The Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory: Quality Abounds, and Firepower, Too

A 1776 Kentucky rifle, a rare Grant Wood painting, and Tiffany’s Poppy Lamp are among the treasures to be purchased.

T he Winter Show, once dedicated to Americana, or antiques made for everyday use, is among the most elegant and oldest art fairs in America, which is why I write about it every year. Today, it invites the best dealers to show fresh-to-the-market, rare, European, American, and, here and there, Asian furniture, silver, textiles, glass, wallpaper, and, yes, paintings. The fair benefits the East Side House Settlement, a New York charity offering all kinds of social services to people of all ages, from toddlers to the elderly — twinkle to wrinkle, as the director told me. The first Winter Antiques Show was in 1954, so it’s in its eighth decade and is, I think, the oldest high-end dealer show in America. It’s all quality, all the time.

With so much art in so many media and from so many eras and places, I tend to pick a different theme every year. Given that it’s Inauguration Week, and an extraordinary week it was, I’ll write about American originals — art that is closely tied to American history and America’s unique aesthetics. At the end of the story, I’ll diverge, in the interests of pure fabulosity.

Nothing’s more original — or American — than the events of 1776. Next year is our semiquincentennial, which I prefer to “Bisesquicentennial,” which sounds like a new pretend gender for the extreme elderly, but that’s beside the point. We’re well placed now, with the new order in Washington, to celebrate 1776 in style and with a positive spirit.

The American Revolution didn’t happen via Zoom. You couldn’t “fight from home,” and it took serious firepower. At Peter Finer’s booth, I saw an exceptionally prime Kentucky long rifle made by George Grace in 1776, most likely at an arms factory in Fredericksburg in Virginia that was owned by George Washington’s brother-in-law. It’s decorated with engraved flame-like foliage scrolls, wavy lines, dots, Rococo-style shells, and fleurs-de-lis. An engraved teardrop concedes that the rifle’s mission is to kill, but what a classy way to go, and none but the woke and Trot will say the cause was a bad one.

Finer is the premier dealer in antique armor and guns, which come in handy if your country’s invaded but, today, can be zeniths of design and craftsmanship. The barrel is long and lithe and, at 50 inches, fatally exact. Its range could be 300 yards for a good shot. Patriots often fought as snipers so that range was most desirable.

Kentucky rifles were first made in America by German immigrants. It’s a later name, giving the weapon a frontier cachet. During the Revolutionary War, they figured in many battles, among them the decisive Battle of Saratoga. A plate with the initials “IW” signifies an 18th-century owner, but we don’t know his name. It’s signed by Grace and dated, making it even rarer.

The rifle was once in the collection of the Earl of Lonsdale, so an English officer might have brought it back from America as a consolation prize. The asking price is $550,000. One of the glories of art fairs is that we can touch the goods for sale. I can attest that it handles smoothly. If and when the next revolution comes, the buyer will be well armed. Don’t tread on him, or her!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Tiffany Studios’ Danner Memorial Window, made in 1913 for a Baptist church in Canton, Ohio, and sold at Sotheby’s in November for $12.48 million, the highest auction price ever for a stained glass window. It’s a showstopper and a prayer stopper, too, since it’s so much in the realm of earthly delights that it takes the mind off God and the saints. Tiffany made more than stained glass windows. He was the interior design genius of his age, in aesthetics as well as marketing.

A rare Poppy Lamp from 1905, offered at Lillian Nassau’s booth, teams Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose firm designed and produced the lamp; Lillian Nassau, now dead but the dealer credited with reviving interest in Tiffany Studios in the 1940s; and Arlie Sulka, who worked with Nassau and, later, her son and bought the company. Nassau is now the keeper of the flame for all things Tiffany.

Bunches of wild poppy flowers and buds gather in dense profusion in magenta, purple, inky blue, gold, variegated greens, pink, and yellow, some of the colors rippling. It’s in great condition, too, and both lovely and rare. It’s $350,000. Americans like new, new, new, so Tiffany’s Art Nouveau designs and opalescent glass were displaced by Art Deco — sleek, geometric, shiny, and given to chrome and glamour. And, of course, the Depression and World War II begat tastes far from Gilded Age opulence. When Nassau started her antiques business, dealers were dismantling Tiffany lamps, tossing the glass, and selling the bronze bases for scrap.

