Decorative Arts

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has hired an associate curator of American crafts and decorative arts - a new position funded by a previously announced $5 million endowment gift from Robert L. McNeil Jr. Elisabeth R. Agro, 39, currently associate curator in the decorative-arts department of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art, will begin Oct. 1 in the new job, the Nancy M. McNeil associate curator of American modern and contemporary crafts and...

  Two area auction houses that regularly offer appraisals on Antiques Roadshow - Noel Barrett, known for toys, and Freeman's, known for fine furniture and decorative arts - will have major sales in the next few days. Barrett's sale, "Something for Everyone," beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Eagle Fire Hall in New Hope, will offer more than 700 lots of holiday items, antique games, clockwork toys, and salesmen's samples. The sale is also being carried online at www.liveauctioneers.com . One of the earliest lots - and a top piece in the auction - is an early-20th-century clockwork Halloween Vegetable Man improbably made of papier-mache.

Judging from yesterday's opening session of the two-day sale at the Fine Arts Co. of Philadelphia, prices at today's session, featuring decorative arts, furniture, and carpets, should do better than the catalogue price estimates. Silver in particular "took off" yesterday, according to James Buckley, Fine Arts' vice president. To be sure, some of the price estimates in the $10 catalogue seemed low. But Buckley, noting that the silver commodity market is not particularly strong, suggested that buyers were particularly interested in the repousse patterns offered yesterday.

Fourteen hundred and ninety-two was a big year in Spain. Christopher Columbus bumped into the West Indies, and after nearly eight centuries of uneasy coexistence, the Christians expelled the Muslims from their last foothold on the Iberian peninsula. Most of this year's quincentennial observances have focused on Columbus' voyage, since it resulted in the colonization of the Americas by Europeans and ultimately in the creation of our republic. Instead of adopting a Eurocentric viewpoint, the Metropolitan Museum of Art decided to mark the anniversary by examining the impact of Islamic culture on Spain, the only nation in Western Europe where Islam became rooted.

For the third time in as many decades, the American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has a new design, one that celebrates the craftsmen of colonial and Federal Philadelphia and replaces a rabbit warren of congested dark galleries with open, flowing, well-lighted spaces. The reinstalled galleries, which will open tomorrow after being closed for two months, is Beatrice Garvan's last major project for the museum she has served for 23 years as curator of decorative arts. Garvan, who will retire in June, said she had felt for the last eight or 10 years that the museum had not done justice to American decorative arts.

The CIA couldn't do a better stealth job than the Barnes Foundation. With the new Barnes museum set to open in mere weeks, the foundation appears to have carried out much of the complex job - almost industrial in its scale, but oh so delicate in its handling - of packing up and moving billions of dollars in art objects from the suburban Main Line to a new home on the Parkway. Like any proper covert operation, this one is being undertaken on a need-to-know basis, and those in the know aren't talking.

The celebrated art collection of Henry P. McIlhenny, who died May 11 at age 75, will repose in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, museum officials have announced. The bequest includes noted works by Degas, Renoir, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Delacroix, Ingres, Corot, Vuillard, Rouault and other 19th- and 20th-century painters. It also includes important works by mid-Victorian English painters and a broad range of decorative arts of great distinction. In accord with McIlhenny's plans, part of the collection will be shown at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in July and August before returning to Philadelphia.

Though it is better known for its sales of American arts and antiques, Freeman's also has a respectable reputation for goods from overseas - as its two-day spring sale next week of English and Continental furniture, silver and decorative arts demonstrates. The more than 800 lots to be offered Wednesday and Thursday come from all over Europe, and also include a selection of decorative arts from China and Japan. In addition, the auction will feature a collection of English and Continental clocks being sold by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to benefit its acquisitions fund.

Compared to silver and gold, iron isn't a very glamorous metal. It connotes strength rather than stylishness. It belongs in the factory, not in the boudoir. Try to visualize cast iron in a domestic application. Your great- grandmother might have had a massive cast-iron stove that not only cooked her meals but heated her house as well. You might have a cast-iron skillet or a kettle for making soup. Chances are you don't have any cast-iron earrings or necklaces, nor could you imagine that such things ever existed.

Philadelphia's annual Antiques Week is nationally known for combining superb offerings in fine and decorative arts with educational extras for collectors. This year is no different. But it's not the Philadelphia Antiques Show - the marquee four-day display and sale at the Navy Yard celebrating its 50th anniversary - that's generating the most buzz. Exhibitors and collectors alike are applauding Winterthur, Americana central in Wilmington, and its landmark exhibition. "Paint, Pattern & People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725-1850," which opened Saturday, explores the creativity of both German and English immigrants and the history of Pennsylvania furniture.

