The Winter Show’s Art from the Hinterlands

Tempting fare from dealers in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Virginia, and rural England

W e live in an age of collapsing boundaries and unforeseen calamities. Whether we call these days the Great Swoon, or the Dissolution, or the Dissipation, things are happening that I assumed never would. I’m in Manhattan now, on Wednesday. Grand Central at rush hour is quiet. I haven’t seen a tumbleweed in Midtown yet, but the hustle and bustle are gone. Lots of Midtown is boarded up. Without restaurants, the performing arts, and people in offices generating ticker tape, Manhattan feels like Cleveland.

Did everyone go to the Inauguration? Why would they? Aside from its faceted banality, this one’s surrounded by 26,000 troops. Was that crazy guy in the buffalo hat that scary? Midtown is not as empty as Rome after the Vandals sacked it, but it’s close.

The Winter Show, running online January 23–31, is the anchor event in what’s called Americana Week, though it’s called Antiques Week, too. Now Old Master drawings are in the mix, and Sotheby’s is having an impressive Old Master paintings sale next week. The Winter Show, when it was called the Winter Antiques Show, sounded the gong on the social season, which in New York means the gala and benefits season.

That still might be the case. The Winter Show ticket sales benefit the East Side Settlement House, which helps poor young people in northern Manhattan and the Bronx with education and job placement. It’s a good cause. There’s no live gala, though, and no fair we can actually visit. It’s all virtual. Should we call our time the Great Disappearance?

On Thursday, I wrote about things I saw at the online fair that I thought were breathtaking, but there was some randomness about it. Today, I’m more focused but not entirely. I’m writing about dealers whose physical lives and shops are outside New York and London. I’ve made it a point over the years to go where few art critics venture — the hinterlands — to see that slice of our big art market. I’ll make one exception at the end.

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence coming soon, who wouldn’t want to channel our Founding Fathers? We need guidance in these bewildering, angry times. I, for one, wouldn’t mind owning Roger Sherman’s highboy, for sale from Nathan Liverant & Son, based in Colchester in southeastern Connecticut. The business turned 100 last year, and it’s still family-owned.

Sherman (1722–1793) is the only signer all four of America’s founding documents. He was among the movers and shakers who gave us the Continental Congress in 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. His highboy is handsome. Dating between 1760 and 1785, it’s made of cherry wood with the original brasses and finial. It stayed in the family until 1987.

Liverant specializes in the best American antiques, and for many reasons the highboy tells the story of its business model. The business is based on connoisseurship, which is essential to American antiques. The dealers know all about condition. Many pieces of old American furniture have had a rough life. Some pieces have stood in the same spot for 200 years as a house descended in the family, but it had to be a family that didn’t like to redecorate. Most have been tweaked, either through refinishing, new brasses, or replacement parts, just like old people get. A good dealer has encyclopedic knowledge of how alterations look. Liverant is an authority. They aim for pristine.

We don’t know who made the highboy. Looking at the shape of its bonnet and its carved finials, the arrangement of the drawers, and how straight its cabriole legs are, we can associate it with highboys signed by their craftsmen and made in the lower Housatonic River Valley in Connecticut and especially in Stratford, at the mouth of the river. This makes sense. Sherman lived for many years in New Milford and then moved to New Haven. The lower Housatonic River Valley lies between them and craftsmen there supplied both towns with high-end furniture.

Sherman’s a fascinating, pivotal figure. He’s one of the Enlightenment savants we don’t see today, as our institutions dilute learning with indoctrination. Once a shoemaker in Litchfield in Connecticut, he died the mayor of New Haven, a U.S. senator, the treasurer of Yale and also a religion professor there, and the father of 13 children — holding each distinction simultaneously. Where did he find the time, much less the energy and focus?

Sherman doesn’t have the star power of Franklin, who was, in his lifetime, one of the most famous men in the world, or the renown of Jefferson or Madison, but he was nevertheless an essential man. The highboy is $70,000. These old highboys often have secret drawers. Maybe there’s one with the answers to our problems.

Taylor Thistlethwaite, based in Upperville, Va., specializes mostly in colonial American furniture. He’s a great dealer, and because he’s in Virginia, he naturally offers the best furniture of the South. He intrigued me in adding to his booth a striking faceted burl cabinet from 1970 designed by Paul Evans for his Cityscape Collection. The line was initially done in chrome and brass but Evans made this one in a sumptuous, arresting olive-wood burl. It’s got its original fiberglass top.

I tend to look at design from the 1970s as flimsy, even trashy, unless it proves otherwise. Aside from disco, it was a grim time. This piece goes one small step in redeeming a decade. It’s $55,000. Wood is the ubiquitous American material, and burl makes a dramatic statement in keeping with a disco diva. I admire Thistlethwaite’s leap.

