In celebration of Women’s History Month, March Object of the Day posts highlight women designers in the collection. This sidewall, with its medallions and stylized animal imagery, brings to mind medieval and Renaissance brocades made centuries earlier. However, its two-tone blue gray color scheme has little in common with the vibrant colors of those rich...
Somersaulting with dopey glee, a group of kangaroos thump around, lapping up wine from gravity defiant glasses. Inebriated marsupials with bottles in their pouches? Such a zany scene is characteristic of the work of beloved graphic artist and designer Ronald Searle (British, active France, 1920-2011). His wry illustrations, ranging from caricature to cartoon and inspired...
This vibrant mural design by Charles Baskerville for A Jaguar Hunt in a Mexican Jungle presents an imagined vision of a lush, foreign environment. Part of a group of studies for the pool house (called the Mexican Pavilion) at the Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney Estate, the eight-hundred-square-foot mural transported Long Island residents and guests to a...
Born in Hungary in 1884, William Hunt Diederich spent his childhood on his family’s estate, where his father bred and trained horses for the Prussian Army. Diederich’s mother was American and a member of the prominent Hunt family in Boston, whose relatives included the painter William Morris Hunt and the architect Richard Morris Hunt....
In 1946, Pablo Picasso attended the annual pottery exhibition in Vallauris in the South of France. He was so impressed by the works he had seen that the artist met with the owners of Madoura, Suzanne and Georges Ramié, who offered him full access to their workshop in exchange for the rights to produce his...
Imagine it is Georgian England and you are curled up in front of the fireplace after a long day of damp English weather. Nearby, a family member reads out loud from a recently printed book of fables by the ancient Greek story teller Aesop: “The lion, hearing an eerie voice but seeing nobody, started with...
A lion and a hare are composed entirely of scrolling acanthus leaves in this late-seventeenth-century engraving. It is the fifth plate from a suite of six designs for gold ornament, entitled Neu-ersonnene Gold-Schmieds Grillen (New Designs for Ornaments in Gold). The acanthus motif, whose origins date to ancient Greece and Rome, was omnipresent in European...
Woven coverlets in the United States are typically categorized as either Geometric or Figured and Fancy; the latter describes this red-and-cream wool and cotton example with its floral and animal motifs. Though Figured and Fancy varieties do maintain regularity and often a linear quality, the inclusion of curvilinear lines, natural or architectural elements, etc. distinguishes...
Puss in Boots, hero of the English fairy tale of the same name, is one of ten storybook characters in a boxed set of Jointed Storybook Animals. These articulated paper dolls were created by Bess Bruce Cleaveland (1876-1966), a children’s illustrator whose books, postcards, teaching materials, and educational toys were popular in the 1910s-1930s. The...
