Witold Gordon was a Polish-born artist perhaps best known for his illustrations of regional architecture and typography, which were shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the exhibition “American Scene” in 1941. New York’s idiosyncratic storefronts were the inspiration for a series of New Yorker covers in the 1940s. Shell Chest was Gordon’s...

Against a bright seascape, the type that reminds one so strongly of a summer day at the beach that it is almost possible to smell the salty air, oversized and misshapen shells are scattered haphazardly.  They fill the foreground of Royal Copenhagen’s poster like beached whales: awkward, commanding, and strangely beautiful.  The storied Danish ceramics...

This oval tray represents the unique collaborative effort between Alexandre Brongniart, the director of Sèvres appointed in 1800, and his father, the designer Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. The younger Brongniart’s passion for the natural world is reflected by the scientific precision of the biological species represented in finely painted enamel. Small roundels of exotic birds and butterflies...