This Year’s Winter Show Crackles, Glows, Shines, and Consoles

At the Park Avenue Armory, the best in American silver, furniture, prints, books, and more

T he Winter Show, running through January 28 at the Park Avenue Armory, has to be my favorite among the dozen or so big art fairs I visit each year. Once known as The Winter Antiques Show, it’s having its 70th anniversary this year. It started as the place where the best dealers, the most discerning collectors, and the most ardent antiquers gathered to worship old American art and craft.

Yes, there were paintings here and there, things like advertising signs, pictures of ships, and portraits of ye olde gramps, but mostly for sale were furniture, silver, clocks, prints, textiles, and a range of breakables, almost all American from colonial times to the gas fumes of the Gilded Age. It was the stuff of connoisseurs, WASPs and WASP wannabes, and patriots who loved American heritage.

What hasn’t changed? It’s still a very classy fair, not a place for snoots by any means but one for people comfortable with their heritage as Americans. There’s lots of European art, more dealers are selling paintings, and there’s even contemporary art. People go because they love quality craftsmanship, not big-name brands. The dealers are connoisseurs. Many have exhibited at the fair for decades.

The ambiance is friendly, even neighborly, and very American. I saw not a single anorexic-in-black, and if any masters of the universe attended, they were quiet about it. If you’re going to cry about enslavers having owned a weathervane 200 years ago, you’re a loser.

I’m writing almost entirely today about American art. It’s a big anniversary for The Winter Show, and, after all, its roots are in Americana. That said, I’ll start by bending, not breaking, my own rule and salute Ralph M. Chait Galleries, the New York dealer of antique Chinese porcelain. Chait is the father of the fair, exhibiting for 69 years. Today, it’s a third-generation family firm that still doesn’t sell American art, but it has stewarded American taste and built dozens of stellar collections. That makes Chait part of the history of American culture.

Chait’s Piggyback Boys is from the Kangxi period — 1662 to 1722 — and the sweetest thing I saw. It’s vibrantly painted and in perfect shape for all the bigger boy’s exertions. It makes me happy. Chinese porcelain is thousands of years old, but Europeans didn’t manage to discover its secret recipe until the 1720s. It’s $38,000.

If it bleeds, it leads, but what if it’s ablaze, it pays . . . to get Currier & Ives to imagine the Great Fire of Chicago for the hand-colored lithograph from 1871 offered by The Old Print Shop, which has exhibited at The Winter Show for 68 years. Currier & Ives, in business from 1835 to 1907, specialized in what it called “cheap and popular prints,” often of current events but, more famously, of everyday, charming aspects of rural life such as sleigh rides.

The Great Fire at Chicago, Octr. 8th 1871 doesn’t so much charm as rivet. At 17-by-24 inches, it’s big, and it sizzles with bold, fresh color. These lithographs were inexpensive decoration, on the edge of ephemera, often exhibited in light, fading over time, sometimes trashed, sometimes stored in damp cellars. This one has survived in good condition. It’s $10,500. Things in Chicago today are dire, not from fire, but from government gone haywire.

I’m an art historian, not a poet.

I’ve been going to the fair for nearly 40 years but have never seen anything like the Petros G. Pelos collection, a hundred rare books offered as a set by Daniel Crouch Rare Books for $3.6 million. Pelos isn’t an emir or a shipping magnate or a tech gazillionaire. He worked for Wells Fargo. He’s still alive. Over time, with awesome discipline, detective work, and taste, he bought iconic, rare travel accounts, atlases, and portfolios visually recording the history of America from sea to shining sea from the days of the early Anglo explorers of the American West to the Gold Rush.

The books are mostly first editions and very rare. I look at them as art, but they’re documentary and anthropological, with thousands of images. Karl Bodmer’s aquatint portraits of Plains Indians are there. George Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, from 1841, is there. Both are sumptuously illustrated. There’s a first edition of Lewis and Clark’s report on their expedition to “the Missouri, Red River, and Washita” from 1804 to 1806, which took them to the Pacific. Early maps of the continent abound, as do rare travelogues.

Pelos is also offering a first edition of Captain Cook’s account of his Pacific voyages, but the collection is focused on the early years of the United States. I don’t know the market value of these objects, but I admire Pelos’s vision as well as Crouch’s. His booth is mostly devoted to this one haul.

New York’s Levy Galleries sells superb, high-end, old-American furniture. Its Chippendale two-shell, bonnet-top secretary desk from around 1765 was probably made by Daniel Spencer (1741–1796), a top-billed furniture-maker in Newport, R.I. Even then Newport was a ritzy town. It also produced its own golden age of furniture production, and Levy’s desk is the crème de la crème. It’s made from sabicu, a hard, red wood from the Caribbean.

It’s minimalist, with a puritan touch of rigor suited for a desk that keeps us organized — both minimalist and voluptuous, which is a feat. Two carved-mahogany shells, a sweeping, serpentine bonnet, and wood that glows like embers make it the sexiest piece of furniture I’ve seen. It’s $175,000. The desk stayed in the original buyer’s family for seven generations. Levy sold it in 1963. It hasn’t been on the market since then.