I got a proud, patriotic rush when I saw the painted and inlaid flag table offered by Kelly Kinzle for $39,000. It was made by Frederick Wedin and is indeed topped by an American flag on a gently undulating surface. The flag’s got 35 stars, telling us it was made after 1863, when West Virginia became a state. The legs are shaped like anchors, the brackets like cannons, the carved cross braces are rifles, and the ball feet evoke cannons. Oh, in case you miss the point, two pistols and a pyramid of ammo decorate the drawer. The conchies among us will snivel and lament, but the desk shows the spirit of the Civil War era. There’s only one desk like it, at least from Wedin, who lived in Roxbury, Mass., near Boston. Now, the flag surface isn’t the most practical for actually placing things other than a tray, but it’s the thought that counts.

Cohen and Cohen is a renowned dealer in Chinese Export porcelain based in Surrey in the UK. “Chinese Export” describes porcelain made in China in the 17th through the 19th centuries exclusively for markets in Europe and, later, America. Like the finest American antique furniture, it’s niche but, in its day and at its best, it signaled cosmopolitan taste among bourgeois buyers. Motifs suggest the otherworldly ambiance of China, but the genre targets Western taste. What we see is our perception of China, so it’s a form of exoticism.

Cohen and Cohen’s punch bowl from 1787–88 was aimed at the American market. It’s both beautiful and rare in its overall subject — an elaborate, topographically correct Canton port scene — and the moment it depicts. We see the flags of the European countries and America that did business in Canton, whose port district was the only access point for Western trade. The flags fly over the building assigned to that country by China’s xenophobic but business-hungry port authorities.

Looking at these bowls from the 1760s to about 1810, scholars can see the architectural changes in the port neighborhood. This bowl shows that the American port building had just moved from the spot shown in earlier bowls. The flag flying over what was once the American building is blank. And the American flag is the largest.

Aesthetically, the bowl’s enameling is high-end. As an object, it’s very charming, with colors having the patina we want but still sharp. The dealer did a great job on their site presenting the bowl. The close-up details are smashing — I shouldn’t use that word with porcelain, should I? It’s $190,000. Cohen and Cohen was caught in the Trump-era Chinese-tariff net. Since most of its customers are American, they closed their London shops and moved their inventory to New Jersey. It was a prophylactic move. The tariffs apply to Chinese antique exports only, but Chinese Export porcelain left China hundreds of years ago! Explaining that to U.S. customs people might have been a bridge too far in terms of their critical thinking powers.

In my story earlier this week, I wrote about antique wallpaper and said that not all flat art is painted and framed. I’ll say it again. I don’t think I’ve written here about Oriental carpet dealers but, in my opinion, the best rugs are addictive. Peter Pap Oriental Rugs, Inc. is in Dublin in New Hampshire. He’s offering a northwest Persian masterpiece, 10 by 29 feet, from the last half of the 18th century. It’s $220,000, rare, and pristine. The all-over decoration was then a narrow regional specialty, but over time villages throughout Persia both adopted and adapted it. This carpet is among the templates. Is $220,000 too expensive? It’s a lot of money, but the thing’s rare, and it’s huge.

Menconi + Schoelkopf isn’t outside New York, but its two pristine and exquisite Thomas Cole paintings need to be noted. View of Schroon Mountain, from 1838, and Italian Scene, from the early 1840s are both 10 by 14 inches. Both have unbeatable provenance in that they’ve gone from Cole to his son, then his granddaughter, to her nephew, staying in the family until today. They’re the freshest of meat, the Kobe steaks of the art market. The Schroon scene is on panel, which means Cole likely painted it en plein air since it’s easier to cart a panel around. They both are so brushy he must have done them quickly. They shimmer with spontaneity and make us feel we’re there with Cole.

The Schroon picture is $400,000, the Italian scene $300,000. It sounds arbitrary but it isn’t. Mr. Market, aka the Invisible Hand, defines Hudson River School painting as American landscapes and seascapes. Cole, who invented the school, did nice Italian things in the early 1840s, but aren’t his brand, as lovely as they are. His Schroon Lake scene, set in Upstate New York, is quintessential Hudson River School material. For the buyer bent on a Hudson River School painting, that’s the subject.

Mr. Market frowns on contrariness, though given the state of the American 19th-century market — reviving but comatose since around 2006 — the current batch of committed collectors might all be contrarians. The Schroon picture is a study for a big, splashy Cole masterpiece, which adds cachet.

Still, they both seem a tad too expensive to me. Coles in private hands are rare, I know, and these are jewels, but they’re small and not studio pictures Cole would have exhibited. I’m a tightwad Vermonter, though — I think everything’s too expensive. Overall, any good collector should be willing to crawl over molten glass to get them. More than anything, though, I hope the zillionaire who writes a check isn’t churlish. They’ve been together, and in the Cole family, since the 1840s. Cole didn’t paint them as pendants but let’s call them twins, or lifelong friends. I think they belong together.