Curious Objects

In 1834 a law was passed in South Carolina that prohibited slaves from reading or writing. The punishment for transgressors? Fifty lashes. That same year, Dave Drake, an enslaved potter at work in Edgefield County inscribed his first poem on a large stoneware jug he'd made. In this episode of the podcast, Ethan Lasser, chair of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, tells Dave’s story and that of an 1857 storage jar that bears the epigrammatic lines: "I made this Jar for Cash-/ though its called lucre trash/ Dave.”

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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.

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Art historian Isabelle Kent regales Ben with the tale of five stained-glass roundels gracing the windows of her childhood home in London's Bedford Park, and he tells her all about his pair of telescoping Sheffield plate candelabra. Bonus tidbit: tips on how to distinguish between a bogus antique and the genuine item.

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Ben and Michael, like everyone else, are stuck at home, but they aren’t a pair to shrink from silver linings. For them these include the opportunity to spend time among the beautiful things they've acquired over the years: silver candlesticks, German watercolors, maps, and portrait miniatures. And they’ve got a fate-tempting prediction for the future: “A lot of people are going to come out of this crisis thinking, ‘God, I wish my walls weren’t so white . . . or bare.’”

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Having spent his entire life in and around the antiques trade, dealer David Schorsch has seen it all. In this special episode, he talks with Michael about how the likes of Albert and Harold Sack, Florene Maine, and Ben and Cora Ginsburg weathered the Great Depression, and how this time around, “the Internet could very well be the thing that saves the antiques business.”

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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.

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We’re pushing out a series of new episodes that will examine the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the antiques world. First up, Tim Martin of S. J. Shrubsole. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories told by plague-stricken raconteurs in fourteenth-century Italy, Martin decided to publish anecdotes from the curious lore of precious silver, keyed to objects that have passed through his shop, online. In this episode, Martin reads one of those stories, “The Customer is Always Right . . . Eventually.”

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Join us on a journey to ancient Egypt as we explore the quirky material history and dead-serious religious significance of a very curious object: a 2,500-year-old Imsety-headed canopic jar—i.e., a vessel made to hold a mummy’s liver. Charis Tyndall of UK antiquities dealer Charles Ede guest stars.

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Special guests James Boening (James Robinson, Inc.), Ria Murray (Lillian Nassau), and Taylor Thistlethwaite (Thistlethwaite Americana), join hosts Ben and Michael at the Park Avenue Armory during the Winter Show for a lively discussion about a Tiffany favrile glass pig, a silver molinet, a pair of Scottish Highlands pistols, a c. 1770 New York card table, and a fetching portrait miniature from the German school.

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Ever wondered how the otherwise-unremarkable locales of Meissen, Staffordshire, and Sèvres became Europe's porcelain-producing polestars? Or what outsider artists like Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, discovered by the art establishment in the 1930s and ‘40s, made of their newfound fame? The experts at Christie's have the answers!

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