Takes Two to Tango at the Winter Show

Pairs of porcelain, candlesticks, and brownstone lions make for a great art fair.

O n Thursday, I wrote about The Embrace, the new bronze memorial sculpture dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King. It’s on the Boston Common and, only a week after its debut, seems both loved and reviled. The embrace in question is between husband and wife, which is conjugal to some, carnal to others. I like it. People will love it over time. That sometimes happens with good art.

When I visited the Winter Show in New York afterwards, I couldn’t help but find pairs of things, not always husband and wife, attractive. One plus one is often more than two. And I’m not writing about a single painting. Only one object in my story’s flat, and it’s wallpaper.

The Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory is the oldest and most prestigious art, antiques, and design fair in the country. This year, its 69th, nearly 70 dealers exhibit their very best. Money from ticket sales goes to the East Side House Settlement, which supports programs for young people in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. It’s one of my favorite fairs, for quality, connoisseurship, and camaraderie.

A La Vieille Russie on Fifth Avenue in New York started in 1851 in Kyiv, specializing in high-end jewelry and, over time, in the work of Carl Fabergé. The firm fled Russia for Paris during the 1917 Revolution and then to New York.

It’s still the international expert on all things Fabergé, but I spied a 1¾-inch brooch designed by Salvador Dalí and made in 1950. It depicts Tristan and Isolde, he a Cornish prince and she an Irish princess in the days of King Arthur. A drink from a love potion — delivered by the chalice between them — made them romantic rogues. Isolde was already engaged to an Irish king.

The chalice is made from brilliant cut diamonds and the potion from garnet. It’s gorgeous. Dalí used the theme in costumes and sets he designed for the ballet Mad Tristan, prints, and jewelry. There are many versions of Tristan and Isolde’s story, all fraught. For Dalí, they express “the effluence of love possible between a man and a woman.”

The brooch is a strong, dynamic object, showing us that love’s not for wimps. So true. Love keeps hearts thumping and Hollywood in business. It’s $60,000.

Ralph M. Chait Galleries is the country’s best dealer specializing in antique Chinese porcelain and Chinese art. Chait, starting his business as an 18-year-old immigrant, sold some very fine things indeed to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Edward Sonnenschein, two monumental collectors, and, among others, Herbert Hoover. His grandsons own the business now. What more adorable twins are there, now that you’ve seen these porcelain famille rose nodding court ladies from the mid 18th century? Each holds a scepter and a handkerchief and wears a gown with landscape medallions. At 16 inches, they’re not small.

The pair is going for $95,000. Given that porcelain breaks, and they’re around 300 years old, their survival is extraordinary. The heads are detachable. With a little maneuvering, they do indeed nod. These days, I wish more people would say “hell, no” but these ladies’ charm and ornamentality make “yes” the right answer.

Nothing sets off twin beauties better than a pair of recamiers from Philadelphia, made around 1840. The mahogany veneer is a rich bronze color, and they’re in superb condition. The object is named for Madame Récamier, whose portrait Jacques-Louis David painted in 1800, laying sideways, come-hither look applied. When the Louvre first displayed the painting in 1826, a craze for recamiers was born among high-society “It” girls.

Pairs of antique furniture are and aren’t rare. Sometimes they stay together in a great house for decades and, let’s face it, Helen Reddy never sang about them. They went out of style. Often, though, pairs of furniture get divided. Charles Clark, a great dealer specializing in neoclassical American antiques, is offering the pair for $30,000.

The prettiest pair is at Aronson’s, the Amsterdam dealer in Delft. It’s another old, family-owned business, and Robert Aronson, like all the dealers at the Winter Show, buys and sells but is by nature an art historian. Two blue-and-white flower vases from around 1700 have spouts for single flowers or a minimalist spray. Random bunches aren’t allowed.

Each vase has two parts, with the base — heart-shaped — a water reserve. The handles at the base form squirrels climbing a stylized tree. The marks at the bottom are for the owner of the Metal Pot, Delft’s factory for exquisite ceramics. The pair is $110,000.

For centuries, a fire on the grate was the main source of lighting, with candles providing dim stationary or mobile light. My nephews and nieces find it beyond the scope of human imagination that my parents were born before electricity arrived in their little towns. If I were the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, I would have plunked my candles in the pair of English silver sticks from 1696. S.J. Shrubsole is offering the pair for $125,000. Not bad. If the climate liars, fantasists, and fools ever rule the world, that’ll be a month’s electric bill.

I write about the old-time silver dealers like Shrubsole because antique silver is art — the casting and ornament are often superb — and there are so few such dealers left. Some have retired while others have moved to high-end jewelry. Young, rich people see English, French, and Dutch silver as burdened by the sins of old aristocracy, and then there’s the matter of polishing it. If old silver is used often, it wants to be polished only now and again.

Shrubsole’s sticks are important because of their ducal provenance, the nice, cast lion’s heads on four sides, their weight, and their durability. At 26 ounces each, they’re things of substance. Aristocratic silver conveyed status through its abundance, elegance, and heraldry, but its weight — and the heavier, the better — was a little bank account in itself. In the days before mutual funds, aristocratic wealth was in land, animals, and precious metals.

By durability, I mean this. The Shrubsole objects are English Baroque, designed with architectural symmetry in mind and having bold, defined masses like their canted base, big knob, and repeated gadrooned borders. Once tastes change, and even the finest silver objects went to the smelter for refashioning. These things survived Rococo whimsy, the fad for foot-tall sticks in the 1750s and ’60s, and a Neoclassical preference for lithe bodies and swags. They’re survivors.

Now, speaking of lions. Barbara Israel Garden Antiques works with landscape designers and anyone else passionate about gardens to find the right furniture and ornamental sculpture to aid and abet nature, and sometimes defend it against evildoers.

What better talisman than a pair of carved brownstone lions, 41 inches long and made around 1890. They’ve got full manes, stippled whiskers, open mouths, and lovely, soulful eyes. They’re carved from stone quarried in Portland in Connecticut. A high-end townhouse in New York might have featured them, but they’re from a Connecticut estate. They’re $95,000, for the pair.

I’m not entirely about aesthetic throuples, two works of art and me. Glacial Seas, a panel of French scenic wallpaper designed in 1855, enchanted me, and you’d think, since I live in Vermont, I’d want tropical. Zuber & Company, based in Paris, produced the panoramic Zones Terrestres in a tiny run between 1855 and 1878. It’s 6’9” by 8’8” and was part of a program of scenes of flora and fauna from the world’s many climatic zones. Glacial Seas isn’t the North Pole, but it’s definitely near Santa’s hood.

Yes, it’s wallpaper but not the Home Depot variety. Zuber made the most refined wall coverings with the highest production values. Each sheet is hand-printed using a special wood printing block for each color, with exacting attention to tones and well as design. Zones Terrestres took 2,000 blocks. That’s 2,000 variations in color and scene for a run of about 75 feet. I look at these as very rare colored engravings. The German army used the Zuber factory in Paris for military lodging during World War II. The blocks went into the fireplace for heat.

Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz, the definitive dealer in French historic wallpaper, is selling the panel for $49,000. Don’t get a bucket of wheat paste — it’s mounted on acid-free linen and a stretcher.

Okay, there might be some shagging polar bears. Even in a deep freeze, love will find a way.