The CIA couldn't do a better stealth job than the Barnes Foundation. With the new Barnes museum set to open in mere weeks, the foundation appears to have carried out much of the complex job - almost industrial in its scale, but oh so delicate in its handling - of packing up and moving billions of dollars in art objects from the suburban Main Line to a new home on the Parkway. Like any proper covert operation, this one is being undertaken on a need-to-know basis, and those in the know aren't talking.

Antiques/Art/Crafts Annual Quilt Competition A show of competition quilts in the Gazebo. Peddler's Village, Rtes. 202 & 263, Lahaska; 215-794-4000. 3/16. Chester County Antiques Show 18th- & 19th-century American, English & Continental furniture, rugs, paintings, porcelain, glass, silver, jewelry, needlework & other decorative arts. Westtown School, 975 Westtown Rd., Westtown. www.chestercohistorical.org/antiquesshow.php . $15. 3/17. Preview party 6-9 pm 3/16; $130 or $200 early admission.

Designer furniture from throughout the 20th century and related decorative arts will be featured at sales this weekend and next. Another sale next week will offer lesser known treasures of the 1900s. The first designer furniture event will take place on Saturday when Kamelot Auctions will offer more than 700 lots of furniture, lighting, statuary, Asian art, and glassware, notably two rare pieces of Lalique, at a sale beginning at 10 a.m. at its gallery in the office complex at 4700 Wissahickon Ave. Online bidding and an auction catalog with presale price estimates are available at www.kamelotauctions.com . The Lalique pieces are both opalescent glass vases just over 9 inches high, depicting frenzied Bacchantes.

The most exciting art season in years is upon us, with the opening this weekend at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts of a major survey of Henry Ossawa Tanner's landmark career and an exhibition of Vincent van Gogh's nature paintings just around the corner at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Art Museum will follow van Gogh with another monumental subject: how three artistic giants - Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Paul Gauguin -...

The Main Line Antiques Show has impressive assets: an outstanding exhibitor list, good timing for the holidays, and a historic setting with easy access. In only its sixth year, the event Saturday and Sunday has found an ideal home at the Radnor Valley Country Club in Villanova. The club's main building was originally part of a vast old Main Line estate. In about 1907, J. Franklin McFadden (1862-1936), a cotton broker and one of Philadelphia's wealthiest men, hired the local architectural firm of Cope & Stewardson to create a grand Colonial-style house on his 307-acre Radnor Valley Farm.

Besides their obvious aesthetic appeal, exhibitions of historical decorative arts serve as explorations in cultural anthropology. They reveal how our forebears solved practical problems of daily living, as well as their material values and tastes. This was revealed to stunning effect 12 years ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in a show called "Worldly Goods," which displayed for our delectation a wide variety of furniture, silver, and other domestic accessories made and used in Pennsylvania from its founding to the middle of the 18th century.

  Two area auction houses that regularly offer appraisals on Antiques Roadshow - Noel Barrett, known for toys, and Freeman's, known for fine furniture and decorative arts - will have major sales in the next few days. Barrett's sale, "Something for Everyone," beginning at 10 a.m. Saturday at the Eagle Fire Hall in New Hope, will offer more than 700 lots of holiday items, antique games, clockwork toys, and salesmen's samples. The sale is also being carried online at www.liveauctioneers.com . One of the earliest lots - and a top piece in the auction - is an early-20th-century clockwork Halloween Vegetable Man improbably made of papier-mache.

Philadelphia's annual Antiques Week is nationally known for combining superb offerings in fine and decorative arts with educational extras for collectors. This year is no different. But it's not the Philadelphia Antiques Show - the marquee four-day display and sale at the Navy Yard celebrating its 50th anniversary - that's generating the most buzz. Exhibitors and collectors alike are applauding Winterthur, Americana central in Wilmington, and its landmark exhibition. "Paint, Pattern & People: Furniture of Southeastern Pennsylvania, 1725-1850," which opened Saturday, explores the creativity of both German and English immigrants and the history of Pennsylvania furniture.

An oil painting by the leader of the Scalp Level School, a southwestern Pennsylvania art colony that predated the Brandywine and Bucks County impressionists, will be for sale this afternoon. Alderfer Auction and Appraisal's sale in Hatfield will offer 200 lots of American and European paintings, including the oil by George Hetzel, probably the best-known artist southwestern Pennsylvania had produced until the advent of Andy Warhol. The Scalp Level School took its name from its location, a once bucolic town southeast of Johnstown where around 1830 an art gallery opened that became a nucleus for area artists.

Looking for love in all the wrong places? If plump, happy hearts give you the warm fuzzies, look no further that traditional Pennsylvania folk art. Hearts adorn bride's chests and sewing boxes, twine around birth and baptismal notices, and give curving shape to wrought-iron trivets and door latches. Were 18th- and 19th-century locals just a happy lot? A "Yellow Submarine" society chugging along to "All You Need Is Love"? In the heart of the city, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has one of the great permanent collections of regional folk art, anchored by a priceless group of objects donated by Titus C. Geesey between 1953 and 1969.