She had a sharp eye for quality and trends and knew the invisible pendulum would swing back Tiffany’s way. This year is the 80th anniversary of her business.

Adolescence, by Grant Wood (1891–1942), is a charming, pick-me-up picture of a fledgling rooster, stretching his long, awkward head to the sky as a hen bookends him on each side. It’s a large gouache and ink picture from 1933, and offered by Alexandre Gallery, which excels in American Modernism and painterly contemporary landscapes. I’m not a committed Wood partisan, though American Gothic, painted in 1930, is among the handful of works of art all Americans except the blind-from-birth recognize.

From Cedar Rapids in Iowa and an Iowan all the way, Wood wasn’t a one-hit wonder, an American phenomenon, but he was close to it. He submitted American Gothic to an art contest run by the Art Institute of Chicago in which it won a $300 prize publicized first in Chicago newspapers and then nationally. To some, it’s a spoof on Midwestern piety and repression, to others, a paean to rural conservatism, and some see it as a study in anxiety as the Depression deepened and thickened. It launched Grant on a short but storied career. Adolescence was among the works of which he was proudest. This particular fowl is innocent, assertive, and uncertain, gawky and handsome and optimistic and forward-looking. The landscape is sparse and brown and reminds me of Dorothy’s Kansas in The Wizard of Oz.

Wood’s career wasn’t long, and his movement — American Regionalism — has always been pelted with garbage by academics who hate rural life and values and love tense, nervous, neurotic, New York School abstraction. His work almost never comes on the market. After thinking about everything he painted and his prints, I surprise myself in noting that his work is consistently very good. Adolescence goes for $625,000. It’s got presence.

In ye olden days, very little at the fair was flat, which means paintings, colonial portraits excepting. Those long-gone faces looked like weathervanes or chests on chests, having patina and the knicks, stains, and flakes of life. Now, there are plenty of dealers in paintings who are offering art before, say, 1945, and among the very best is Thomas Colville. He knows where the treasures hide, having more than 50 years of experience and limitless contacts. He has a gem in a tiny Eastman Johnson portrait of Johnson’s toddler daughter with her pet lamb, but in keeping with my theme, I’ll focus on Fidelia Bridges’s Swallows, from 1873.

Bridges (1834–1923) was best known in her lifetime as a sublime watercolorist specializing in birds and flowers and as America’s embodiment of Ruskin’s vision of truth to nature. She belonged to all the top artist groups, often as the first woman.

An unmarried woman with no independent means, she had endless side hustles, among them as governess for Mark Twain’s children. Her work’s precision is inspirited by fantasy and delight. That’s hard to do. They’re nearly religious pictures. Swallows belonged to the artist Sanford Gifford, who cherished her work’s precision. It’s priced to sell in the low five figures. And sell it did, minutes after the fair opened.

Hirschl & Adler’s gilt and mother-of-pearl chair, made by the Herter Brothers around 1881, isn’t exactly an American original. William Vanderbilt, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s son and a gazillionaire, commissioned it for his Fifth Avenue palace, but gazillionaires and master designers like the Herters aren’t unique to America. Still, the Gilded Age was our new country’s first brush with world-class wealth.

William, one of Cornelius’s 13 children, was America’s richest man when he went seriously decorative. The chair was made for his drawing room, the gussiest place in the house, where everything sparkled with gold, marble, sheen, and brilliant color. Hirschl & Adler’s chair is one of three, the other two are in museums. The firm’s booth is a Victorian interior to-die-for and packed with furniture, glass, paintings, textiles, and metalwork. They specialize in American art and have exhibited at the Winter Show every year since I’ve been going. The chair’s scarlet covering, mother-of-pearl ornament, cloven feet, and gilding demand attention like a poised, well-turned-out, to-the-manor-born child. It’s mid-six figures.

