5 Enchanting Antiques That Caught Our Eye at the Winter Show
At the beginning of every year since the 1950s, New York's old guard has scurried dutifully to the Park Avenue Armory for a smattering of some of the finest antiques on this side of the Atlantic. The Winter Show’s 70th edition—open to the public today through February 2— welcomed those Upper East Side stalwarts along with a new stream of bright young things as curious about the past as they are active in the present. Through there are some 70 international galleries to check out and thousands of antiquities to peruse, we've done the difficult work for you and highlighted the most interesting, rare, and enchanting objects for sale (and some already spoken for!).
A Pair of Dagobert Peche Mirrors from Kunsthandel Nikolaus Kolhammer
The work of Dagobert Peche is as likely to appear in your dreams as it is to outfit your nightmares. In his short life, the Austrian multi-hyphenate created furniture, objects, and art following the guiding principles of the Wiener Werkstätte, of which he was a member. Peche's work plays with the past while also displaying a singular penchant for the off-kilter through feet, handles, and finishes that vaguely resemble aspects of the natural world. In his cabinets you can see mountain peaks; in his tables, you can make out claws, wings, and hooves. In a hopelessly-chic pair of gilt mirrors offered by Kunsthandel Nikolaus Kolhammer you see the digits of a centipede. The chunky, carved, limewood frames were designed by Peche and executed by Max Welz around 1922, yet over 100 years later they are still searingly modern.
Elizabethan Mount Mask in the form of a Lion’s head from Michael Pashby Antiques
When it comes to Elizabethan England we see and hear much too much about wide starched ruffs and never enough about the fanciful, bizarre, and wide-ranging decorative elements that lived off the body. Among the split sleeves and ropes of pearls there were also peculiar carvings; exquisite and complicated dishes in the shapes of birds and buildings; and lace plackets with whole narrative scenes sewn into them. This was the English golden age of theater and expression. And like the ancient Greek masks of comedy and tragedy, one carved oak mask of a lion from Michael Pashby Antiques holds a wide range of human emotion in a frozen, inhuman form. His roar seems more like a moan of exhaustion, with his tongue lolling out of his mouth, incongruous besides his more serious eyes. His arched eyebrows mimic that of his monarch, who was known for her heavy makeup. The mask, priced at $7,500, is the kind of object you don’t expect to see amidst massive jewels and priceless paintings, but that is what makes it so very special.
A Fabergé Botanical Study from Wartski
Every antiques or jewelry aficionado has seen a Fabergé egg, but very few of us have beheld a Fabergé fruit or flower. Wartski, the nearly 200-year-old British jewelry dealers known for their discretion and exquisite taste, brought to the Winter Show a genuinely rare delight. A “study” of a barberry sprig, made around 1900 in St. Petersburg (where Fabergé was based) for the Lady de Grey, Marchioness of Ripon. De Grey was a patron of the opera and ballet (marked as partially responsible for bringing Serge Diaghilev to London) and one of the pre-eminent society hostesses of the late Victorian age. You can imagine her showing this delicate nod to the natural world to Oscar Wilde or King Edward VII, both of whom she knew personally, exclaiming at its berries of purpurine, leaves of nephrite, and its golden stem. Even the vase in which the sprig is balanced is a jewel – with rock crystal simulating water – and now for a lucky few days anyone can exclaim at this small, but mighty, masterpiece themselves.
Four Portraits of Black Women by Joseph Savart from Zebregs and Roell
The Dutch are known for many a dastardly deed, especially when it comes to dealings with their former colonies, but thanks to a new generation of Dutch dealers, the beauty of Europe’s formerly diverse royal courts has begun to be excavated and displayed with more sensitivity. In their first year with the Winter Show, dealers Zebregs and Röell are showing portraits of several African and Caribbean figures – including one Swedish queen's adopted African son – along with furniture and objects from the era's in which these fascinating figures lived. Four portraits of Black women with skin tones ranging from blue-black to pale caramel by Joseph Savart from 1769 are not to be missed. There are few versions of this subject matter in New York museums (one notable example being an Agostino Brunias’s painting at the Brooklyn museum) and what’s more, Savart was adept at expressing these women’s distinct features, expressions, personalities, and inner worlds in ways that many artists of his era did not care to. But run fast—this quartet has sold already so who know's when we will see it again!
18th Century Welsh Windsor Armchair from Robert Young Antiques
Style never meant rigidity as a wonky, wonderful Welsh chair from Robert Young Antiques proves. The $9,500 chair, like its purveyor (a lovely British man with an effortless air) is sturdy, familiar, and somehow still one-of-a-kind. It’s irregular bow-shaped arms are the first to catch your eye, but then those eyes wander down the chair’s finely turned spindles that make its wide back, and then to its broad, burnished seat, which over two centuries of sitting has made more comfortable than any contemporary iteration ever could be. Finally, the three simple legs that make its base: wobbly by sight and stable in practice. It’s a chair you could imagine in only the most elegant of hobbit holes, brimming with personality, yet stately, with a birth date somewhere around 1780.
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