I enjoy writing about old glass but have mostly looked at stained glass. I’d never written about Glass Past, a New York dealer that is exhibiting at the fair for only the second time. Its lily-pad pitcher from 1835, made in Plattsburgh, N.Y., attracted me by its design — a cascade of glass meant to evoke water — and its palette. It’s clear but ever-so-green in the light. The glass is lustrous and thick. It’s made from local Potsdam sandstone. Redford Crown Glass Company, the manufacturer, made high-quality window glass. Tablewares were a sideline, though made from the same thick glass used for its windows. It’s $45,000.

I know child labor is a no-no, but nimble little fingers work wonders if there’s a cog in a machine. And young minds have a distinct sense of style. Nathan Liverant and Son, from Colchester in southeastern Connecticut, has a schoolgirl-painted sewing table, probably from southern Maine, made in the late 1790s or early 1800s. It’s a lovely concerto of castles, garlands, seashells, arched stone bridges, and scenes of everyday New England life. Levy’s secretary desk was made for the rich. This sewing table is folk art. It’s quaint, to be sure, but comforting, even consoling. It’s the art of country imagination.

These tables have got to be the most niche of objects, and this one’s original construction is undisturbed. The lovely painting has a soft patina. It’s $75,000, kept the girls productively occupied, and was surely an antidote to mean-girl syndrome.

Milord Antiques from Montreal has a startling, handsome polychromed, welded-steel, “deep relief” buffet made by Paul Evans, who excelled in brutalist furniture. Its surface is made from pleated, painted brass and chrome welded together using old shipbuilding technology. It was made in 1968, a bad year in most other respects. On the one hand, it’s cutting-edge. On the other, it’s a relief from the sleek, blond furniture that’s also modern but tends to bore. A Montrealer probably bought it in New York, where rich Canadians tended to shop. It’s $110,000.

I can’t call American silver derivative of English silver, though from the early 18th century well into the 19th century, London styles and forms tended, with a lag of a few years, to cross the Great Pond and land with fanfare in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In the Gilded Age, though, makers such as Tiffany, Gorham, and Whiting went native. S. J. Shrubsole’s mixed-metals water jug, made by Tiffany & Co. around 1878, is inspired by Japanese art in its delicate wisteria vines, but with hand-hammering marks for an active surface and copper details, both distinctly American. It’s $50,000 and very pretty.

Shrubsole is renowned for old-English silver, and nothing can match in presence and authority the pair of candlesticks made in 1696, probably by David Willaume. Willaume was a French silversmith and among the Huguenots forced out of France in the 1680s in an epic purge. After moving to London, Willaume rose to become silver-maker to the aristocracy.

At 55 ounces, these sticks are massive, at least by English standards. In this era and well into the 1760s, the value in English silver wares wasn’t in the design, though buyers wanted nice-looking things, but in the metal. These things are a hefty savings account in themselves. Together with cast lion’s heads and at a tall eight inches, they’re as sound and steadfast as Old England itself.

Would that a likely, later owner — the 2nd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, had lived a sounder, more steadfast life. His crest is on the base. He was extravagantly named Richard Plantagenet Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville. In 1847, among the richest peers in the realm, he was the first duke to file for bankruptcy. The Christie’s sale of almost all his possessions took 37 days. These sticks and much else went into the marketplace. Today, they’re on sale for $125,000.

Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker is based in London, but the best sleuths get the choicest scoops. I always visit their booth for fresh-to-the-market British art, and they’ve got an ethereal mid-career Turner watercolor, but I was as gobsmacked as this frosty Yankee could be by a plaster sculpture of General Sherman that was indeed, as I thought, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and was certainly a modello for the majestic Sherman bronze by the Plaza Hotel in New York.

Last year, I wrote about Saint-Gaudens’s home and studio in Cornish, N.H. In sculpture, he’s an image-maker without peer, at least among Americans. Sherman, he of the March to the Sea, sat 18 times in 1888 for Saint-Gaudens, longer than it took him to burn Atlanta. Lean and mean, eyes fixed, raffish with his unbuttoned collar and scruff, Sherman looks alive, alert, and every bit the eternal soldier.

There are only three or four plaster sculptures from the Sherman monument, which premiered in 1902. Plaster, like clay, wax, terra-cotta, or a drawing, is an intermediate step in sculpture and sometimes the most vivid. It’s $350,000. Saint-Gaudens is a cult figure among coin collectors since he designed the double-eagle $20 gold coin, the zenith in American hard currency. Provenance-wise, the plaster has lived quietly and secretly in this tight little world for decades.

I wish an American museum would buy it, but imagination’s not in abundance. They’re plowing money into overpriced work by marginalized genders and races. Next to Lincoln, Grant, and Frederick Douglass, no one did more to end slavery than Sherman. And when recruited to run for president, he declared with pith and ruthless resolve, “If nominated, I will not run, and if elected I will not serve.” Would that a raft of other humans had said the same thing.

The Winter Show, as always, didn’t disappoint. Quality and camaraderie reigned at the Armory. Here’s to 70 more years for this lovely event.