The distinguished British rare-book dealer Peter Harrington has treasures galore, from a first edition of Pride and Prejudice to inscribed first editions of Ian Fleming’s novels; the earliest printed European guidebook, from 1475, with tips on what to see and do in Rome; and a corrected carbon typescript of The Little Prince. All are tempting, but Claudius Ptolemaeus’s first modern atlas of the world, printed in 1513, displays the first map of America to appear in an atlas. Though the book is in German, and the slice of America is South America, Cuba, bits of other islands in the Caribbean, and Florida, it counts as an American original. The cartographic source is likely Columbus or, possibly, Vespucci. The volume is 181 leaves and pigskin-covered wooden boards. Though supplanted by GPS, it’s among the origins of New World geography. For the collector looking for the rarest of rare things, and one with $1,250,000, look no further.

“It’s my party and I’ll write what I want to,” channeling my inner Lesley Gore, and that takes me to a pair of objects decidedly not American. Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s bronze modello of the Lion from Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona did get an audible gasp out of me, and I’m not one for gasping. Bernini (1598–1680) was the preeminent architect and sculptor in Baroque Rome. His works include St. Peter’s, many little churches, and the fountains in the Piazza Navona  — all defining Rome’s look today. This little Lion, only inches wide, on a porphyry base, was part of a multipart modello, or test version, given to Spain’s Philip IV as a diplomatic gift from Pope Clement IX in 1668. Sometime after 1849, when an inventory lists it as living in Queen Isabella II’s library in Madrid, some of the bronzes were dispersed, among them the Lion. It bounced around in private collections in Rome until 2023. Now it can be yours for $950,000.

Bernini made the bronzes early in his conception of the two mammoth fountains, located in the Piazza Navona, which was, in Roman times, a racetrack for chariots. Think Ben Hur. The bronze Lion, compact and muscular, seems to bend over, tongue extended for a slurp of water. The final version is more attenuated and slimmer and isn’t poised to drink. It’s hard to find work by Bernini these days. Not only is he a giant, but the Navona fountains, especially the Fountain of the Four Rivers, show us that God’s providence infused the power of the church throughout the world. The rivers are the Danube, the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rio de la Plata in South America, so America is implicated.

I write a lot about antique silver, which is art made from precious metal and expresses the lifestyles of the rich and famous better than most media. Casting, ornament, composition, engraving, and provenance at its best align to make sculpture on the order of the greatest artists in marble or bronze. Koopman Rare Art, the London silver dealer, always bedazzles and astounds. Its specialty is Regency and early Victorian silver, which goes big and bold. Britain in those days was feeling truly imperial, with plenty of newly rich and the old aristocracy feeling flush. I can’t resist writing about Paul Storr’s monumental pair of four-light candelabra from 1822. What don’t they have? They’ve got Bacchus, a pelt, bacchantes, leopards, putti, grapevines, palms, ivy, and a botanical garden’s worth of flowers. At 1,102 ounces of silver, They’ve got heft as well. Koopman is asking $1,250,000.

Storr was among London’s top makers along with Garrard’s and Rundell Bridge & Rundell. His workshop attracted the best forgers, gilders, modelers, burnishers, and engravers. He wasn’t hammering at the forge, sweating and heaving. Storr was the entrepreneur, marketer, and design visionary. For the candelabra, his client was Henrique Teixeira de Sampaio (1774–1833), a Portuguese count from the Azores whose family made a fortune by supplying the Portuguese military with food and, later, from the tobacco business.

Henrique had strong business and personal ties to England, so it was natural for him to commission Storr, and that he did. The candelabra are part of one of the great dinner services ever made by a British silversmith. It’s thought to have been, in total, 10,000 ounces of silver. It has been split up but stayed in the family until the 1970s. Silver, it’s always worth noting, wasn’t just for sumptuous display. It wasn’t just a status symbol. It was a store of value and more reliable than the stock market. In a pinch, you could melt it down. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and not everyone has a Kentucky rifle.

Once lit, in a dining room at night, this candelabra would make everyone and anyone look like a movie star. You’d need the local fire department to put it out . . . unless you live in L.A., and the hydrants don’t work.

I often suggest going to a blue-chip art fair like the Winter Show to people who want an unusual art experience. It’s all museum quality, and it’s a fun exercise in connoisseurship and the art market. Caressing great art is very satisfying. It craves attention but isn’t bitchy or whiny. The dealers at the Winter Show are uniformly kind, engaged, and knowledgeable. Tickets are $40 but the money goes to charity. Many of the dealers are my old cronies, so I enjoy the fair even more.