexel
established a religious order, the Sisters of the Blessed
Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, in 1891 and
built the Motherhouse in Bensalem. The first school,
St. Catherine Indian School, was a boarding school in
Santa Fe, New Mexico, that opened in 1894, and for the
next 60 years Drexel and the Sisters of the Blessed Sac-
rament built 145 missions, 45 elementary schools, 12
high schools, and Xavier University of Louisiana, the
only historically black Catholic college in the U.S. At
her death in 1955, Drexel was laid to rest in the Moth-
erhouse chapel. She was canonized as a saint in 2000.
Lack of membership and financial pressures have caused
the mission to sell the shrine in Bensalem and consign its
collection of Native American arts to Freeman’s for sale.
Saint Katharine’s remains will be moved to the Cathe-
dral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in Philadelphia,
and the archives will be entrusted to the Archdiocese of
Philadelphia.
In addition to the collection of pottery, beadwork, weav-
ings, and baskets from the Drexel collection, Freeman’s
will offer a collection of Tennessee quilts by members of
the McLin family dating from 1830 to 1910. Among the
American furniture is a small collection of furniture made
in Norfolk, Virginia. Among the Pennsylvania furniture is
a Lancaster County painted chest with tulips in the arched
panels and the name M. Bucher and the date 1784. There
is a portrait of Daniel Webster by Gilbert Stuart, a view of
Philadelphia harbor by Thomas Birch, and a painting of A
North-East View of the House of Mr. Emanual Lousada,
Kingston, Jam. ca, painted in 1778 by Samuel Felsted, an
inventor, musician, artist, friend of Benjamin Franklin,
and a member of the American Philosophical Society. The
sale will be held on Wednesday, April 26, beginning at
10 a.m. For more information, check Freeman’s website
).
Pook & Pook is having an “International and Ameri-
cana” sale on the following weekend, Friday, April 28,
and Saturday, April 29, with previews beginning on
Thursday, April 20, to accommodate those driving into
Philadelphia for the show. On Friday, April 28, begin-
ning at 6 p.m., after cocktails and supper at 4 p.m., the
auction house will sell European and Asian works, and
on Saturday, April 29, beginning at 9 a.m., it will offer
American furniture from New England and the Middle
Atlantic States, including a painted chest from Lebanon
County, fraktur, scherenschnitte, a horse and rider weath-
ervane, a Ferdinand Brader farm scene, a Thomas Birch
coastal scene, some American silver, painted tin, and
early American glass. For more information, see Pook’s
website ).
For antiquers, Philadelphia is the place to be in late
April.
Samuel Felsted (Jamaican, 1743-1802), A North-East View
of the House of Mr. Emanuel Lousada, Kingston, Jam.ca ,
signed and dated “S. Felsted, Pinxit. 1778, Count[r]y
House, Kingston, Jamaica,” oil on canvas, 24" x 32" (sight
size), estimated at $10,000/15,000. Inventor, musician, art-
ist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society
in Philadelphia, Felsted composed the New World’s ear-
liest known oratorio, Jonah, in 1775. Emanuel Baruch
Lousada (1744-1797) was a Jamaican merchant and land-
owner. This painting is will be offered by Freeman’s on
April 26. Photo courtesy Freeman’s.
A purpose-built tent will be constructed for the 2017 Phila-
delphia Antiques & Art Show. Diana Bittel photo.